The winners in the open network management market will be Hewlett-Packard Co, IBM Corp and Microsoft Corp, while Digital Equipment Corp and the PTTs will be amongst the losers according to a new report from London-based consultancy Ovum Ltd. The report, Open Network Management: Market Opportunities, says that in five years’ time, the market for management framework products will be dominated by Hewlett, IBM and Microsoft, in the same way as the operating system market is currently dominated by just a few suppliers. Other vendors are better off concentrating on applications and tools. As for Novell, the report says the company is seriously threatened by Microsoft’s Windows NT and should develop its own integrated framework and applications management offering. On the technology front, Ovum says that vendors need to support the most popular technologies, regardless of their technical merit – which means that the future of SNMP, the Simple Network Management Protocol, is assured, despite its flaws. Iain Stevenson, one of the authors of the report, commented, Why re-invent the wheel – and that’s what they’re all doing at the moment. As for SMP, the Simple Management Protocol, he says, it faces a struggle against the Open Systems Interconnection protocols.
Grandiose
According to Stevenson, A lot of people have had grandiose visions that simply aren’t what users want. What users are after, according to Ovum, is an integrated, high-level view of network resources, with improved integration between computer systems and wide area network providers. More immediately, users want specific support in providing additional interfaces and tools; the users interviewed cited SNMP Management Information Bases attached to applications, translators that map from proprietary management protocols onto SNMP, and SNMP access to wide area network information; they also want functions to relate communications and applications better, and improved filtering and interpretation of raw error reports.
