IT AS A BUSINESS. The emerging market for software and services to manage IT

Transcription

1 IT AS A BUSINESS The emerging market for software and services to manage IT Economic pressures and the rise of the cloud have the IT department thinking more like a business. Tools have emerged to help contain costs, ascertain value and determine the best place to run workloads. ICE INFRASTRUCTURE COMPUTING FOR THE ENTERPRISE KEY FINDINGS IT organizations are looking to reduce software and overall costs, while at the same time, spending on virtualization and cloud computing is increasing. Startups are emerging to help IT better manage its own business covering areas such as cost modeling and management, chargeback/showback or billing of IT to business units, budgeting and forecasting, and cloud spend metering and management. The market for these tools will top $460m by 2015, and we expect an active M&A environment in this space as emerging suite vendors look to shore up their offerings, and IT management framework vendors add these technologies to their stacks through acquisition. Cost containment and improved visibility into IT spending may be the initial adoption drivers for these technologies, but they are not the ultimate goal of IT business management. Once IT organizations have a better handle on cost management, they have an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the real value of IT in supporting and enhancing the quality of business services and ultimately improving the bottom line. AUGUST RESEARCH: INFRASTRUCTURE COMPUTING FOR THE ENTERPRISE

2 ABOUT 451 RESEARCH 451 Research, a division of The 451 Group, is a leading global analyst and data company focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation. Clients of the company at end-user, service-provider, vendor and investor organizations rely on 451 Research s insight through a range of syndicated research and advisory services to support both strategic and tactical decision-making Research, LLC and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction and distribution of this publication, in whole or in part, in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The terms of use regarding distribution, both internally and externally, shall be governed by the terms laid out in your Service Agreement with 451 Research and/or its Affiliates. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. 451 Research disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Although 451 Research may discuss legal issues related to the information technology business, 451 Research does not provide legal advice or services and their research should not be construed or used as such. 451 Research shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The reader assumes sole responsibility for the selection of these materials to achieve its intended results. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. New York 20 West 37th Street, 6th Floor New York, NY Phone: Fax: San Francisco 140 Geary Street, 9th Floor San Francisco, CA Phone: Fax: London Gower Street London, UK WC1E 6HH Phone: +44 (0) Fax: +44 (0) Boston 125 Broad Street, 4th Floor Boston, MA Phone: Fax: RESEARCH: INFRASTRUCTURE COMPUTING FOR THE ENTERPRISE i

3 TABLE OF CONTENTS SECTION 1: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY KEY FINDINGS METHODOLOGY SECTION 2: IT AND CLOUD SPENDING OUTLOOK 3 Figure 1: Projected IT Spending Figure 2: Corporate Software Spending Plans Figure 3: Virtualization Software Purchasing Figure 4: Corporate Usage of Public Cloud SECTION 3: VENDOR LANDSCAPE IT BUSINESS MANAGEMENT SUITES Apptio BMC Cloud Cruiser ComSci Costnomics ServiceNow VMware Figure 5: ITBM Suite Vendors at a Glance CLOUD SPEND METERING AND MANAGEMENT Fusion Cloudability CloudVertical Figure 6: Cloud Spend Metering and Management Vendors at a Glance DISCOVERY, ASSET AND LICENSE MANAGEMENT E BDNA CA Clarity Flexera Software Figure 7: Discovery, Asset and License Management Vendors at a Glance. 19 ii IT AS A BUSINESS

4 3.4 PERFORMANCE AND CAPACITY MANAGEMENT CA Nimsoft Netuitive Quest vkernel Reflex Systems uptime software Figure 8: Performance and Capacity Management Vendors at a Glance SUBSCRIPTION BILLING AND MANAGEMENT ALIGNING COSTS THROUGHOUT IT CA Business Service Insight Crosscheck Networks Exoprise OpenLogic Sensible Cloud VAlign Software Figure 9: Cost Management Vendors at a Glance SECTION 4: THE BIG FOUR, THE CLOUD AND ITBM BMC CA TECHNOLOGIES HP IBM Figure 10: The Big Four and ITBM SECTION 5: MARKET SIZING AND M&A MARKET SIZING Figure 11: IT Business Management Revenue M&A OUTLOOK RESEARCH: INFRASTRUCTURE COMPUTING FOR THE ENTERPRISE iii

