Alternative Frameworks Catch On

The latest wave of low-cost management tools offer a welcome option to traditional frameworks

E-business is making life more complex than ever for IT managers. So it's reasonable to think the powerful enterprise management frameworks offered by vendors such as Computer Associates and IBM/Tivoli would be more appealing.

But it's become fairly clear the opposite is true. High costs, unacceptably complex implementations and a failure to deliver promised benefits have led many IT managers to avoid, or even abandon, frameworks--opting instead for the latest wave of low-cost management tools that are easier to use and deploy.

This new generation of alternative companies includes Edge Technologies, Entuity Inc., Magnum Technologies Inc., Managed Objects and Somix Technologies Inc. Some of these companies have been in business for less than two years, and many only have a few dozen employees.

"There's definitely been a significant backlash against the big platform framework," says Hurwitz Group analyst Richard Ptak. "And there has been a proliferation of new products from smaller developers that do a very effective job of addressing the needs of today's corporate enterprise."

A recent Lucent Technologies survey of 100 network operations centers supports Ptak's claim. The survey reports that the NOC market share for frameworks such as Tivoli and Unicenter has stalled at 18 percent for the past two years, while the number of respondents building their own customized solutions around shrink-wrapped software has risen to nearly 48 percent.

J.D. Edwards in Denver is an example of a company that gave one of the alternative developers a chance. With 5,000 employees spread across 64 locations in 46 countries, and a networked computing environment that includes several hundred Windows NT servers connected by a wide range of routers and LAN switches, J.D. Edwards should be a prime candidate for a high-end management platform.

But Ken Migaki, vice president of infrastructure services at the ERP software developer, opted to get off the platform treadmill.

"We don't want to spend a million dollars and invest countless hours of development time for results that may be over a year away," he says. "We'd much rather go with off-the-shelf products that we can get into operation very quickly."

Migaki and his staff tried to go the big-ticket route with Cabletron's Spectrum framework (which has been sold and re-christened Aprisma), as well as BMC Software's high-end Patrol systems management software. But they weren't happy with the configuration hassles of Spectrum, or the high labor and overall costs of Patrol's management agents.

"If you have to install agents on every managed resource, you wind up with two problems," he says.

"First, you have to distribute and update those agents, which can be a real headache. And second, it means you're paying for your software on a per-agent basis, which really drives up costs."

That's why Migaki turned to relative unknown Magnum for the bulk of his infrastructure monitoring. Magnum's management suite--which is built on HP's OpenView engine--doesn't use agents, and is much simpler to maintain. "We were able to get Magnum up and giving us what we needed within a month," Migaki says. "That's important to us, because we're trying to run IT as a business, which means we can't afford to make investments and then wait forever for returns."

In fact, between its less expensive licensing and simplified implementation, Migaki estimates Magnum saved his company about $300,000. He will still use BMC to monitor a few high-end machines and apps, but Magnum will handle the bulk of his desktops and servers. Spectrum will be phased out.

Another disenchanted enterprise management framework user is Duncan Bond, data network analyst for the state of Maine's Bureau of Information Services. Like J.D. Edwards, the bureau looks like a great candidate for an all-encompassing, big-ticket management framework. The organization supports 400 government office locations connected with a mix of T1 lines, frame-relay circuits and 56-Kbps switched service over a collapsed ATM backbone. The equipment comes from a variety of vendors, including Cisco, D-Link and Nortel.

To make matters worse, each state agency maintains a good measure of independence, so Bond and his team can wake up to all kinds of surprises on any given day. "They'll just call us up to let us know that they're launching an application that we know our 56-Kbps connections won't be able to support," he says. "That causes us to panic sometimes."

The agency's experience with Computer Associates' Unicenter TNG was less than satisfactory. For starters, having all infrastructure assets from switches to servers pooled into a single management domain was a problem.

"Anybody in IT who had admin privileges to change anything had admin privileges to change everything," Bond says.

For example, several times, Bond's networking team deleted a managed object and later found they had disrupted a Unicenter Business Process View that another IT group was using.

Bond also ran into difficulties with tasks that would have been simple for a specialized networking tool to perform, but seemed to pose major challenges for Unicenter.

"We had some very specific ATM MIBs that we absolutely needed to look at to monitor our virtual circuits," he says. "But for some reason, we couldn't do that with Unicenter--even with the help of a senior CA engineer."

Those problems--plus some serious shortcomings with Unicenter's remote browser interface--eventually led Bond to look elsewhere for a simple, practical solution for babysitting his networking environment. Bond's search quickly led him to Somix Technologies, a 10-person software development firm based in Sanford, Maine, that was founded by several former Cabletron employees.

"They did an online demonstration for us that was very slick and impressive," says Bond. "We were able to see right away how the product worked and how it met our needs."

Just as Magnum leverages HP OpenView technology, Somix's WebNM leverages another well-known management software package: Ipswitch's WhatsUp Gold. WebNM builds on WhatsUp Gold through a variety of functional enhancements and additional shareware components such as the popular MRTG router monitoring tool.

Bond and his staff were already WhatsUp Gold users, so they had a good deal of confidence in the underlying technology. They also needed an inexpensive solution that would work right out of the box.

