HP, IBM, VMware Rank Highest For Configuration Management Tools

An industry analysis released this month rates Hewlett-Packard, IBM and VMware as "value leaders" for configuration management tools that can identify software applications running on a network and the impact of network configuration changes that will affect how those applications run. The report, from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), rates those vendors high based on their product strengths and cost efficiencies. Other vendors ranked as a "strong value," the second highest ranking, were ASG, ServiceNow, OpTier and ManageEngine.

The EMA report, released Dec. 14, is similar to the Gartner Magic Quadrant analyses of IT vendors. The EMA report analyzes the market for Application Discovery and Dependency Mapping (ADDM), a component  of configuration management software.

The EMA report says that, traditionally, the most feature-rich ADDM tools tend to be the most expensive and carry the highest maintenance costs, but that IBM's Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager and HP's Discovery and Dependency Mapping software products, in particular,  "are closing the pricing gap." HP's product features are "well thought out and executed," the report states, while IBM, within the past year, has introduced "token-based pricing," which EMA says improves cost efficiency.

HP's ADDM product includes its Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB) and Configuration Manager (CM), which provide visibility into what applications are running on the network and identify the impact of configuration changes on physical and virtual servers, routers and other equipment.

The ADDM software identifies the apps on the network and populates the UCMDB, which is then analyzed by the Configuration Manager, says Jimmy Augustine, marketing team leader for HP configuration management systems.On the one hand, the UCMDB and Configuration Manager warn against making a configuration change on a network if, for instance, it's for an e-commerce site and the change could disrupt transactions during the busy holiday shopping season, Augustine said in an interview. On the flip side, he added, it could evaluate how a server or router that is down affects the applications and identify the best way to fix it.

Configuration management is important for IT managers because new applications and new versions of existing applications are constantly being introduced, Augustine says. In addition, the advent of virtualization and cloud computing continues to make IT systems more complex. HP introduced the latest version of its UCMDB and Configuration Manager software at a company event last November in Barcelona.

VMware's vCenter Application Discovery Manager also scored in the "value leader" category for its ease of deployment, professional services, interoperability and security, and for being the only product offered as a virtual appliance, EMA notes. However, VMware ranked lower than the IBM and HP solutions because it only operates within a VMware ESX hypervisor. HP and IBM also support Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix and Unix virtualization.