Another interesting topic at Gartner’s Datacenter Conference 2010, is the trend of more and more vendor tools providing functional level integration and data integration between 2010 – 2015. The end goal is to move into a management framework.

However, there is the challenge of vendor lock-in. So an alternative to having one management vendor’s framework is to purchase a set of best of breed mini management product suites in some sub areas and fill in the gap with best of breed point products. The live audience poll greatly favored this approach.

I am delighted to hear the term ‘mini-management suite’. In a way, we can think of our Integrated Datacenter and Cloud Monitoring solution as a mini-suite in the monitoring area within the datacenter operation management umbrella.

Our approach of integrating the availability, performance, security, and change monitoring coupled with auto-discovery, and a CMDB allows us to truly integrate at the data level. The cross-correlation of all of these multi-sourced data points with powerful analytics capabilities, whether it is logical analytics for relationships and patterns, or trending analysis for anomalies and best practices, provides datacenter operations the intelligence and proactive capabilities that they require.

These capabilities allow us (AccelOps) to provide our users (datacenter operators) a best of breed, integrated framework or mini-suite in the monitoring area.

Interestingly, when polling the live audience in the event, 27% of the audience responded that they currently use “other solutions” than the big 4’s. And 25% will use “other solutions than the Big 4’s” for 2011. When asked how many have the confidence for the big 4’s solutions, 34% of the audience responded NOT having the confidence in the big 4 and in infrastructure vendors’ (e.g. Cisco, VMWare, Oracle, Microsoft) solutions.

I think that is the reason why our solution is so well received and welcomed by the market: a lot of room for new innovations like ours to address issues in the increasingly complex but increasingly important datacenter and its operations.

There are two other opportunities for the new players according to Gartner, besides managing across multiple sourced environments (which is the integration point already mentioned):

• Alternative delivery methods (e.g. SaaS, subscription model) — AccelOps has this already.
• Penetrating customers outside the Global 2000 — AccelOps was built for this market with ease of use, ease of deployment, and with the right TCO.

I am glad that we are hitting the mark! I have good feelings coming back from the Gartner Conference — a lot of reassurance and confirmation!