The Performance Management Market and Customer Portals

Earlier this week I wrote a blog post about CA acquiring NetQoS.  It got me thinking about the overall market for performance management software.  This has been a very interesting market to follow.  When I first got into the technology monitoring and management market (TMM), there was a huge focus on deploying NOC’s centered around a ‘Manager of Managers’ solution like that of  Micromuse Netcool.  This was during the dot com craze when internet enabled companies were coming out of the woodwork.  It was also a time when the CLEC market was still alive and well. This spurred all of these companies into a buying spree like crazed shoppers at Walmart the day after Thanksgiving.

Event management was a red hot market, and Micromuse was right in the thick of it.  Companies also realized that they needed more than event management.  They also wanted to be proactive, to understand how their infrastructure resources were being utilized.  This presented opportunities for companies to augment their event management software with performance management solutions.

During my time working predominantly with service providers, we  found that they were generally looking towards COTS (commercial off the shelf) software to augment their event management implementation.  Leading players at this time were folks like Concord, InfoVista, and Trinagy.  There were some other second-tier players like Linmor and Quallaby that popped up now and again.

The Big Four management companies (HP, IBM, CA and BMC) did not have software to address this new market need.  The resulting acquisition activity has become somewhat of a spectator sport over the last 10 years.  HP acquired Trinagy.  IBM acquired Micromuse, which had previously acquired Quallaby.  CA acquired Concord and most recently NetQoS.  BMC is a little harder to follow: lots of acquisitions, but they have never been particularly strong in the network management and monitoring arena.

InfoVista is still a standalone vendor in the market.   Linmor has disappeared into the woodwork — I can’t tell if they just shut their doors, or if their technology was acquired somewhere along the way. It is interesting to note that none of the Big Five (adding EMC to the group) have built their own performance management software.  Three of the five have acquired companies.  BMC appears uninterested in the space.  EMC has acquired SMARTS for network management and Voyence for network change management, but to date still does not address the performance management space.

Having been in the TMM market for over a decade now, I have seen some interesting changes in consumer sentiment.  As I previously mentioned, it used to be all about the MOM.  The MOM is now an expected component, kind of like your meat and potatos.  Virtually every service provider that I am talking to these days is focused on performance metrics, service level management and customer facing portals. Out of all of the service providers looking to provide customer facing portals, no more than 15% even want to show fault or event related data.  It is all about the metrics.

They want to display information pertaining to how well they are providing services to their customers.  Let’s say that I work for a big company and I am a customer of a large carrier.  I have 50 offices that I have bought MPLS connectivity to.  As a customer, I want access to a portal that will allow me to log in to see aggregate statistics on how well the provider is delivering those services to me , as well as information at the individual circuit or link level. The statistics should include information such as availability, latency, jitter, packet loss, MOS, R-Factor, utilization, errors, discards and the like.

I know this should be pretty straight forward and somewhat obvious. However, not every carrier that I am talking to today is providing this highly sought after capability.  I recently heard one customer tell their carrier, “The reason that you lost our business was your inability to provide us with accurate, real time information about how you are delivering your services. I could understand if this was 1999 and you didn’t have this capability, but this is 2009.”

Performance management has become increasingly important. This is one of the most hotly requested areas of capability.   It doesn’t matter whether you are a large enterprise customer or a service provider.  Proactively monitoring KPI’s is key.  Presenting them in a highly consumable and secure manner is even more key.   Luckily for Monolith this is an area in which we excel.

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