Enterprise Management Associates is back again after a year of absence, this time on a monthly basis. We've really missed your dialog and comments, and hopefully we’ve been missed as well. As before, this column will focus on network management trends as they fit into the bigger IT management landscape - focusing from time to time on application performance, or SLM versus BSM, or new approaches to asset management, or trends like CMDB adoption as they may affect the NOC.

But as an opening column, I'd like to target an area that has begun to haunt me, as well as some of our IT clients: What ever happened to network management?

This column idea was sparked by a query from an executive in operations working with EMA to try to figure out what a viable network management strategy should look like in 2008. This was not a naïve individual, but one who couldn’t sort out where to begin in planning to address network management in an environment so changed from what it had been even five years ago.

Let’s just start by looking at the obvious marketplace phenomena. Five years ago, when many of us thought of network management, we looked at companies like SMARTS, Micromuse, Aprisma (Spectrum) and Concord as good places to begin. While there were many other significant companies out there, these brands were very much at the center of what defined the network management marketplace, along of course with HP.

But just in case you’ve been stranded in the Pacific for the last half decade, SMARTS was acquired by EMC late in 2004, CA acquired Aprisma and Concord (after Concord acquired Aprisma) in 2005, and Micromuse was acquired by IBM in 2005. Last year Quest acquired Magnum Technologies, a much smaller but still ‘core” brand in network management. This leaves other small players in the event management area such as Entuity, CITTIO and Monolith, as well as more mid-market and SMB offerings such as Solar Winds and Ipswitch. Yet for the most part these vendors are overshadowed by enterprise brands in which the role of network management has become, to be blunt, problematic. In many of these platforms, politics have gotten in the way of effective integration, leaving network management and its potentially transcendent technologies (analytics, discovery, etc.) in a virtual limbo between foundation and stepchild.