It seems customers are not really happy with the big 4 infrastructure vendors. First, they don't think they are doing a good job, and second, despite their size, customers don't buy much from them. Heck, even Pizza Hut has a bigger market share than they do. Here are a couple of quotes from the Network World article:
"An impromptu poll of more than 355 attendees (exact number of responses were difficult to calculate on-the-fly) at the Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Management Summit in Orlando Monday showed that 50% of attendees in the keynote session would give the market-leading big four management vendors a grade of C. Some 17% gave the big four a D grade, 4% determined they deserved an F and 15% offered the "incomplete" option."
Ouch. You have to admit, that's gotta hurt a little bit. Additionally......
"Considering the big four management vendors make up about 60% of the $13 billion market -- which Scott says is very fragmented with 40% market share up for grabs -- BMC, CA, HP and IBM must consume start-up contenders while avoiding attacks from the sharks looking to get a piece of the management market."
So the big 4 ITSM vendors share 60% of this market. Say 15% each (Pizza Hut has 20% -- Pizza is in no danger of consolidation). They don't have much market power. As a customer, you are in charge, no the vendors.
There are excellent reasons for why the ITSM market offers so many choices: IT is the key engine for innovation and productivity in the global economy. Organizations stands still at its own peril. Every company out there is trying to be more competitive, more innovative, more efficient.
IT is core to 21st century organizations. And innovation usually comes from smaller vendors, not big ones.
Here is one practical example: Should your organization use the new Apple iPhone and/or Amazon's cloud computing infrastructure? This is an innovation question not an efficiency question. How can the business deploy these technologies to support new business offers? What are the new business processes we can enable with these technologies? What is the margin, TCO, agility these technologies enable?
This is what service portfolio management is all about; this is not an infrastructure management question.
Companies like newScale are at the forefront of innovation in IT. That's not what the big guys do; the big guys are not innovators, but consolidators of commodity products. Once everyone decides that the iPhone or cloud computing are important, they'll go buy someone to add to their offerings. Their job is to make stuff the stuff that is not relevant to business innovation, cheaper. By the time, they go buy a company that manages cloud computing, this technology will no longer be a competitive advantage.
The market needs both: technology that drives innovation and technology that drives down perational costs. No matter how much the big vendors try to say the market is "consolidating," as long as the science that underpins IT keeps on innovating, the big guys are not going to dominate. They certainly don't do it for cloud computing or the iPhone platform today. This Network World research shows that customers understand this very well.
In short, in the ITSM market it's a great time to be a customer -- choice, competition, and innovation are in the hands of the customer, not vendors. It will remain this way for at least the next decade -- don't let a vendor tell you otherwise.
For the whole thing article see here: Big 4 management vendors squeak by with a passing grade, garner little confidence from Gartner attendees | NetworkWorld.com Community.
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