MarketScope for Network Configuration and Change Management

Transcription

1 MarketScope for Network Configuration and Change Management Gartner RAS Core Research Note G , Deb Curtis, David Williams, 31 March 2010 Network configuration and change management products are being investigated by network managers to improve staff efficiency and address network compliance audit requirements. Use this MarketScope to understand the range of vendors and technology alternatives available in this category. What You Need to Know Network configuration and change management (NCCM) tools for the enterprise market are moving from being eclusively the domain of element management systems from network equipment manufacturers to becoming the province of vendors with multivendor network device configuration management, change detection and compliance audit capabilities. Corporate audit and compliance initiatives are the chief drivers changing this everything from specific regulatory compliance, such as Sarbanes-Oley Act (SOX), Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Payment Card Industry (PCI), to general corporate compliance guidelines put in place to satisfy auditors requirements. Network managers will increasingly be called on to replace manual processes with automated NCCM tools to monitor and control network device configurations, thus improving staff efficiency, decreasing downtime, reducing risk and enabling the enforcement of compliance policies. Use this MarketScope to assist in vendor decisions and to establish enterprise strategies for NCCM. However, prior to investing in tools, establish standard network device configuration policies to reduce compleity and enable more-effective automated change. MarketScope NCCM has primarily been a labor-intensive, manual process involving remote access (for eample, Telneting) to individual devices and typing commands into vendor-specific command line interfaces that are fraught with the possibility for human error, or creating homegrown scripts to ease retyping requirements. With its just get it running approach, the enterprise network operations team gave little consideration to rigorous configuration and change management, compliance audit or disaster recovery rollback processes when eecuting network configuration alterations, although they were often the root cause of network issues. However, corporate audit and compliance initiatives are forcing a shift in requirements. In addition, the increased frequency of network configuration changes and patch updates required for security purposes is causing network engineers to rethink their manual approach. A new generation of NCCM vendors have created tools that operate in multivendor environments, enable automated configuration management and bring morerigorous adherence to the change management process, as well as compliance audit capability. The market has progressed to the point that many of these startups have been acquired, and new vendors have entered the market using various angles to differentiate themselves, such as appliance-based products, cloud-based alternatives, integration with security, out-of-band device management and free entry-level products to form a basis for upselling.

2 2 Market consolidation activities have taken two forms, and clients should epect different integration priorities and network technology investments, depending on the type of company that acquired the NCCM product: Vendors with a presence in other network management disciplines, such as network fault management, are epanding their portfolios to cover the network configuration management discipline. For eample, EMC acquired Voyence to add to its EMC Smarts network fault management product (now both part of the EMC Ioni product family), and IBM acquired Intelliden to add to its Netcool-based network fault management product. Vendors with a presence in change management or configuration management for other technologies, such as servers, are epanding their portfolios to cover network devices. For eample, prior to HP acquiring Opsware, Opsware acquired Rendition Networks to add to its server provisioning product, and BMC Software acquired Emprisa Networks to add to its server provisioning and configuration management, client configuration management, change management, and configuration management database (CMDB) offerings. Enterprise network administrators will likely be more interested in NCCM s staff productivity and efficiency improvements and, in the short term, tactical integration with other network management disciplines, such as fault and performance management. Gartner clients and NCCM customer references have improved their ratio of full-time equivalents to the number of network devices managed by a factor of two to as much as 10 times the number of devices as before. However, productivity and efficiency improvements are not solely due to NCCM product deployment. A level of infrastructure standardization and documented configuration policies is required to achieve the most-significant improvements. Senior enterprise IT management will likely be more interested in NCCM s compliance reporting and, in the long term, strategic integration with companywide configuration and change management processes, and the promise of having compliance visibility across all data center infrastructure components from a single dashboard, where networking is just one component. Currently, NCCM tends to be a