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Zenoss Takes Cloud Management To The Next Level: Page 2 of 2

It's incredibly ambitious and a good challenge for any IT management vendor to provide management analytics over "everything," notes Michael Cote, senior analyst at RedMonk. "In recent times, when it's come to doing virtualization and cloud-based management, newer companies typically lead before larger, incumbent folks. You see this in the cloud space, especially where people like RightScale, CloudKick and others were doing 'cloud management' in a level of detail that traditional vendors are just now getting around to."

With traditional, virtual and now cloud systems, the need to take a data-based approach to managing IT is growing, he says. "We already had a deluge of devices, networks and applications to manage in the physical world, then the virtual world multiplied that. Using cloud resources brings its own growth to that pool of stuff you need to manage, and is also challenging because you can't always use traditional polling and eventing methods for monitoring and management. You're practically forced to start with the big picture with reports and then drill down to the specific red and green lights only when needed. Like I said, this problem has existed forever and it's only gotten worse."

A number of vendors provide data center reporting and analytics as a core part of their "big visions," says Cote. These vendors include Tivoli, BMC, CA and HP. "I think what Zenoss is trying to do is give it a more all-in-one-box feel than the integrated suites you see from some other vendors. If the overall architecture of the system is truly an integrated product, you can avoid the problems you get when you try to strap together existing and acquired products [that now live under one 'roof'], as so often happens in the IT management world."

He says the challenge for Zenoss will be scaling the back end for this system up to meet the large data demands you get when you want to do real, "big data" analytics. "Even large vendors have a tough time doing that affordably. The other issue is bringing the domain expertise to ship with reports that are useful at that scale and for all the different IT management scenarios."

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