Overview:
Organizations are in both a reactive and proactive mode in response to the current economic challenges. Reactively, they trim budgets and staffs. Proactively, they re-evaluate what is and is not core, assess their teams, and move people to strategic areas to concentrate on more tactical, business-value services and projects. They also selectively outsource some of the day-to-day monitoring and management to third parties, taking advantage of the predictable monthly expense that managed services offer.

A big driver toward managed services is the increased adoption of complex unified communication and collaboration applications. The increasingly virtual workforce has led to growth in adoption of applications such as VOIP, unified messaging, video conferencing, Web conferencing, and document sharing. Unfortunately IT organizations struggle to support these collaboration applications. Many work with limited on-site resources and inadequate, centralized management tools. They also find a lack of internal, specialized expertise.

Nemertes Research predicts adoption of managed communications services will continue to increase across the board in 2010 and beyond. We expect the use of managed services for other UC applications to double or even triple by 2011, similar to what we saw with managed VOIP over the last couple years.

All IT functions are heading into the clouds: Cloud computing, cloud storage, cloud collaboration, cloud content management, cloud unified communications and even cloud security and compliance. Yet, security and compliance concerns are holding back adoption.

Nemertes’ PilotHouse Awards recognizes how vendors and service providers perform in the eyes of their business customers. What makes Nemertes’ PilotHouse award so unique?

The winners of the Nemertes PilotHouse Awards represent the “movers and shakers” among communications and computing vendors, and their customers, the IT practitioners deploying those technologies.

Vendors:

Tuesday, September 8, 2009 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT

It’s highly likely that in a few years, we’ll be looking back at 2009 as the year when everything changed for IT. The recession literally decimated IT forces, or worse: Sixty-seven percent of organizations are decreasing their IT departments by an average of 17%.

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview: Relevant to IT. Information technology’s role in businesses is changing dramatically. Today’s business issues open the door for the IT staff to play a major role in the transformation from a mildly effective, somewhat progressive organization to one that is truly innovative and industry-leading.

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview: Whether an organization’s virtual workers are at a branch location, on the road, or working from home, they require IT support to stay connected to the rest of their team. The IT department’s challenge is to make sure these workers get predictable, high-performance access to applications and data no matter where they reside. The problem: Only 18% of branch locations (and virtually no telecommuter sites) house IT expertise.

Application performance is where the rubber hits the road in IT - it determines how IT's services are perceived by the rest of the business.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview:

Nemertes Issue Paper

Mobility represents one of the fastest-growing line items on most IT budgets today, as a rising number of employees request and receive an increasing range of mobile services. Nemertes strongly recommends companies consciously define a mobility strategy and policies to align deployment and procurement practices with business goals.

Nemertes Issue Paper

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview:

Overview:

SOA creates unique challenges for architecture and governance. SOA is a global phenomenon with local significance. As discussed in Volume 1, "Organizational and Operational Trends," organizations are launching SOA initiatives with the goals of greater business agility and flexibility. SOA facilitates these business goals through increased interoperability, faster integration of applications and services reuse. If one distills down the SOA message to one word, it must be agility. Unfortunately, agility is not a term widely used to describe architecture and certainly not a terms used to describe governance. In fact, rigidity and static are far more common descriptors. After discussing these issued with participants, it had become clear that to us that the same driving goals of SOA-Flexibility and agility-must also drive architecture and governance. For organizations to be successful, they must implement an agile architecture with agile governance.

The Issue:

Unlike its TDM predecessor, IP telephony is not a closed-network, single-application environment using its own network resources. Rather, IP telephony is part of an overall unified-communications infrastructure, where multiple applications compete for finite network resources. As a result, IP telephony implementations require new monitoring and management tools and skills. But is the cost of these IP telephony management tools worth the benefit?

Nemertes Research has conducted an analysis evaluating the operational and capital costs of IP telephony, and has concluded that companies using IP telephony management tools demonstrate a compelling return on investment.

SLAs for hosted, managed and co-located data center services

New Data Center Strategies Newsletter, By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 1/30/07

Almost 10% of participants in Nemertes’ data center research cited outsourcing data center facilities as one of their most important funded initiatives.

Over the last five years, the cost of building data centers has increased quite dramatically, mainly because of the increased power and cooling demands of dense platforms such as blade servers. So naturally, many businesses have decided that data centers are too complex and too costly to own, even if they are necessary to have.

Things to consider when leasing data center equipment

New Data Center Strategies Newsletter, By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 1/23/07

Many of the IT executives I speak with lease their servers from one of the big server vendors. With a bit of careful planning they can use the lease to manage technology refreshes on a two-year basis, thereby always staying one step ahead of technology obsolescence.

The Issue:

A constant lament from IT executives these days is “We’re not getting more staff and we’re not getting more budget, but we always have more to manage!” Though they are not getting ongoing budget increases, however, they are still able to leverage extra money for specific projects if the case for doing so is strong enough.

The idea that IT departments need software to help them manage and support enterprise IT services is not controversial. The decision to spend a lot of money on a new tool for managing systems or problem tracking is, because it either requires displacing existing spending, or justifying spending above budget. But, since the alternatives are usually to add staff or to stretch existing staff ever more thinly, the case can be made for spending the money.

Overview

The enterprise is in a strange new position when it comes to providing its employees with the tools they need to perform their duties.

On the one hand, the tools continue to become, or come to rely on, information systems. Companies and industries convert processes that were paper-based (such as medical records management) to be all-digital. Physical tools (like packaging machines on a factory floor) continue not only to be driven by ever more sophisticated automation, but also are increasingly tied into the rest of the IT infrastructure by supply-chain management or other software.

