My friend and fellow blogger Bernd Harzog posted an analysis of the market opportunity created by the adoption of virtualization. He started by speaking to the fact that: “innovations in platforms always outstrip the ability of the major management vendors to keep up with them.” He also cited examples of market innovators being created by platform changes over the past 20 years:
- Client/Server computing – Tivoli
- Windows Servers for production applications – NetIQ
- Web application response time management – Keynote
- J2EE Web Application Management – Wily (now part of CA)
- HTTP as the standard application level protocol – Coradient, and the other web appliances
- TCP/IP as the standard transport – NetQos, Network General, and the other TCP/IP appliances
Certainly, it is gratifying to see NetIQ being mentioned as the innovative leader in Windows Server management. Yet, it is also sad to see that the company I founded is among this same list of dinosaurs whose days of glory have since passed because their technology is either:
- Commoditized with the passage of time. For example, while the Keynote synthetic monitoring service is still very useful in testing the availability of Web sites, there are many different service or product offerings that can do “nearly” the same function and sometimes even for free.
- Rendered dysfunctional by new platforms or technologies being deployed. For example, Web appliances based on sniffing technology cannot determine the performance experienced by end users if the content or the application is delivered by third-party content or application delivery networks like Akamai. [Stay tuned for a future blog posting on this subject.] As a result, while monitoring Web application performance is still a critical need, the adoption of Web monitoring appliances will slow down because the information they provide might be flawed or incomplete.
- Degraded in budgetary priority. For example, monitoring software focusing on a particular silo of the infrastructure. More often than not, these silo monitoring products can no longer provide actionable information for the management of complex Web and/or virtualized applications. Bernd’s article provides amble examples why these products won’t work in a virtualized world. As a result their prominence on IT’s budget is slipping.
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