Has your MOM seen better days?

Let’s go back in time, say, to early 2000.  This was a pretty exciting time in the technology industry for me.  I had just left Cisco Systems to go work for Netigy, which had come into existence as a result of Lucent’s purchase of INS.  As a Cisco employee at the time, I can tell you that Lucent’s purchase of INS created quite the storm.  You see, INS was our go-to technology consulting partner.  How could one of our biggest competitors purchase our preferred consulting partner?  As a response, Cisco decided to fund three companies to fill the role INS once played.  The three companies were Netigy, Thrupoint and Calisma (it’s been quite a while, but I think those are the other two).  Cisco was a big investor in all three companies.  They wanted to make sure that all three succeeded.

Based upon all this excitement, I decided to hop over to the world of technology consulting; I took a job with Netigy.  It was while working for Netigy that I was introduced to the wonderful world of network & systems management (NSM).  I can’t tell you exactly why, but after six years of slinging routers and switches, the world of technology monitoring held quite the allure.  During my time at Netigy I had the chance to work with some very large Fortune 500 companies on their monitoring and management needs.  This introduced me to some very smart folks at Netigy who specialized in this arena: some of my key influencers were Christine Haycock, Rob Maines and Jim Brunke.

It was during these projects that I first learned of concepts such as FCAPS, availability management, performance management and yes, the mother load, the MOM (manager of managers).  The MOM is also called event management, centralized event & log management console, NOC console, and I am sure a host of other names I just can’t remember at the moment.  At Netigy, we bid Micromuse Netcool to a number of the clients that I was working with.  Micromuse was the dominant player in this market niche.  It offered the promise of reducing the number of screens or consoles operators needed to keep track of, reducing MTTR due to not missing events, being able to correlate disparate event types, and even reducing neck pain in operators via less swivel time.

The pitch was so crystal clear and obvious that you almost seemed foolish if you didn’t invest in your very own MOM.  I’ll tell you what: back then MOM was very hot indeed.  A number of you may remember the video called “Stacy’s Mom” which was a hit single by American band Fountains of Wayne.  The song was released in 2003, so it fits my story’s timeline pretty darn closely.  Now if you saw the video (click here if you’d like to), then you’d remember how good Rachel Hunter looked.  Yes, the MOM was very sexy indeed.

Let’s now fast forward 9 years.  Is MOM still appreciated?  Yes.  Is she still needed?  Absolutely.  Does she provide value?  No question.  Now let me ask you this.  In the year 2009 is the MOM what gets you excited about the monitoring and management industry?  Not from the vast majority of the clients that I have been talking to.  Things like key performance indicators, real time dashboards, service level management, customer portals, discovery technologies, new ways of performing root cause analysis, and advancements in dynamic mapping technologies are what the majority of folks that we talk to today are getting excited about.  Metrics are key, and they are the future.  Events are certainly important and a staple of any robust management solution, but let’s be honest, for most organizations they are a commodity.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I still have great respect and admiration for the old gal, I mean MOM.  It still blows me away that in this day and age you have an extremely tough time finding a good competitor to Netcool in the event management space (other than Monolith Software).  The difference is this: we not only built an extremely fast, good looking and scalable MOM, but we also built the other key (and, we’re told, more exciting) features that today’s buyers are looking for.  And the cool thing is, we did it in a single, fully-integrated code base.  We didn’t buy code from a whole bunch of other companies, super-glue it all together and call it our “framework” solution.

Just to be absolutely clear, I have great respect for the MOM technology.  We have worked very hard to make sure that ours out-performs any other out there.  If your monitoring & management needs are causing you too looks towards some of those other areas that I mentioned earlier – customer facing portals with multi-tenancy, real-time dashboards, service level management, etc. – then I’d invite you to give us a call.  A lot of companies out there still have very significant yearly maintenance renewals for their MOM.  That is one area that I can tell you the folks at Monolith Software will work very hard to make you an offer that your CFO and VP of Ops will love.  If you have a maintenance renewal coming up, then I’d encourage you to give us a call.

Cheers!

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Event Management, MOM, Fault Management, Network and Systems Management, NSM, Netigy, Thrupoint, Calisma, Cisco, Event Correlation, Netcool Alternative