ITMaaS vendors provide the essential management tools that enable users to access and view an IT environment, monitor and evaluate performance, and ultimately improve the functionality of IT environments through a cloud delivery model. The ability to gain visibility into an internal IT structure and deliver the performance data is a critical component within the management process. Through ITMaaS offerings, enterprises are able to easily capture, analyze and monitor the risks, costs, capacity constraints and other performance metrics that help ensure the optimization of IT resources.
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2. IT Management-as-a-Service
“It’s much easier and more effective to manage the cloud from the cloud.” Dennis Callaghan, Senior
Software analyst, 451. Research, Feb 18 2011.
ITMaaS vendors provide the essential management tools that enable users to access and view an
IT environment, monitor and evaluate performance, and ultimately improve the functionality of
IT environments through a cloud delivery model. The ability to gain visibility into an internal IT
structure and deliver the performance data is a critical component within the management process.
Through ITMaaS offerings, enterprises are able to easily capture, analyze and monitor the risks, costs,
capacity constraints and other performance metrics that help ensure the optimization of IT resources.
The ITMaaS segment is a part of the broader SaaS world. However, the adoption drivers and emerging
market characteristics of the segment mimic those of IaaS and PaaS to a greater degree than the
enterprise SaaS market.
We currently dissect the ITMaaS segment into three categories: problem management; systems and
network monitoring and management; and resource utilization, capacity planning and billing. As seen
in the figure below, we expect systems and network monitoring and management to generate more
than 50% of the revenue within the ITMaaS market in 2011. It is currently the largest segment within
the ITMaaS space because many IT professionals consider monitoring as the first step within the
IT management process.
Figure A.
Estimated 2011
ITMAAS revenue
breakdown
Source: The 451
Research and
Tier1 Research
Although smaller in size, the problem management segment, resource utilization, and capacity
planning and billing are gaining traction as the cloud delivery model becomes more widely accepted
by IT professionals.
We believe that the revenue generated from the ITMaaS market totaled $110m in 2010, and will grow
at a CAGR of 53% to reach $603m in 2014.
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3. IT Management-as-a-Service
Anatomy of the market
Problem management: Problem management software tracks, records and manages problems related
to the IT infrastructure and operations. This category includes IT helpdesk applications and related
problem determination and resolution applications, including knowledge bases. Event management
tools automate the analysis and response of the systems to non-scheduled system and application
events. Included in this segment are event management applications, event correlation and root-cause
analysis software, and event-action engines.
Systems and network monitoring and management: Cloud-monitoring tools drill down from the
application code through the VM to the underlying physical server and network layer. The most
effective way to monitor cloud workloads without heavy overhead is with monitoring tools that are
themselves cloud services. Cloud analytics tools are used to ensure that performance data can be
accurately measured and interpreted. These analytics tools must be able to analyze multitier, multisystem
(virtual or physical) and multivendor/OS environments. A good analytics or diagnostic tool runs
algorithms over the performance- monitoring products in order to detect correlations. The goal is to
identify the root cause of an application slowdown—i.e., the particular server misconfiguration or network
device outage that is causing one part of the website to hang. It’s a mathematically complex and
difficult task, and the analytics packages that have evolved for in-house enterprise applications will
need even more sophisticated capabilities to meet the needs of a multi-tenanted, ‘cloudbursting’ environment.
Resource utilization, capacity planning and billing: Resource utilization enables companies to better
utilize server resources by running workloads that are flexible as to when they are run alongside
primary applications. These can be workloads such as reporting, data analysis, media conversion, Web
crawling, search indexing, and other compute-intensive workloads and maintenance tasks. Capacity-
planning vendors provide insight into the cloud environment. This enables customers to establish new
workload and capacity management strategies based on previous events.
As for billing and chargeback capabilities, simply stated, without them, there can be no cloud. Billing
systems must be cloud- aware. There is essentially no way to utilize a general IT billing system
because many of the concepts, like granular billing and nonphysical assets, are, if not unique to the
cloud, then nearly so. Billing functions are often bundled into a broader cloud product; therefore, the
billing vendors included in our analysis are limited to those with a stand-alone billing capability.
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