By Jo Maitland
A top Cabletron Systems executive has confimed that the company is well on its way to spinning off its Spectrum network management division, ComputerWire can reveal. Following speculation from Wall Street analysts that put Cabletron’s Spectrum next to BMC Software, analysts agree the two would be an excellent match. While neither company is allowed to comment on market speculation, both put forward synergies between their products. A spokesperson for Cabletron said that the Spectrum division would be a much stronger product if it could be distanced from Cableton. It can manage almost every other network vendors’ hubs, switches and routers on the market but a typical customer thinks it it is a product unique to Cabletron. He added that Spectrum has partnerships with Tivoli Systems, BMC Software and Metrix, who are all concentrating on integrating applications management with network management, but refused to comment on any discussions taking place with these companies.
Wayne Morris, VP of marketing at BMC Software said that while Cabletron’s Spectrum platform is excellent in its field, it is not what BMC is focusing on: We need to know what the traffic on the network is doing on behalf of a particular application, we don’t need to be able to actually go in and reconfigure individual hubs or routers. Morris said he could not comment on market speculation, but said that it was conceivable that network management was a natural extension to applications management.
He said that by closely coupling the two such that you understand network failure, you can then re-route the application. Elizabeth Rainge, an analyst with IDC said: Spectrum is definitely an attractive acquisition for applications management companies who want to be able to drill down into the network for closer scrutiny on what is causing bottlenecks in the network. However, she said that Spectrum goes in a lot further which might be a deterrent for BMC. A Wall Street analyst noted: Companies are migrating away from just managing hardware to managing applications and services across all platforms. He said that Spectrum’s large installed base makes it an attractive acquisition target, adding that it has been neglected by Cabletron but with plenty of resources behind it from the likes of BMC Spectrum could regain its number one position in this space.
IDC figures from last year put HP, with its OpenView platform, at the top of the list with 22.8% of the overall market, followed by IBM on 18.1% and then Cabletron at 16.3%. IDC said that the latest figures (not available until the summer) put HP’s Network Node Manager neck-and-neck with Spectrum but this was down to poor sales by HP rather than better figures from Cabletron. IDC’s research shows that worldwide revenue in 1998 for network management vendors was $362.3m reaching $405.4m this year. By 2003, IDC predicts the network management for vendor revenue will reach $532.2m.
