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F E A T U R E

Hot MoMs

August 5, 2002
By Bruce Boardman

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Managing the App Gap

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	In this article
	Introduction
	MoM Features
	Managing the App Gap
	Executive Summary

Although MoM vendors have good penetration into the service-provider market, they are pushing to offset the flatness of that market by driving into the enterprise. They see the medium-size enterprise as the next low-hanging fruit. However, these enterprises need to proceed carefully. After all, management is a cost center. There's a link between better operations, management and business, but it's not concrete.

MoMs make the most sense if you're managing profitable networked applications and when downtime would cost hard dollars. Transaction-oriented applications that support e-commerce or financial services are examples of medium-size business models that could benefit from a MoM. Midsize retail businesses often have costs associated with WAN and distributed support issues and can benefit from a MoM too.

At other times, implementing a MoM simply doesn't make sense. For instance, in our testing, we used Syracuse University's multitiered PeopleSoft registration system. No doubt, it's important and complex. If the system fails during the first week of classes, epithets will fly. However, because you can't attach a hard dollar value to such downtime, it's unlikely the university will implement a $200,000 to $500,000 solution to safeguard against it. Existing technical expertise and point products provide enough insurance against that unlikely event.

Obviously, recurring WAN costs make it easier to justify even slight improvements in efficiency provided by management applications. But midsize enterprises don't have the same dollars to throw at a management problem, even though they have equally complex and critical networked applications.

Managing internal application environments in midsize businesses carries mostly soft dollar justifications, such as the cost of downtime. Many of the services are provided over reliable LAN infrastructures that can be upgraded or duplicated for far less money than even a modest MoM project.

This means most MoM vendors won't be able to transition to the enterprise. Not only aren't they going to be able to adjust their products to offer enough shrinkwrap functionality, but doing so would remove their professional services revenue. That's a double whammy.

Bruce Boardman is executive editor of Network Computing, testing and writing about network management and systems. He has 12 years' IT experience managing networks and distributed computing for a financial service provider. Send your comments on this article to Bruce Boardman at bboardman@nwc.com