Your assessment that enterprise brands are letting politics interfere with effective integration of network management capabilities is spot on. But as the vendor of the only open network automation solution, and one of the few remaining independent network solutions providers, we believe the root of the problem has even more to do with the challenge all management vendors face when attempting to keep pace with the rapid innovation taking place in our industry.
Innovation in the areas of unified security, network optimization and application acceleration has resulted in an explosion of new technologies, specialty devices and vendors. The proliferation of high-speed connectivity networks and logical overlay networks -- all running over the same physical links -- has made it all but impossible for network teams to maintain consistent security, access, audit and change control using manual processes and device-specific management tools. There has never been a greater need for a unified network management platform. But as the number of equipment vendors in a typical enterprise network has increased from just a handful to over 20 or more, management vendors have not kept pace and in some cases because of competitive politics, and in others because it is a daunting task for any single vendor. This situation has led to the explosion of non-logical, opportunistic and sometimes tactical point management solutions that you describe, as well as a least-common-denominator management capability that causes network management teams to revert to native element management systems for all but the most basic operations.
At AlterPoint, we believe that the best solution will be achieved when network equipment vendors, management software vendors and network management teams work together to promote open manageability and interoperability of multi-vendor networks. This kind of cooperation used to occur only through industry standards bodies. With open source, this can now happen at the code level. That is exactly what we're achieving with the formation of the ZipTie Open Network Alliance (ZONA), a community of like-minded technology vendors including Citrix, Force10, Juniper, Radware, Riverbed and Vyatta, among others. AlterPoint has also taken the step of offering a standard for network inventory frameworks by contributing the framework from our own commercial product to the ZipTie open source project (ZipTie.org). In addition, we contributed to the development of a number of tools that enable the ZipTie community and ZONA members to download, develop and share scripts, change templates, rules, policies, device adapters, plug-ins and best practices. These network management components are housed at ZipForge.org the industry's first-ever network management exchange.
By embracing an open and collaborative approach to software development, and taking the lead in driving the Open Network Management Initiative, AlterPoint is creating value for our own customers as well as the networking industry at-large. Opens source approaches provide a win-win-win situation for network management teams, network equipment providers, and management software vendors - and a step in the direction of more integrated and unified network management.
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What ever happened to network management?
Dennis – you have a very valid question.
Having worked for two market-leading management software companies over the last six years, experience has taught that even the best intentions and resource support to innovate inside of big companies can get choked. As a result, most large companies plan innovation as a decision between “build, buy or partner”, with feature extensions more common for internal development and step function improvements coming through partnering or direct acquisition.
We’ll always see innovation come from smaller focused companies that have the freedom to respond to specific market needs and create opportunities that can’t be seen in a spreadsheet. Small companies aren’t harnessed by big company constraints to innovation (roadmap bias, organizational boundaries, resource silos, financially-driven – even Wall Street led – decision making, etc.). It’s the stuff we see outlined in Clayton Christensen’s, The Innovator’s Dilemma (www.claytonchristensen.com).
In the case of network management, what used to be an overlay architecture for the WAN infrastructure and the Private Network (LAN) that were designed to provide data (IP) and voice (analog) only running over separate networks, has now evolved into “one” IP-based network architecture delivering voice, video, data applications, services, etc….each application requiring very complex technical network requirements for security and SLA’s. Strong and complete innovation into one management solution for a complex system like that is not likely.
To realize the benefits your comments are searching for, it remains the responsibility of the “framework” and management platform companies to integrate the technologies that a “buy and partner” innovation model fosters, and deliver “whole product” value to their customers, their shareholders, their partners and the future market.
They need to lead the standards and integration efforts, to make it easy for innovators to build against their platform with integrated views, workflows and data models – whatever it takes to help external innovation become successful. After all, their customers are dependent on them to lead.
Sadly, the incumbents remain held hostage by their business-unit orientations and the self-interest of the managers who are incented to optimize their product line revenues and profits. It’s why CA and BMC have long been criticized as “holding companies” and “where products go to die”, which is a shame to see given their potential to lead and dominate. It’s hard to prove to the CEO and the Board how “integration” investments generated revenue last quarter. It takes brave and focused senior leadership teams to drive for the long run profits and platform and category dominance true integration brings.
In the meantime, we’ll likely see a lot of feature overlap by point software products, especially in areas where the barriers to entry are low, as we see in pure-play management software today (proven by the length of the list in your post).
Where there is potential for disruptive changes to occur by taking a whole product view to the problem (like Riverbed merging branch office production functions), we’ll continue to see innovation and market share increases grow rapidly, while market share leader incumbents stuck in their prior points of view will remain focused on easy revenue with adjacent features, but don’t fundamentally change the approach to the problem.
For the innovators and their customers and investors, that’s good news.
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