5 SECTION 6: USE CASES REED ELSEVIER GROUP COMSCI BILLBROWSER COLORADO SPRINGS UTILITIES SERVICENOW IT COST MANAGEMENT.. 31 SECTION 7: CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS CONCLUSIONS RECOMMENDATIONS INDEX OF COMPANIES 35 iv IT AS A BUSINESS

6 SECTION 1 Executive Summary What if enterprise information technology could be managed like any other aspect of a business? Elusive for generations of organizations, this notion of treating IT like a business now stands a fighting chance. Virtualization and cloud computing have paved the way for the delivery of IT as a service. New vendors and technologies seek to show what it costs to run an application in a public cloud environment vs. running it in an internal environment, what cost savings can be gleaned by virtualizing physical servers, and how those virtual or cloud resources can then be assigned or charged back to the business applications they support. Correlating these metrics with performance and capacity management information can show the cost of delivering a desired service level with cloud or virtualized resources. Beyond the cloud, enterprise IT departments must rein in costs as they are constrained in their spending by continuing economic uncertainty. Software that can help manage the cost of new IT projects or show the usage and cost of existing IT resources, including software licenses, is hardly new but is now seeing renewed prominence. Cost containment and improved visibility into IT spending may be the initial drivers in adoption of these technologies. But once IT organizations have a better handle on cost management, they have an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the real value of IT in supporting and enhancing the quality of business services and a company s revenue and profitability. When it added budgeting and forecasting applications to its IT cost management SaaS offering in 2010, Apptio sought to define the Technology Business Management concept. With other vendors now adopting similar terminology, a host of competitive and complementary offerings have emerged in the last few years with more on the way. 1.1 KEY FINDINGS Cost management remains a concern for IT organizations of all sizes. A recent study from ChangeWave Research, a service of 451 Research, shows continuing increases in the number of IT organizations planning to cut spending on IT. There s a single bright spot here, however: IT spending will increase on virtualization and cloud computing. This process of conversion from the capital expenses of in-house IT to the operational expenses of cloud and hosting remains in a nascent stage, with only about 9% of IT organizations having successfully made the switch. Apptio remains the leader in its space, at least in terms of brand recognition, with the strongest competitor being VMware, through Digital Fuel and its other assets. Cloud Cruiser, ComSci and Costnomics are startups to watch. 451 RESEARCH: INFRASTRUCTURE COMPUTING FOR THE ENTERPRISE 1

7 Chargeback remains a rarely deployed technology at the enterprise level, although it s widely used by service providers. We speculate that this is because most enterprises have not gone beyond virtualization into true private or hybrid cloud adoption. We expect showback which illustrates the cost of cloud usage traced back to the business services supported to supersede chargeback in the near term. Showback will be more of a feature of performance and capacity management, or an integrated part of an IT business management (ITBM) suite, rather than a defined space of its own. However, as IT departments progress in their use of showback, we believe many will move up to chargeback and actually bill business departments from a preset budget. By doing so, they will obtain better cost containment and reduce wasteful IT spending across business units. The total value of the ITBM software market is projected to reach $208.8m in 2012, according to 451 Research s Market Monitor service, and revenue is expected to grow to $466.9m by METHODOLOGY This report on IT business management is based on a series of in-depth interviews with a variety of stakeholders in the industry, including IT managers at end-user organizations across multiple sectors, technology vendors, managed service providers, telcos and VCs. This research was supplemented by additional primary research, including attendance at a number of trade shows and industry events. Reports such as this one represent a holistic perspective on key emerging markets in the enterprise IT space. These markets evolve quickly, though, so 451 Research offers additional services that provide critical marketplace updates. These updated reports and perspectives are presented on a daily basis via the company s core intelligence service the 451 Market Insight Service. Forward-looking M&A analysis and perspectives on strategic acquisitions and the liquidity environment for technology companies are also updated regularly via the Market Insight Service, which is backed by the industry-leading 451 M&A KnowledgeBase. Emerging technologies and markets are also covered in additional 451 practices, including our CloudScape, Enterprise Security, Eco-Efficient IT, Information Management, Infrastructure Computing for the Enterprise (ICE), Datacenter Technologies (DCT) and 451 Market Monitor services. All of these 451 services, which are accessible via the Web, provide critical and timely analysis specifically focused on the business of enterprise IT innovation. This report was written by Dennis Callaghan, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Software. Any questions about the methodology should be addressed to Dennis Callaghan at: dennis.callaghan@451research.com For more information about 451 Research, please go to: 2 IT AS A BUSINESS