discipline unto itself; however, in the future, it must increasingly be considered part of the configuration and change management processes for an end-to-end IT service, and viewed as an enabler for the real-time infrastructure (RTI). This will require participation in the strategic, companywide change management process (usually implemented through IT service desk tools) and integration with configuration management tools for other technologies, such as servers and storage. Market/Market Segment Description The ideal NCCM product for the enterprise network has the ability to discover, backup and restore network device configurations; provision new network devices; distribute software updates; make configuration changes; detect and alert on changes; perform a differential audit between configuration versions; establish and enforce compliance with network device configuration policies; provide role-based access; and report on all aspects of network device configuration and change management. Not all vendors provide this comprehensive set of functions. The NCCM tools in this MarketScope provide the basic features of capturing network device configuration files, detecting and auditing configuration changes, and making configuration changes to network devices. However, there are significant differences in delivery (software, appliance, cloud and managed service), scope (number of vendors/models and types of technology supported), scale (the architectural robustness to scale to very large network environments, such as those found in telco/ carrier-class networks) and vendor size to address global support requirements. Some vendors have matured their products to offer additional sophistication, such as performing the initial provisioning of a network device (that is, a bare metal install), providing an automation wizard to guide the user through changes to network devices and to automatically generate the resulting configuration commands, comparing network device configurations to the policy or gold standard for that device, automatically remediating devices back to policy compliance, and providing out-of-the-bo compliance reporting. The product features eamined in this MarketScope include the core functions of backup, compare and update. Many vendors have similar capabilities and achieved similar product ratings in these core functions. To uncover the sometimes subtle differences among vendors, we also eamined the more-sophisticated provisioning, policy, compliance and breadth of multivendor network device coverage features. In some cases, a vendor s weaknesses in one area balance strengths in another, resulting in similar ratings for multiple vendors, although the vendors may have very different products and strategies. Inclusion and Eclusion Criteria Vendors will be included in this MarketScope evaluation if they have an NCCM product that shipped by 30 September 2009 and that has the ability to: Capture a baseline (or backup file) of current network device configurations 2010 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates. Reproduction and distribution of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Although Gartner s research may discuss legal issues related to the information technology business, Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The opinions epressed herein are subject to change without notice.

3 Detect and alert on network device configuration changes Perform a differential audit between network device configuration versions Make configuration changes to network devices, which can include (but is not required to include) distributing software updates and rollback to a previous known good configuration The NCCM MarketScope focuses on a single NCCM product from each vendor (this MarketScope assesses NCCM products, not product portfolios). For guidance, vendors were instructed to submit the product they consider to be the most strategic and best at meeting the NCCM evaluation criteria. Rating for Overall Market/Market Segment Overall Market Rating: Promising Pressures from corporate audit and compliance initiatives are forcing network managers to investigate NCCM tools, which should push this market to a higher overall rating. However, network management buyers are reluctant to change their standard operating procedures. Network configuration management is often a black art practiced by router gurus who are the only ones familiar with the arcane command-line interfaces for their various network devices. They feel it provides job security for network managers who can use the arcane commands. In addition, many network managers don t want to be burdened by any kind of rigorous change management process. It takes a top-down effort from senior IT management and a change in personnel performance review metrics to convince these sometimes recalcitrant network managers of the business importance of documented network device configuration policies, rigorous change management procedures and tested disaster recovery capabilities. These inhibitors constrain the market rating to Promising and limit the current total market size. 3 Evaluation Criteria Table 1. MarketScope for Network Configuration and Change Management Evaluation Criteria Product/Service Offering (Product) Strategy Overall Viability (Business Unit, Financial, Strategy, Organization) Sales Eecution/Pricing Market Responsiveness and Track Record Comment Core goods and services offered by the vendor that compete in/serve the defined market. This includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets and skills, whether offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships. The vendor s approach to product development and delivery that emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current and future requirements. Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization s financial health, the financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the state of the art within the organization s portfolio of products. The vendor s capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the overall effectiveness of the sales channel. The vendor s ability to respond, change direction, be fleible and achieve competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor s history of responsiveness. Weighting high high high standard standard

4 4 FIgure 1. MarketScope for Network Configuration and Change Management RATING Strong Negative Caution Promising Positive Strong Positive AlterPoint BMC Software Cisco Dorado Software EMC HP Intelliden, an IBM company LogLogic ManageEngine Netcordia Pari Networks SolarWinds Uplogi As of 29 March 2010 Source: Gartner (March 2010) Vendor Product/Service Analysis AlterPoint Originally founded in 2001, AlterPoint was acquired in February 2009 by Versata, a wholly owned subsidiary of the privately held Trilogy, based in Austin, Teas. AlterPoint still operates as a stand-alone entity focused on NCCM, but it is now a much smaller company, with many of the original AlterPoint personnel gone, including most of the eecutive team. AlterPoint can tap into Versata s etensive network of development resources, and shares marketing resources with its parent company. Under Versata, AlterPoint s primary objective is customer satisfaction and epansion within its installed base of 160 customers. It is not focused on new-customer acquisition. Although aligned with its objectives, the fact that AlterPoint has not gained significant numbers of new customers negatively affects its sales eecution ratings. To demonstrate its continuing commitment to the NCCM market, AlterPoint released NetworkAuthority 7.0 in September This was almost a year after the planned release date, but AlterPoint eplains that the delay was based on Versata s new internal quality metrics. The new release included a number of new capabilities, such as a Web console, improved topology visualization and router redundancy analysis. AlterPoint also provided a free-of-charge download for enterprise network administrators who wanted to get control of their basic inventories of network devices. AlterPoint created the NetworkAuthority Inventory open-source community (formerly called ZipTie), which remains a novel approach to get the network equipment manufacturers to write their own adapters, relieving AlterPoint of some of the responsibility and the R&D spending. However, it remains challenging for a vendor of AlterPoint s size to persuade suppliers and customers to allocate the time to contribute to the community, and we have yet to see an increase in AlterPoint s market traction with enterprise customers due to its NetworkAuthority Inventory open-source initiative. Rating: Promising BMC Software BMC Software entered the NCCM market through its 2007 acquisition of Emprisa Networks, founded in Although BMC Software is a large, publicly-traded company and one of the Big Four IT operations management software vendors, it has limited focus on the network management market, so it has no upsell opportunity from an eisting network management installed base. However, the vendor understands the importance of network configuration, and is investing in training its field sales and support organization (including those gained when it acquired BladeLogic) on NCCM. BMC Software s primary strategy is leveraging BMC BladeLogic Network Automation (Emprisa) to integrate with its strong Atrium CMDB, its service assurance products (including those from BMC MarketZone partner Entuity), and across an end-to-end IT service by linking to BMC Remedy Service Request Manager and BMC Atrium Orchestrator to provide self-service provisioning. Even with its focus on integration, BMC Software continues to invest in keeping its stand-alone NCCM product competitive. For eample, the vendor continues to enhance Emprisa s SmartMerge capability, which automatically generates change scripts required to implement comple, mass configuration changes. BMC Software has an installed base of more than 125 customers for its NCCM product. Rating: Positive

5 Cisco Gartner considers Cisco to be a player in the NCCM space; however, Cisco declined to participate in the data-gathering phase of this MarketScope evaluation because Gartner restricts the evaluation to a vendor s single strategic NCCM product, whereas Cisco s NCCM offering is a group of products and professional services known as Cisco Proactive Automation of Change Eecution (PACE). Gartner rated Cisco based on other data sources, including publicly available product information and inquiry calls with hundreds of Gartner clients that use Cisco s NCCM capabilities. Cisco first entered the NCCM market with the Resource Manager Essentials (RME) function of the CiscoWorks LAN Management Solution (LMS) product suite more than 12 years ago, with a focus on fault and configuration management for Cisco devices only. To augment Cisco management