14 March 2010
Sunday
SolarWinds enters SRM territory
By Dave Raffo | Feb 4, 2010
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PrintNetwork management software vendor SolarWinds entered the storage resource management (SRM) market this week in anticipation of IT convergence gaining steam.
SolarWinds executives say their $42 million acquisition of SRM vendor Tek-Tools was spurred by their belief that IT organizations want to bring storage into their common IT management framework. SolarWinds will sell Tek-Tools' Profiler SRM application as a standalone product and eventually integrate it into its Orion IT management suite.
"We've been selling application management into network and systems management teams," said Kenny Van Zant, senior vice president and chief product strategist at SolarWinds. "Storage people are viewed as an island to themselves with their own teams and their own tools. We think that's changing. We think our model will work in other IT sectors, and we felt storage was the right adjacent market for us to make an acquisition in and prove that point."
SolarWinds isn't alone in its desire to bring IT management under a common umbrella. Although few vendors have fully implemented such a management framework, most of the large IT vendors such as Cisco Systems inc., EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co. and IBM have taken steps in that direction.
"The trend here is around end-to-end management across different IT resources – server, storage, networks, hardware, software, services – in support of various infrastructure resource management tasks," said Greg Schulz, founder and senior analyst at StorageIO Group in Stillwater, Minn.
Schulz said he's surprised nobody picked up Tek-Tools sooner for two key pieces of the infrastructure stack: storage and virtualization management.
"SolarWinds needs to beef up with storage, server and virtualization capabilities to complement its network-centric model to remain relevant with the likes of Cisco moving into servers and storage, and Oracle expanding its domain of focus, not to mention the giants HP and IBM," he said. "So it is about convergence of technologies, convergence of technology domains and IRM [infrastructure resource management] focus, and convergence of the partner ecosystem."
