Historically, network and system management solutions have been expensive to deploy and difficult to maintain. As a result, they've been beyond the grasp of many smaller businesses, but several recent advancements are making these tools more accessible
Network management is complex and requires coordination among many different components. Consequently, building management products has taken vendors a long time and eaten up research and development resources. To recoup their investments, vendors, such as CA, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, charged high prices for these products and their associated services.
Compounding the problem, the return on such purchases from a user's perspective has been murky. Companies have been hard pressed to identify and then quantify tangible improvements and instead sunk their money into projects, such as e-commerce applications, where paybacks were more clearly identified. These market dynamics are changing for several reasons.
The main reason is that suppliers have found ways to deliver functional management systems at reasonable prices. Whereas the cost once hovered in the six figures range and quickly rose as vendors added on consulting services, products are now available at dramatically reduced rates. Companies, such as AdventNet, Heroix, and SolarWinds offer solutions with pricing starting at less than $1,000.
The open source movement has had a growing impact on the network management market both in terms of pricing and also in the way these products are packaged. Tools, such as Ethereal and Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG), have emerged to help many smaller businesses better manage their devices. Vendors, such as Red Hat and Plixer, have turned these open source solutions into various distributions.
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In other cases, startups developed their own open source network management systems. The GroundWork Monitor features an integrated console with color-coded threshold breaches and related message details so companies can correlate event details with real time status screens to arrive at the likely source of a problem. Its insight reports let businesses analyze historic trends for availability, performance, outages, events, alerts, and notifications, so companies can proactively manage systems and network availability and performance. Hyperic's HQ software provides users with 1.5 million metrics to determine the effectiveness of their MySQL back-end databases. In addition, IT managers can examine any downed resources and the length of their downtime on one page. Zenoss provides a single repository for a company's IT assets; a browser-based GUI so technicians do not need to have Linux skills, and the ability to scale to thousands of nodes.
Paragent is another vendor pursuing an open source strategy, and its solution enables smaller businesses to manage their desktops remotely. With it, businesses can monitor, control, audit, and enforce policy regarding the use of information on their networks. The solution includes automatic software and inventory collection and advanced search functionality.
Founded in late 2007, PacketTrap provides a company with a variation on the open source theme. The company's pt360 offers network diagnostic, scanning, analysis, monitoring, and discovery tools. PacketTrap views itself first as a commercial software company but has integrated open source network monitoring and management tools into its pt360 Tool Suite. By doing this, the company avoids the challenges in managing an open source project but can build on any advances that such communities may make.
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Another trend helping to lower network management pricing is the move to advertising-based revenue models. Here, companies receive management software free, but they do have to view ads from Google AdSense. In this motif, Spiceworks offers IT Desktop, which offers PCs and software functionality, monitors network devices, troubleshoots problems, and generates reports.
The new products provide smaller businesses with more options for managing their networks and systems, but they come with some potential shortcomings. Many of these vendors are startups with no proven record, so using their products represents a risk. While open source solutions help companies cut costs, they often require that customers shoulder most of the support requirements and often require a higher level of technical expertise than commercial products.
Despite those limitations, the emergence of these new options represents welcome news for smaller businesses. They now have a growing number of options available so they can manage their networks more proactively.
Read other columns by Paul Korzeniowski
Paul Korzeniowski is a Sudbury, Mass.-based freelance writer who has been writing about networking issues for two decades. His work has appeared in Business 2.0, Entrepreneur, Investor's Business Daily, Newsweek, and InformationWeek.