functionality, Cisco formed an OEM relationship with Opsware in 2006 to resell and privatelabel the Opsware Network Automation System (NAS) product as CiscoWorks Network Compliance Manager (NCM). This allowed Cisco to add multivendor compliance and change management to its product portfolio, while CiscoWorks LMS continued to provide NCCM functionality for Cisco-branded devices only. HP s acquisition of Opsware provided an unepected OEM relationship between HP and Cisco, which are direct competitors in other market segments. While the OEM relationship with HP is still in effect, Cisco recently announced an agreement with EMC to resell the EMC Ioni NCM product (VoyenceControl) as an additional NCCM alternative for Cisco sales teams. Because CiscoWorks RME, one of the applications in CiscoWorks LMS bundle, is the most widely used of Cisco s NCCM alternatives, that is the product that we evaluated for this MarketScope. Cisco received high marks for overall viability and sales eecution, due to the overwhelmingly large installed base. However, the product functionality and performance is more limited than other NCCM alternatives in this MarketScope, and only Cisco devices are managed, resulting in a Caution rating. When customer requirements go beyond Cisco devices or include compliance reporting, Cisco would recommend other products in its PACE strategy (which is a mi of internally developed capabilities, as well as products from reseller and OEM relationships). It is a benefit to Cisco s customers that the products it offers through its OEM (HP) and reseller (EMC) relationships have a Strong Positive rating in this MarketScope; however, for this evaluation, the NCCM product, strategy and eecution results are credited to the originating vendors, not to Cisco. Rating: Caution Dorado Software Dorado Software is a privately held company focused on service life cycle management for heterogeneous and multitechnology environments. Dorado Software s Redcell family of products covers a broad spectrum of infrastructure administration and resource management, including network devices, servers, operating systems, quality of service and security, but is not eclusively focused on NCCM. Its differentiation is providing a single, unified console for all functions health and performance monitoring, as well as configuration and change management which enables scenarios such as after receiving a configuration change alert for a device, the Redcell user can pivot to a performance view to ensure that performance is not affected. Redcell has advanced NCCM capabilities that can commission devices with initial configurations for the dozens of network hardware vendors that Dorado Software supports. In addition, the wizard-based Redcell Device Driver Factory enables users and channel partners to create drivers for other network devices (for eample, legacy devices or new network technologies) without software coding. Dorado Software is committed to NCCM functionality as part of the Redcell product strategy, including plans for built-in compliance policies, such as HIPAA, PCI and SOX, and adding configuration backup information to configuration change alerts. However, much of its vision and future product road map involve enhancements that are not specific to the NCCM market, which limits Dorado Software s product strategy rating. Dorado Software has been in the NCCM market for nine years, and historically had been focused on going to market with OEM partners (such as Dell and NEC) that private-label or embed its technology. Although this improved Dorado Software s viability rating, it limited the vendor s market visibility. Dorado Software has 350 NCCM customers and its primary enterprise go-to-market strategy is through indirect channels; however, NCCM is typically an add-on to a broader Redcell purchase, and the end customer is not usually investing in NCCM as a point solution. Rating: Promising EMC EMC entered the NCCM market through its 2007 acquisition of Voyence, founded in There is good synergy between Voyence and EMC s previous acquisition of Smarts (now both part of the EMC Ioni product family) because of their network management market focus on enterprise and service provider customers. This gives Voyence the opportunity to take advantage of EMC s sales team, which includes a specialized sales overlay team for network management software, and to leverage EMC Ioni channel partners to epand its addressable market. It also provides an upsell opportunity to target current Smarts accounts with VoyenceControl, now called Ioni Network Configuration Manager (NCM). EMC has more than 100 NCM customers. Since acquiring Voyence, EMC has capitalized on the opportunity for integration across the network management disciplines of fault and configuration. Through the integration, an NCM network device configuration change can be sent as an event to the Smarts network fault management product, and a Smarts user has the ability to drill down in contet from the network fault topology/map view to NCM to eamine the recent configuration changes made to a device, as well as invoke NCM to perform any configuration remediation, if needed. Although EMC does not have the eclusive focus on NCCM that the smaller pure-play vendors do, it does have a strong pocket of network management epertise in the company. EMC will continue to leverage that domain knowledge and Ioni NCM will see continued investment in capabilities focused on multivendor network device configuration change automation, automated response to dynamic network changes caused by virtualization technologies, ensuring that network configurations comply with policies and managing new technologies such as the Cisco UCS. 5