The Issue:

The average consumer has become accustomed to the availability of a shopping site at 2 a.m., and sees that popular Internet search or portal sites are “never” down. These experiences now inform their expectations for computing in the workplace. Now, even in environments like higher education, where 24/7 availability would have been considered silly just a few years ago, each successive cohort of students arrives on campus with higher expectations. “We have to have all systems available all the time now. Our students have been spoiled by availability and we are struggling to keep up,” says the CIO of a university.

New Data Center Strategies Newsletter, Network World, By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 10/31/06

Scientists conducting experiments on addiction have shown that when mice are allowed to self-administer narcotics, such as cocaine, by pressing a lever, they will very quickly develop addictive behavior patterns - pressing that lever repeatedly, even until death by overdose. At a recent technology conference, an IT director described a very similar behavior that immediately reminded me of the addiction studies. In this case, however, the drug of choice was a virtual machine.

Most IT execs don't use a management framework package

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By John E. Burke, Network World, 08/29/06

Unfortunately for enterprise IT, the fact is that most employees (and their workstations, phones, and all the associated local infrastructure) work in one form or another of branch office. That is, they are remote from central data centers, applications, and IT staff. Some enterprises address this by stripping the branch down to bare essentials - Ethernet and thin clients. For the rest, this dispersal of the enterprise, coupled with the continued increase both in the importance of IT services to daily operations and in the complexity of the IT infrastructure, makes it increasingly important to have clear visibility into what is going on inside branches as well as inside the data centers in order to manage the delivery of baseline IT services.

Table of Contents
1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 4
2 THE NEW DATA CENTER 5
2.1 OVERVIEW 5
2.2 KEY THEMES 5
3 COMPUTING 8
3.1 PLATFORMS 8
3.2 OPERATING SYSTEMS 9
3.3 DENSITY OF SERVERS IN THE DATA CENTER 10
3.4 BLADE SERVERS AND VIRTUALIZATION 13
4 SERVER VIRTUALIZATION 15
4.1 INTRODUCTION TO SERVER VIRTUALIZATION 15
4.2 VIRTUALIZATION CURRENT STATE 17
4.3 VIRTUALIZATION COST SAVINGS 20
4.4 SERVER VIRTUALIZATION SOLUTIONS 21
4.5 VIRTUALIZATION FOR SERVER CONSOLIDATION 23
4.6 VIRTUALIZATION AS ABSTRACTION LAYER 29
4.7 VIRTUALIZATION FOR BUSINESS RECOVERY 31
4.8 VIRTUALIZATION AND LIVE-MIGRATION FOR MAINTENANCE OR LOAD BALANCING 34
4.9 VIRTUALIZATION FOR TESTING AND QUALITY ASSURANCE 37
4.10 VIRTUALIZATION FOR PATCHING 40
4.11 VIRTUALIZATION FOR SECURITY 41
4.12 VIRTUALIZATION FOR THIN-CLIENT DESKTOP 44
5 CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS 48

A Route Map for Network Vendors Riding into New Territory

By John Burke, Principal Research Analyst, Nemertes Research Inc.

Executive Summary

In the not-too-distant past, the network was the model of interoperability and enterprise software an illustration of siloed incompatibility. In recent years, software interoperability has undergone a renaissance with the diffusion of XML-based messaging as a program-integration technology to replace conventional APIs. Likewise, in recent years, networks are driven to perform more and more tasks formerly resident on servers, whether in Web load balancing, traffic management or security. Unfortunately, though, the expectation of interoperability among network vendors’ equipment on the newer, advanced functions has diminished or disappeared. At the same time, network vendors are beginning to move into the market space of companies distinctly different from themselves – Cisco, for example, is moving to compete directly with enterprise integration/enterprise service bus vendors like Oracle, BEA, Microsoft and IBM. They must compete in a new way to gain trust – and market share – in this new world.

The complete issue paper is available to Nemertes clients. Non-clients, please contact research@nemertes.com

by John Burke, Principal Research Analyst
May 5, 2006

Privately held AttachmateWRQ is acquiring NetIQ (NASDAQ: NTIQ) via a stock buyout (at $12.20/share) for about $495M, confirming enterprise IT’s burgeoning need for help with compliance, and the shift to a service-delivery model for enterprises.

AttachmateWRQ is a global provider of products focused on integration of legacy systems into more modern IT architectures. With the acquisition of a struggling NetIQ—whose costs are up but revenues flat in services and down in sales—AttachmateWRQ is moving into hot areas of technology where it lacks presence: data-center management and compliance.

By Robin Gareiss, Nemertes Research

April 15, 2005

Computer Associates International Inc. (NYSE: CA) has spent $330 million in cash and $20 million in assumed debt for Concord Communications Inc. (NASDAQ: CCRD), which just a few months earlier acquired Aprisma Networks and Vitel Software. This supports a growing trend that Nemertes has predicted: Networks are becoming more complex, and management vendors are scurrying to offer the broad requirements companies need.

Visual Networks webinar, featuring Robin Gareiss, Executive Vice President of Nemertes Research.

Learn how real-time insight into WAN and LAN performance can optimize VoIP in a live, free technology webinar.

By Andreas M. Antonopoulos

Network World Data Center Newsletter, 12/21/04

As data center consolidation continues rapidly across all industries, the distance data has to travel to reach its end user is increasing. Nemertes’ research has shown that, on average, more than 80% of enterprise employees access the data center remotely. That means IT managers must take an end-to-end view of security, performance and availability as they deliver applications across a WAN.