On Open Source IT Systems Management - Q&A with Nora Denzel (formerly of HP OpenView fame)

Originally Posted in InfoWorld Open Sources:

On Open Source IT Systems Management - Q&A with Nora Denzel (formerly of HP OpenView fame)

I recently had a chance to chat with Nora Denzel, former Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Software Global Business Unit of Hewlett Packard, to talk shop about IT operations management and open source’s role / opportunity in the space. Here’s a snippet of the QA.

Open Sources: How big is the IT monitoring/management space today? Who are the major players that occupy it?

Denzel: In 2006, Gartner released a study that pegged the IT operations management software market at about $7 billion a year with more than 50% of the number going towards IT infrastructure monitoring and management. The dominant legacy players that offer proprietary monitoring solutions are the usual suspects - HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter, and to a lesser extent BMC Patrol. Their software is filled to the gills with features, which often goes unutilized I’d like to point out, and is very expensive.

Open Sources: What role do you see open source solutions playing in the IT infrastructure space that has previously been dominated by the “Big 4″?

Denzel: Obviously, there’s a significant cost savings with open source solutions compared to proprietary tools. And as most mid-market organizations (including educational institutions) can’t afford to shop at the “Big 4″ store, it opens up a big market opportunity for open source. Add to that the flexibility and extensibility of open source products that allow companies to “right-size” and customize their IT monitoring and management solutions to fit their specific needs. Being able to do this at a low cost had been a pipe dream for SMB’s and smaller enterprises, since most of the solutions out there cater to the largest enterprises with the deepest pockets. The availability of open source options is changing that.

Open Sources: How do you see open source software disrupting the IT monitoring/management space?

Denzel: As customers embrace more and more low cost enterprise-grade open source IT infrastructure and network monitoring solutions, the “assess” layer of the IT operations management stack has essentially become commoditized. By “assess”, I am referring to the collection and correlation (or monitoring) of raw data so that it can be of use to system administrators to make decisions. There is no longer differentiation with the monitoring, or “assess”, level of management. Inflexible, expensive proprietary solutions from the “Big 4″ vendors simply do not provide enough additional value, in comparison to open source alternatives, to justify the magnitude more cost. In fact, studies show that customers who use the expensive proprietary solutions use less than half of the product’s features even though they’re paying for the feature bloat.

This “commodity layer” line of thinking has historical precedent - Apache with web servers, JBoss with application servers, SugarCRM with CRM, MySQL for the RDBMS industry, and Linux in the datacenter. It also makes sense given the current trend in organizations to drive down infrastructure costs while focusing resources on initiatives that ultimately grow the bottom line.

Open Sources: What do you think about the future of open source in this space? What do you see happening over time?

Denzel: Already, research and development / marketing dollars invested by the “Big 4″ vendors are not being devoted to enhancing the infrastructure monitoring software within their IT operations management suite. Rather, the dollars flow up the stack in the areas of IT service and business processes - areas where open source solutions are nascent and far from mature. It is at these “advise” and “act” layers where large proprietary vendors add real value for customers. Their R&D investment reflects that.

I predict a “draining the cost pool” for customers and a paradigm shift in the way they view management solutions. Big fish vendors will be pushed down to the deep end where they can add value while the adoption of best of breed open source solutions will lower the customer cost water line in the shallow end. Inevitably, as customers realize the commoditization effect of IT infrastructure monitoring due to the economic disruption of open source alternatives, the large proprietary vendors will follow suit by focusing on the upper layers of IT operations management, where prices are protected and open source alternatives are not ready for prime time. Open source IT infrastructure monitoring solutions can then serve as feeders to the upstream proprietary solutions.

Open Sources: What is the biggest challenges facing open source IT infrastructure solutions at present?

Denzel: I think they face many of the same challenges all open source tools and companies face — the perception of limited / poor functionality as well as inferior documentation and support services that you’d expect from a commercial vendor.

I also think the “sex appeal” or buzz associated with open source IT infrastructure monitoring solutions still pales in comparison to other areas where open source technologies have forged further into the mainstream - the “P” languages, application and web servers, databases, Linux commodity boxes, etc. The technology may be fantastic and scalable and a legitimate alternative to proprietary stalwarts, but there’s always the tendency of people to follow the herd and go with what they know - it’s the whole tipping-point idea - and I think it’s not too far off.