6 6 EMC s recent sale of a number of Ioni assets to VMware will make it more challenging for EMC to etend its integration with the server provisioning and service desk products that now belong to VMware. Rating: Strong Positive HP HP entered the NCCM market as a result of its acquisition of Opsware in Opsware had also acquired its way into the NCCM market when it purchased Rendition Networks in Network Automation, HP s NCCM product, received superior ratings in each of the current product capability categories evaluated for this MarketScope. The product automates previously manual network device configuration tasks, and can enable proactive policy enforcement and compliance reporting. HP s focus and plans to epand market share are centered on leveraging the integration of NCCM with its market-leading network management products and across its considerable portfolio of change management, configuration management, release management and CMDB products. HP s vision is of NCCM that is increasingly integrated with network fault and performance management and is an integral part of virtualized IT infrastructure management. HP has an installed base of 500 to 600 NCCM customers, including those gained through its OEM agreement with Cisco. The challenge for HP is that it doesn t have a dedicated NCCM sales force, which puts it in a difficult position when it has to compete with pure-play NCCM vendors in this specialized niche market. The HP software sales force is responsible for the full range of products, including the former OpenView, and the acquired Peregrine, Mercury and Opsware portfolios, which means it can bring in products that are complementary to NCCM, but does not have the opportunity to gain specialist depth in any one area. However, HP does have 100-plus channel partners focused on selling and supporting its network solutions. Rating: Strong Positive Intelliden, an IBM company After the research for this MarketScope was completed, Intelliden was acquired by IBM, but Intelliden s rating in this MarketScope is based on its eecution and vision as a separate, independent company. Intelliden was founded in 2000 and has an installed base of approimately 50 NCCM customers, including many service providers that manage the network device configurations for large numbers of end customers. Most of Intelliden s success has been with service provider and telco customers, with their requirements for reliability, accuracy, robust architecture and large-scale service activation capabilities. For the types of network devices that telcos use, Intelliden s SmartModel approach has deep device knowledge that allows it to do bare-metal provisioning; however, that depth comes at the price of sacrificing breadth, and it does not support a wide range of vendors and models through SmartModels. A wider range of network device vendors and models is covered with Intelliden s standard support, but not at the depth of the SmartModel approach. Intelliden provides sophisticated functionality, such as the ability to roll back a device to a previous configuration without having to reboot the device if a configuration change fails halfway during the process. This is accomplished by sending only those commands to the device needed to bring the device configuration back into the desired (good) state, rather than by pushing out the entire configuration. Although Intelliden has been more prevalent in network service provider accounts, at the cut-off time for this MarketScope research, it had just launched its new NetNovo product targeted for the enterprise market. Intelliden lacked a channel strategy to reach enterprise customers, which reduced its ability to succeed with this planned enterprise offering (which shipped in October 2009), but its acquisition by IBM should resolve that issue. Intelliden has many interesting projects on its future road map, such as the ability to validate configuration changes against policies prior to deployment, which it refers to as preemptive compliance management ; however, these investments will need to be corroborated by IBM once the acquisition closes. Rating: Positive LogLogic LogLogic is a privately held company that offers a suite of log management and security management products. It acquired Eaprotect in 2009 to enter the NCCM market, and has approimately 300 NCCM customers. Eaprotect made its way into the NCCM market through its 2006 acquisition of Solsoft, which was founded in With the new LogLogic ownership, the company no longer has the long-term investment plan to provide full network-device-level configuration management. LogLogic s long-term goal is to become the standard for the design, tracking, monitoring and deployment of security policies enforced on the network firewalls, providing compliance control points related to NCCM. It is focused on configuring the security elements in the network, such as firewalls, rather than on network elements, such as routers and switches, with the eception that its Security Change Manager (SCM) product, which will look at the security parameters of the routers and switches. LogLogic s SCM product capabilities include visual security policy design, as well as simulation and