Managing The Mess

Mostly, these product introductions are for infrastructure tuning tools that predict and thwart performance issues or deal with actual problems in realtime.

As part of last week's crop, as an example, CompuWare of Farmington Hills, Mich., updated its Vantage application performance management suite with support for multiprotocol label switching and features for assessing and analyzing instant-messaging traffic and network security breaches. A few days earlier, I heard from Westwood, Mass.-based Precise Software Solutions, which sells a suite called Precise i3 6.0 that can trace the flow of a business transaction through a company's various software applications and databases and point to places where the process may get bogged down.

In general, I'm excited about these sorts of commercial software offerings, because they give companies a chance to really get a handle on where they may be able to improve their existing applications. Many services companies, of course, have proprietary methods of doing this.

Management tools will also be crucial to the acceptance of emerging technologies once companies are really able to spend again. While wireless networking has found a groundswell of support among early corporate adopters and small businesses, did you ever stop to wonder how much more money would be spent on wireless solutions if they weren't such a mystery to manage? Likewise, it's logical that security will eventually become simply another core part of managing IT infrastructure rather than a separate discipline like it is now.

Until then, of course, solution providers will find plenty of margin in solving these management mysteries for their customers and in helping them centralize this management. In other words, the channel can help by developing ways to manage all the management tools. After all, what good is a wireless network if it can't be evaluated in the context of a company's entire IT infrastructure?

How do you manage? HEATHER CLANCY, Editor at CRN, welcomes your comments at (516) 562-7446 or [email protected].