"WebNM lets us monitor link utilization, router CPU and memory utilization, near- and far-end errors--all the essentials," he says. On his NT systems, Bond can also track MIB statistics such as CPU and NIC utilization, free memory, page faults and a variety of disk parameters. And, because WhatsUp Gold carries a list price of just $695 per copy, the total package was very affordable. Most important, the WebNM/WhatsUp Gold solution was functional within a week.

Bond concedes there are some features a framework like Unicenter offers that he can't get with his toolkit. For example, his technical team doesn't have a screen that shows all of his network and systems information. "We might have to look in a couple of places to get the information we need," he says. "But I'm not sure it's worth a million dollars just to avoid a few mouse-clicks."

He also minimizes one of the attributes that leading vendors often tout as a major selling point of big-ticket management frameworks: the ability to easily integrate a selection of certified third-party apps into the management environment. "WebNM is a purely open-source app, so integration really isn't a big issue" he says. "You can just pop in any type of module you want."

Of course, there are many organizations that have been successful with large-scale management frameworks. Mike Gibbs, director of LAN engineering and support at Kemper Insurance in Long Grove, Ill., has been a Tivoli TME user since early 1997. Gibbs says TME has been a great tool for monitoring his large, diverse IT environment, which supports 8,300 employees across more than 100 locations in North America, as well as for automating operations such as electronic software distribution (ESD).

"In addition to maximizing availability and doing capacity planning, one of our main objectives is cost control," Gibbs says. "So Tivoli's ESD has been a very effective tool for us."

Using the Tivoli Enterprise Console, Kemper has built a common control point for ESD, asset inventory and systems management data, as well as networking data and alarms gathered through applications from a variety of vendors, including Compuware, IBM/Tivoli and Visual Networks.

"Bringing everything together makes it much easier for us to alert our techs and get them working on problems as proactively as possible," Gibbs says. He contrasts this model with Kemper's previous environment, where every different technology in the company, 17 by his count, had its own unique set of management components.

Gibbs has no illusions about the challenges associated with making a management framework work.

"It's definitely like getting shipped the parts to a 747," he says. "It takes a little work before you have a plane."

But Gibbs says some basic principles can help companies achieve success with their framework implementations. First, he says, is to face up to the fact that the department has to commit significant resources to the effort. "It doesn't make sense to go out and make a multimillion-dollar software purchase and then not put the staff resources you need into it to make the whole thing happen," he says. That kind of commitment requires strong support at the CIO level.

Kemper also augmented its own staff resources with an outside consulting firm that had previous experience implementing Tivoli's framework. "They were very helpful in jump-starting the project, since our own people were facing quite a learning curve," he says.

Finally, Gibbs says IT departments should be careful about biting off more than they can chew at any one time. That's why Kemper has staggered its purchases of various Tivoli applications over the last two-and-a-half years. "You're much better off taking smaller pieces and delivering those first," he says. "Otherwise, you're going to end up with a lot of 'shelfware' that you've paid for but isn't delivering any benefits."

In Kemper's case, it took just under nine months to get the Tivoli console up and running for monitoring. And it was a year before they were effectively monitoring their most critical applications.

Other functions, such as ESD and inventory, followed.

Hurwitz Group's Ptak says there are a couple of reasons the new generation of alternative framework companies have been so successful rolling out rapidly deployable, high-value management tools.

"The initial framework providers had to design their products around a set of pre-existing applications for a variety of specific platforms," Ptak says. "The current wave of innovation, on the other hand, is being built with the understanding that there are already tools out there for gathering all the data you need about the various resources in your environment. So, instead, they can concentrate on the analysis and presentation of that data."

And clearly HTML presentation has become a must-have. The state of Maine's Bond says the ability to disseminate network information to the technical personnel distributed across various state agencies has been a big boon to his own group's productivity.

"We give them a Web page that lets them see the status of the network any time," he says. "So when they have a problem, they don't have to call us to find out if something's wrong with the network."

According to Bond, having this browser-based data instantly available to anyone who needs it has cut his incoming call volume by around 50 percent.

But he cautions other IT managers about assuming that simply installing a Web interface alone will do the trick. "Design and presentation are very important," he warns. "But if the software doesn't present the information in a way that's absolutely clear and intuitive to the user, you can end up creating more support problems for yourself than you solve."

That's one reason he gives WebNM high marks. "When we set it up, the only calls I got were 'atta-boys,' " he says. "Most of the technicians actually leave the page up all the time now."

J.D. Edwards' Migaki goes one step further, providing a Web window into network performance to important business managers.

"That's an important part of establishing IT's credibility with the business," he says. "You have to be able to show them what you're doing for them."

Ptak predicts that the next wave of innovation in infrastructure management will focus on business processes. This is as opposed to the particular network and systems components within the environment--similar to what CA has marketed with Unicenter Business Process Views, but more rapidly deployable and less dependent on the complex element-specific data correlation Unicenter employs. Ptak also points out that infrastructure managers will face new challenges now that such business processes are spanning multiple organizations.

But while it may be fun to talk about future possibilities and challenges, real-world technicians such as Bond are happy just to get through the day without a major incident.

"I have my WebNM Web page set up as the default home page on my ISP connection at home," he confesses. "Whenever I log on, I can see if everything's OK. I find that very relieving."

Lenny Liebmann is an InternetWeek contributing editor. He can be reached at ll@exit109.com