analysis of policies. SCM includes a patented security rule engine that translates high-level, enterprise security requirements (for eample, a branch office needs access via HTTP to finance servers) into device-specific configuration statements. SCM provides a unique and differentiating feature in that it uses its knowledge of the underlying topology to apply security configuration updates (for eample, access control list, networkaddress translation or virtual private network) to all device interfaces in the network path affected by a rule change, ensuring that no devices are left out during a change. However, LogLogic is more focused on the specific tasks of the security operations team, and it does not address the full range of the network operations team s NCCM challenges; therefore, it does not rate as strongly in this NCCM MarketScope. Rating: Promising ManageEngine ManageEngine is a division of privately held Zoho. DeviceEpert, which is ManageEngine s NCCM product, was introduced in 2005 and has an installed base of 1,200 customers. It s part of ManageEngine s network management product portfolio, which also includes OpManager, Network Performance Manager and

7 NetFlow Analyzer, each of which can be leveraged for upsell opportunities. DeviceEpert is inepensive and generally appeals to small or midsize businesses (SMBs), although the channel strategy is to move DeviceEpert to the enterprise. ManageEngine has improved DeviceEpert s scalability since the last NCCM MarketScope, and reports deployments of more than 10,000 devices; however, typical implementations manage fewer than 500 network devices. Much of ManageEngine s DeviceEpert sales are direct download, try it, then buy it purchases through its website. ManageEngine uses a rapid development process to turn out frequent product releases, adding new features and filling functional gaps. Future versions will add synta checking before pushing configuration changes to the network, predefined compliance policies (for eample, SOX, HIPAA and PCI) and automatic validation of configuration changes against policies. ManageEngine has limited marketing presence worldwide and needs to work at creating more awareness of the product with its target market. Rating: Promising Netcordia Netcordia is a privately held provider of network management software that automates network change, manages network configurations and enables network managers to meet compliance requirements. Netcordia was founded in 2000, but focused on the NCCM portion of the network management market four years ago, and has more than 300 NCCM customers. Netcordia s appliancebased NetMRI product was originally developed to perform a broad range of network management functions, including network discovery, configuration, fault and performance. Its goal is to take advantage of that broad background to define network health and topology impact analysis as requisite components of NCCM, differentiating Netcordia from other pure-play NCCM vendors. During the past 18 months, Netcordia s concentrated focus and R&D investments have plugged functional gaps in areas such as patch, configuration rollback and automated remediation to policy compliance, resulting in a much stronger rating in this NCCM MarketScope. In addition, Netcordia can provide sophisticated configuration analysis that the other pure-play NCCM vendors don t provide, such as highlighting configuration inconsistencies between interconnected devices and analyzing the performance impact of a network configuration change. Rating: Positive Pari Networks Pari Networks, the newest entrant to the NCCM market, was founded in 2005 by a group of Cisco veterans. The company is focused on NCCM combined with network asset management and security compliance, and it has a dozen customers. It has a different go-to-market model from the other vendors in this MarketScope, and claims to be the first vendor to provide NCCM solutions for managed service providers (MSPs). Pari Networks MSP partners are usually also resellers that have the option of selling the product outright or offering it as a managed service subscription. The Paritra Appliance Series has no out-of-the-bo integration with the usual event management or service desk/ change management products, but does integrate with managed service platforms, such as Silverback. Reseller partners have leveraged Pari Networks well-defined northbound XML interface to create custom integrations with trouble-ticketing systems, as well as with other network fault and performance management systems. Future product road map and long-term investment plans include out-of-the-bo integration with performance management and security information management products to provide intelligent anomaly detection for performance or security issues and correlate them back to network configuration changes. Its appliance form factor makes Paritra easy to deploy and easy to configure, which should bode well for its target MSP channel, as well as for enterprise customers in general. However, Pari Networks receives a Caution rating because it is such a new vendor with no track record and a very limited installed base. In addition, the MSP go-to-market model is unproven in the NCCM market. If Pari Networks succeeds in getting a number of MSPs on board and demonstrates success in customer engagements, we would epect its rating to move up to Promising in future research. Rating: Caution SolarWinds SolarWinds