Improving ROI of IT management

Most IT departments are having difficulties in addressing IT infrastructure monitoring and management requirements due to

• Limited resources
  
• Increasing complexity of infrastructure
  
• Growing number and type of devices in an environment, and
  
• Demands for better usage, performance and uptime reporting

While attempts are made by industry to address these challenges through unified management platform, few years ago, I was told by an IT management vendor that over half of such products sit on the customer shelf due to integration complexity, customization requirements and wide variations in capabilities of various device modules provided by device vendors.

Incorporating device configuration and control functions to unified management applications is considered the major hurdle in adoption of such applications. But, IT administrators typically prefer to work with feature-rich device-specific configuration and control applications instead of using a generic unified management product. Most device vendors also provide limited functionality beyond monitoring and basic reporting to unified management platforms limiting value delivered through them. Rightly so, it also plays in to lock-in strategy and defense against out-of-sight out-of-mind perception for device vendors.

As more and more devices being installed in customer environment with email capabilities, real-time monitoring and auto-support from vendors, these management functionalities are becoming quite burdensome for the IT administrators, if not potential security risks. Just think aboutseveral dozen devices with frequent out-bound emails, monitoring pings and SNMP alerts in a data center and the management headache these auto-support functions can create.

So, how can the IT management vendors increase the value delivered to the customers with monitoring, reporting and analysis tools and without device configuration and control abilities as well as without creating another layer of management headache? As mentioned in my last post Understanding the Web 2.0 Trends, this was a topic of my conversation with Scot French, VP of Marketing at Klir Technologies, a local startup, for last few weeks.

I particularly liked the Klir solution to IT monitoring, reporting and analysis platform market with scalability of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and collective intelligence of “2.0”. I believe their approach brings the ease of use, perpetual upgrades, contextual content and community approach to IT management that is not available from enterprise IT management software packages.

Your opinions are welcome on IT monitoring, reporting and analysis market, SaaS approach and leveraging “2.0” to enhance ROI of IT management tools.