8 SECTION 2 IT and Cloud Spending Outlook As macroeconomic conditions deteriorate, IT departments are becoming increasingly conscious of how much they are spending. In our most recent ChangeWave Research IT Spending Survey, in May 2012, 22% of respondents said their IT budget will decrease. In the previous quarter, only 19% of respondents were planning cuts. Meanwhile, just 18% of survey respondents expected their total IT spending would increase, while 53% indicated it would remain the same. The corresponding figures for the previous quarter were 20% and 54%, respectively. 60% FIGURE 1: PROJECTED IT SPENDING Feb 12 Survey 50% May 12 Survey 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Increase Remain the Same Decrease/No Spending Let s leave aside the hardware for now and look only at the software layers on top. The ChangeWave Software Spending Survey in July 2012 showed a similar outlook, with 20% of respondents saying they would spend less on software over the next 90 days, compared with 17% in the previous quarter. Just 13% of respondents said they would spend more, down from 20%. And 58% said software spending would remain flat over the next 90 days, compared with 59% the previous quarter. 451 RESEARCH: INFRASTRUCTURE COMPUTING FOR THE ENTERPRISE 3

9 FIGURE 2: CORPORATE SOFTWARE SPENDING PLANS How would you characterize your company s spending plans for software over the next 90 days compared to the previous 90 days? 60% Previous Survey Apr 12 50% Current Survey Jul 12 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% Increase Remain the Same Decrease/No Spending Despite reduced overall IT spending and software spending, virtualization remains a key IT initiative, according to the survey results, as 21% of the respondents expect to increase virtualization spending over the next three months. That s compared with only 8% looking to spend less on virtualization. This is the second straight quarter that the proportion of respondents looking to increase virtualization spending has been at the 21% level, which is the highest percentage in this area since January Meanwhile, the percentage of those looking to reduce virtualization spending declined from 10% in the previous quarter. 4 IT AS A BUSINESS

10 FIGURE 3: VIRTUALIZATION SOFTWARE PURCHASING 30% Increase 25% Decrease 20% 15% 10% 5% Jul 08 Oct 08 Jan 09 Apr 09 Jul 09 Oct 09 Jan 10 Apr 10 Jul 10 Oct 10 Jan 11 Apr 11 Jul 11 Oct 11 Jan 12 Apr 12 Jul 12 Cloud computing adoption and spending is also increasing even as other IT spending decreases. Spending on cloud services from third-party providers (i.e., public cloud) continues to trend upward. The percentage of companies using public cloud services rose to 32% in July 2012 from 29% in the previous quarter and 19% in July 2011, and is forecast to rise to 34% over the next six months. 451 RESEARCH: INFRASTRUCTURE COMPUTING FOR THE ENTERPRISE 5

11 FIGURE 4: CORPORATE USAGE OF PUBLIC CLOUD Percentage of Respondents Whose Companies Currently Use Applications that Run on Public Cloud Computing Services 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% Jul 10 Oct 10 Jan 11 Apr 11 Jul 11 Oct 11 Jan 12 Apr 12 Jul 12 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% Current Cloud User - Jul 2012 Future Cloud User - Next 6 Months 6 IT AS A BUSINESS

