Tom Bishop, Tivoli's chief technology officer, acknowledges that integrated suites haven't done as good a job as they might in simplifying deployment. "Building an enterprise IT infrastructure is a difficult task," he says. Nonetheless, he argues that it's better to do the right thing poorly and rely on vendors to improve their products.

Central Management
IT managers who do embrace frameworks praise the centralized management capability they offer, the integration work they don't have to do themselves, and the opportunity to deal with a single vendor.

"We could put a couple of point products out there and then add things on," says Dave Reckles, senior technologist at A.T. Kearney, a management consulting firm that's an EDS subsidiary. "But that makes the environment even more complex as time rolls on--more complex for teaching people to use it, more complex to update. That's not what we're looking to do."

"I'm looking for a lot of consistency," says Allan Horn, VP for technology operations at USA Group Inc., a financial-services company in Indianapolis and a Unicenter TNG user. "I know I'm bringing in a product that may give me only 70% to 80% of what best-of-breed tools will give me. But I'm not an integrator."

Cost is another issue. Dave Chapman, regional manager for RPM Consulting, a Columbia, Md., firm that helps companies deploy system- management products, acknowledges that frameworks are relatively costly. That's problematic, he says, because "managers are willing to spend multimillion dollars on a network, or servers, and applications and software and things like that, and they expect to be able to manage it for pennies on the dollar."

Boston Edison's Routsis recalls spending $250,000 on a system-management package. But it's difficult to estimate the cost of deploying a typical management system because of the variations among companies and the many options for product choices.

That itself is a problem: The University of North Carolina survey said 42% of the companies in the process of deploying a system-management suite weren't able to estimate the per-desktop cost. Of those that could, most estimated the cost between $100 and $250 per desktop, which adds up to a substantial number for a large enterprise. In the survey, 44% said they expected to come in within budget, while 39% said they weren't sure.

RPM Consulting's Chapman says there is a large return on investment for doing enterprise management. "Doing it right pays off," he says.

Glaxo Wellcome's Revak, on the other hand, says his company's revenue isn't directly dependent on network and system availability--so he can't cost-justify deployment of an expensive management framework when he believes the company needs only a few of the many components a suite offers.

The challenge of deploying point products is to integrate them. Unfortunately, there are few accepted standards, so integration is largely a custom process.

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Photo of Revak by Robert Campbell