InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
September 13, 1999
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If standards were more widely supported by the applications and system-management vendors, Revak says, arguments in favor of frameworks would carry less weight.
Smarter applications would also help, especially when it comes to delivering the type of information sought by a company's top management. "We're getting smarter about the fact that you can't simply build apps, throw them over the wall, and assume that they'll just run themselves," says application builder Chris McDonald, co-director of the Next Generation Enterprises Lab at American Management Systems' Center for Advanced Technologies in Fairfax, Va. "So what you do is build in the automatic triggers and performance monitors as a core part of the app." The danger, McDonald says, is that without agreement on interface standards, "you will go down the proprietary path."
Hurwitz Group's Ptak says framework vendors are responding to the criticisms. "They're scrambling, with some measure of success, to create modular solutions, growable solutions that are easy to implement, easy to use, and have a very fast time-to-install," he says. "They've also broken up their monolithic environments into pieces that can be introduced on an as-needed basis."
Olivier Helleboid, VP and general manager of Hewlett-Packard's OpenView Software Business Unit, says the whole market is shifting in the direction of focused tools to solve specific business problems. He says even OpenView, one of the first management frameworks, is sometimes marketed as a point solution that offers easy integration.
Helleboid may be onto something. The University of North Carolina survey reflects a trend that might be called a third way: using a framework to provide breadth and coherence, but supplementing it with point tools for drill-down functionality. Three out of 10 respondents identified this as their chosen path. This trend is reflected in the proliferation of new versions of point products that have hooks built in for integration to a framework or management suite.
At the same time, today's point product may become part of tomorrow's framework. The system-management market is in churn and Ptak says he expects lots of partnering and acquisitions in the near future. "Many point products will get bought up and absorbed," he says. "I see a consolidation taking place."
When evaluating system-management products, A.T. Kearney's Reckles urges IT managers to start by asking what data a company's senior executives need and in what format. Once that is clear, it's time to go shopping.
But, IT managers caution, no single approach is right for all companies. A best-of-breed approach is being used by PageMart Wireless, a Dallas communications company. "Make sure everyone understands there is no one single solution to the problem we face of monitoring our network--it takes a combination of tools," says Robert Wilkerson, manager of network information systems. He recommends choosing best-of-breed point products and then overlaying a centralized console for a common look and feel. PageMart uses Formula from Managed Object Solutions.
Glaxo Wellcome's Revak is a proponent of integration only where it's needed. "We picked the management disciplines important to us and figured out which ones of those are related to one another and need to be tightly integrated, like problem management and change management," he says. "That limited our search to vendors that could deliver the level of integration we needed."
Tanner, however, deployed a framework in an environment of 10,000 desktops and several hundred servers. "Start with a look at frameworks," he says. "But go forward on the basis of understanding the full costs of frameworks vs. point solutions. Understand also that a good deal of work needs to be done up front to make these implementations work. Most of us usually go off and buy something, we do a little bit of up-front homework, then we start to put it in," Tanner says. "With these frameworks, you need to do a lot of up-front planning and architecting. If you do that, then the implementation will proceed in a fairly orderly fashion."
That could change. Says Allen Brown, president and CEO of the Open Group, an industry consortium dedicated to creating standards to allow the integration of enterprise technology, "We're finding right now that there is an increasing willingness on the part of suppliers to collaborate about reaching consensus in the management arena."
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