12 Of those companies now using public cloud services, 37% expect to spend more on the public cloud over the next six months. Just 1% expect to spend less. This spending will come at the expense of other areas of IT, however, with 21% of respondents saying increased spending on the cloud would effectively decrease other IT spending, compared with 15% saying increased cloud spending would increase overall IT spending. Meanwhile, 49% of respondents say increased cloud spending would have no effect on overall IT spending, and 12% weren t sure one way or the other. Perhaps this latter group represents the best candidates for IT business management software. These tools are designed to provide visibility into how much IT services cost, wherever those IT services reside including the cloud. IT business management tools can show what business units those IT services support, and what kind of usage those business units get from the IT services. Many of these offerings can help plan migration from internal IT services to cloud services, and then monitor and manage ongoing cloud spending. The upshot is that virtualization and cloud computing remain spending bright spots, and that the desire to spend on these initiatives is clearly driven by otherwise gloomy macroeconomic and other forecasts. Virtualization and the cloud, in other words, are seen as ways to do more with less. Whether these increases in cloud spending actually end up yielding cost savings remains to be seen. Just 9% of respondents to the most recent Storage Survey from TheInfoPro (also a service of 451 Research) reported using the cloud or external hosting services to successfully convert capital expenses to operating expenses. So a picture emerges then of IT organizations increasingly cognizant of costs and looking to reduce overall spending, while considering increased investments in cloud computing and virtualization. We believe this will lead to increased demand for software or application services that help IT organizations to better manage and monitor the total cost of ownership of IT resources and to better understand how spending on cloud and virtualization initiatives can reduce spending in other areas. We re not alone in this belief. This report examines a group of vendors aiming to capitalize on these developments and trends. 451 RESEARCH: INFRASTRUCTURE COMPUTING FOR THE ENTERPRISE 7

13 SECTION 3 Vendor Landscape We ve identified six main approaches that enterprises can use to better manage the business of IT. We characterize these approaches as: 1. IT Business Management 2. Cloud Spend Metering and Management 3. Discovery, Asset and License Management 4. Performance and Capacity Management 5. Subscription Billing and Management 6. Aligning Costs through IT Perhaps the most compelling players in this market are the IT business management suite vendors. Virtually all of these vendors start with IT cost modeling and management and then add showback or bill of IT capabilities that allow CIOs to show business-unit managers the quantity of IT services they are consuming and the cost of those services. Differentiation lies in what sort of capabilities the vendors build on from there, in areas such as analytics, optimization, budgeting and forecasting, correlation with performance, and benchmarking against similar-sized companies or companies in the same industry. We see IT service management converging with IT business management. ITBM is about measuring the cost and usage of IT services, and you can t track IT services without a service catalog, which these vendors provide. ITBM is another front on which bitter rivals BMC Software, the longtime leader in ITSM software, and high-flying ITSM SaaS startup ServiceNow will battle. Right now BMC has the edge, thanks to its acquisition of startup ITM Software in The intellectual property from that deal makes up BMC s IT Business Management suite, which is tightly integrated with the company s Remedy ITSM product and its Atrium configuration management database (CMDB). ServiceNow is building out its own capabilities in ITBM after introducing a SaaS-based IT Cost Management application in Although it lags the suite vendors in capabilities at this point, we believe ServiceNow will continue to be disruptive as both it and its customers build new ITBM capabilities on the company s ITSM platform. SaaS is the preferred method of delivery for these vendors, and for most of the customers they serve. However, virtually all of the vendors in this space offer a licensed software option as well. Specialty vendors cover certain aspects of what the suite vendors cover. Cloud spend metering and management is a fast-growing space, at least judging by the startups flocking to it. IT asset and license management and discovery are highly complementary to ITBM and can feed valuable inventory data to these systems to help gauge IT spending and usage. Getting a better handle on the cost of IT and the value to the organization that spending generates is increasingly finding its way into a lot of different software applications, as this report illustrates. 8 IT AS A BUSINESS

