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Come 2003, the sharpest arrows in your network and systems management quiver should be products that solve problems without hefty investments and protracted planning, implementation and training cycles. The VC community agrees and is putting its money on vendors offering wares that get to the bottom of network woes while flying under the CIO's approval radar. We're talking tools with sane TCO numbers that don't make you put your job on the line by guaranteeing some risky ROI business.

Don't get us wrong--tracking and correlating all the relationships within the average tangled network and systems infrastructure is still an important goal, and strategic management product vendors aren't standing still. But given the well-publicized cost overruns and performance shortfalls of behemoths like Tivoli that endeavor to implement centralized control, 2003 is not going to be their year.

Still, from most network and systems management vendors' perspectives, these are the worst of times and the not so bad of times. Because network and systems management is all about squeezing every last drop out of IT resources, vendors in this space have fared better than most in a tight economy--in fact, of the top 10 network and systems management software vendors, six showed double-digit revenue growth last year . Although the bottom line of this ranking from Gartner Dataquest indicates a gloomy forecast, these numbers look worse than they are because some big vendors, notably Computer Associates International and BMC Software, had a tough year, overly flattening the entire segment. Moreover, the other shoe may have dropped: A new forecast from Gartner predicts a 4.5 percent growth rate in 2003, and 7.1 percent in 2004.