14 3.1 IT BUSINESS MANAGEMENT SUITES Think of an ITBM suite as analogous to an IT performance management suite. While IT performance management suites show metrics that impact the overall health of IT such as device status, application response time, user wait time and network service levels ITBM suites show how much those resources are being used and by what business units, and how much these services cost IT. A bill of IT can be created for those organizations that actually charge back the cost of IT services, or it can be used as a showback mechanism for those that just wish to show high-level allocations of IT services to the business units. The chargeback vs. showback debate is ongoing. Today, we find that chargeback is more prevalent at the enterprise IT level, and our conversations with vendors bear that out. TheInfoPro, a service of 451 Research, found in a study last year that just 9% of IT organizations have implemented chargeback, and 76% of respondents have no plans to do so. The remaining 15% of respondents were in various stages of planning and evaluation. TheInfoPro is in the middle of a new study that will compare implementations and plans for chargeback vs. showback. Conversations with users for this report indicate that chargeback may be gaining steam. As IT departments move to the shared-services model, supporting multiple business units and departments, IT organizations are finding that simply showing high-level allocation of IT services to those business groups isn t good enough. Using chargeback to actually bill the business units from a preset budget is proving to be a more effective method of cost management and containment. Beyond cost modeling and management and chargeback/showback, IT business management suites can prepare IT budgets, forecast future spending and benchmark an IT department against similar organizations. The software, which is usually delivered via a SaaS model, extracts this data from a slew of sources, including (but not limited to) business applications, service desk software, CMDBs, log files and systems management frameworks. Once extracted, the data is stored in a central repository where integration, correlation, modeling and other calculations can be performed on it. The ITBM engine can then generate the kinds of alerts, analytics and reports its IT users expect to see. Because the input is focused on business, rather than technical, parameters, the output should help the IT team optimize for business goals. At least that s the theory. 451 RESEARCH: INFRASTRUCTURE COMPUTING FOR THE ENTERPRISE 9

15 3.1.1 APPTIO Apptio can rightfully take credit for defining this space. It launched in the middle of the 2008 financial meltdown with a SaaS offering designed to help budget-constrained IT departments rein in their spending. The Seattle-based company was founded by Sonny Gupta, a serial entrepreneur who had sold his previous startup, iconclude, to Opsware. Apptio s SaaS platform for technology business management now gives IT visibility into not only the cost of services provided, but also the quality of those services, how much they are consumed and their value to the business units they support. The company has modules for IT planning, including budgeting and forecasting and demand and resource planning; IT service costing; bill of IT; IT service performance, including service quality and utilization, and vendor management; and IT benchmarking. The company has certainly garnered the attention of investors, raising a total of $91m in venture backing since its founding. It has more than 80 Fortune 500-sized customers and $101bn under management at those vendors. It has about 300 employees BMC BMC acquired ITM Software, an early pioneer in IT cost management, in June It was the first acquisition in this space. That acquisition forms the basis of BMC s IT Business Management Suite. The suite has modules for Service Cost Management; Demand and Resource Management; Supplier Management; and Financial Planning and Budgeting. Like other offerings, it can also handle showback and chargeback and produce a bill of IT for business units. BMC touts the Supplier Management module as its key differentiator against other competitive products. The module, often the first module BMC ITBM customers use, helps manage supplier relationships, including with SaaS and cloud vendors, managing vendor contracts, agreements, commitments and service-delivery levels. Vendors can be connected to the services, applications, assets and projects their product or service supports. This module can essentially allow IT to create its own purchasing department. Service Cost Management helps users model and manage the cost of IT services and the value they deliver. Demand and Resource Management manages staff and contractor capacity against project and operational demand for those human resources. Financial Planning and Budgeting consolidates cost information from other systems, including HR, ERP and financial management systems, to centralize the IT budgeting process. BMC also includes a database construct, known as ITBM Decision Foundation, to manage all the data pulled into the system. BMC ITBM leverages the IT asset discovery and tracking, license management and contract management capabilities of BMC s Atrium configuration management database, although it does not require Atrium. 10 IT AS A BUSINESS

16 The relationship with BMC s Remedy IT Service Management Suite is less clear. While BMC maintains that ITBM is a completely separate product and says some customers use competing ITSM products, like ServiceNow, the suite does share the same authentication and permissions layer as Remedy and thus requires a limited-use Remedy license. And on BMC s website, the ITBM modules are identified as being part of Remedy. Ultimately, it s up to the customer to decide whether to use BMC ITBM separately with the limited-use Remedy license or as an integrated part of Remedy. BMC does not disclose customer adoption by product line, nor does it disclose information on IT spending under management for ITBM. BMC ITBM is available in both on-premises and on-demand versions CLOUD CRUISER Cloud Cruiser is a nascent IT business management startup with a SaaS offering specifically designed for managing the costs of cloud computing environments. It does this by identifying, analyzing and charging for internal and external resources that are being used across the IT environment. It includes an analytics engine plus budgeting, alerting, consumption forecasting and chargeback capabilities. Although it does not compete with the preceding vendors across the board, it offers much of the same technology, specifically targeted toward understanding the costs of cloud migration, which is a key driver in this space as the data in Section 2 showed. The company offers prospective customers a 30-day trial in which it guarantees that it can identify a minimum of 10% cost savings in a user s private, hybrid or public cloud computing environments through chargeback, BI analytics, proactive budgets and alerts. Rogue workloads generating unexpected charges, inadequate public and private cloud chargeback, uncontrolled VM sprawl, vendor pricing errors and shadow IT are just a few of the problems that Cloud Cruiser says it can identify. Cloud Cruiser claims that its management software can collect anything that can be counted and is targeted at private, hybrid and public clouds. It uses custom or native collectors to pull data sources on physical or virtual data resources logs, spreadsheets, reports, databases, Web services, etc. It is the ease with which it can collect this data that Cloud Cruiser claims is its key intellectual property. Data is transferred by push or pull mechanisms into Cloud Cruiser records and is then mapped to the consumers of those resources using hierarchical resource mapping. Pricing algorithms (pricing and rating engine) are applied to determine the cost of the resources consumed, and the records are then loaded into a database. The data is populated via application servers to a Web browser portal or to an external billing or general ledger system. 451 RESEARCH: INFRASTRUCTURE COMPUTING FOR THE ENTERPRISE 11

17 Source collection venues in the demo we saw included Amazon, OpenStack, VMware, Azure, service management sources, DB2, EMC Centera, , KVM, SQL Server, Exchange, Hyper-V, Windows, mobile devices, networks, Oracle, Power, Linux, Unix, volume manager, Web-FTP and Xen. The software includes a suite of standard reports on usage, trends, variances and invoices, forecasting, benchmarking, BI analytics, and an alert notification system. Cloud Cruiser s go-to-market routes are direct sales, bundling via OEMs and taken to prospects as part of multivendor reference platforms. Nimbula and Gale Technologies are already OEMs, while SHI International is now offering Cloud Cruiser integrated with its IaaS cloud platforms, as is IaaS wholesaler Artisan Infrastructure. Cloud Cruiser is already integrated with OpenStack. Pricing depends on how big the deployment is (certainly for on-premises deployments at cloud service providers), not on the amount of money the system counts. End users are paying $5,000-15,000 a month, Cloud Cruiser reports. Cloud Cruiser claims to have 200 customers already and has raised $7.6m in two rounds COMSCI ComSci traces its roots to a now-defunct company known as Communication Sciences, which developed software for the telecom and network-spend management space. In 2005, ComSci founder, president and CEO Robert Svec and business partner Alan Maltz, both veteran telecommunications company executives, acquired the intellectual property of Communication Sciences and renamed the company ComSci, refocusing it on IT cost management. ComSci now has a SaaS offering featuring IT costing, chargeback, and budgeting and forecasting. The IT CostFlow application handles IT product and service cost modeling, including visual representation, unit cost/rate generation, benchmarking metrics, analytics and executive dashboards. The BillBrowser application handles CIO invoicing, allowing business managers to see the cost of provisioned IT products and services and establish demand-based budgeting and forecasting assumptions for future IT spending. ComSci offers its own data-integration product, known as Source Data Manager, for integrating and importing utilization and financial data into ComSci s platform. ComSci frequently exports data to its customers financial management systems as well, allowing customers to communicate the value of IT across the entire corporate structure. The data is also used as part of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance initiatives. Iselin, NJ-based ComSci has emerged as a credible startup in this space, winning large deals from BNY Mellon and SAP, which uses ComSci to track its employees mobility spending. It has nearly 50 customers altogether, most Fortune 500-sized companies, and almost $40bn in IT spending under management. All of ComSci s customers are in North America. The company has just under 50 employees. ComSci has yet to raise venture funding and has no plans to do so. It claims to be cash-flow positive for the last four years with a 25% annual growth rate. 12 IT AS A BUSINESS