was founded in 1998 and had a successful initial public offering (IPO) in 2009, and is now traded on the New York Stock Echange (symbol: SWI). Its NCCM product was introduced in 2005 and has more than 3,000 customers. It was called Cirrus when it was originally brought to market, but has been renamed Orion Network Configuration Manager (NCM). SolarWinds acquired the New Zealand-based Kiwi Enterprises in January 2009, adding its Kiwi CatTools to SolarWinds portfolio of NCCM alternatives. Orion NCM is SolarWind s strategic entry for the NCCM market, thus was the product evaluated for this MarketScope. The Kiwi CatTools product and customer base were not included in this evaluation, ecept to recognize the market opportunity that SolarWinds has to gain entry to the low end of the NCCM market with CatTools, for those customers who have outgrown scripts, but can t afford or don t need more-sophisticated NCCM capabilities, and creating an upsell base for Orion NCM as those customers configuration management needs mature. SolarWinds primary differentiators are its price and its go-tomarket model. It provides a good enough NCCM capability that s inepensive and easy to purchase as simple as a credit card and a download. However, SolarWinds is not seen as a strategic network management supplier to large enterprises, and its challenge is to grow its product and marketing to change that view. SolarWinds is not trying to be the bleeding-edge innovator in NCCM. Rather than eperimenting with advancing the state of the art, it does a good job of adding required capabilities when the market need is well-understood, without the requirement to invest in epensive market education. SolarWinds NCCM product is a logical addition to its Orion network management installed base, which can also be leveraged for upsell opportunities. SolarWinds future product road map includes plans to overlay Orion fault and performance statistics with NCM configuration and change management data in a single console to aid with troubleshooting and diagnosing network issues. 7

8 8 Rating: Positive Uplogi Uplogi, founded in 2003, is a privately held provider of colocated management appliances that automate routine administration, maintenance and recovery tasks, regardless of network availability. It has 150 customers for its appliance-based Secure Remote Management (SRM) offering. Although SRM is not a traditional, pure-play NCCM tool, it is a good eample of a vendor providing basic NCCM functionality and leveraging it to achieve a differentiated network management value. Uplogi s NCCM features are included with its multipurpose SRM product, an appliance that provides secure access to network devices through physical connectivity via the console port (commonly called out of band management). Uplogi s approach, with its local network configuration storage and rule-based remediation, is useful for troubleshooting and configuration management when the primary network link or device is down, especially in conditions that would make an on-site visit challenging, such as an oil drilling platform out to sea. The increased resilience of persistent device management will appeal to some uptime-sensitive, security-conscious and riskaverse customers. When evaluating Uplogi based eclusively on NCCM requirements, its product functionality is not as comprehensive as the pureplay NCCM competitors. Uplogi SRM complements traditional software-based NCCM products where secure physical access is needed. Uplogi s strategic vision focuses on eploiting the physical connectivity to the console port to reliably and securely automate routine network administration, maintenance and recovery tasks, regardless of network availability, but does not epress any incremental innovation specific to NCCM, compared with pure-play NCCM vendors. Rating: Caution Vendors Added or Dropped We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants and MarketScopes as markets change. As a result of these adjustments, the mi of vendors in any Magic Quadrant or MarketScope may change over time. A vendor appearing in a Magic Quadrant or MarketScope one year and not the net does not necessarily indicate that we have changed our opinion of that vendor. This may be a reflection of a change in the market and, therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or a change of focus by a vendor. Gartner MarketScope Defined Gartner s MarketScope provides specific guidance for users who are deploying, or have deployed, products or services. A Gartner MarketScope rating does not imply that the vendor meets all, few or none of the evaluation criteria. The Gartner MarketScope evaluation is based on a weighted evaluation of a vendor s products in comparison with the evaluation criteria. Consider Gartner s criteria as they apply to your specific requirements. Contact Gartner to discuss how this evaluation may affect your specific needs.

9 In the below table, the various ratings are defined: 9 MarketScope Rating Framework Strong Positive Is viewed as a provider of strategic products, services or solutions: Customers: Continue with planned investments. Potential customers: Consider this vendor a strong choice for strategic investments. Positive Demonstrates strength in specific areas, but eecution in one or more areas may still be developing or inconsistent with other areas of performance: Customers: Continue planned investments. Potential customers: Consider this vendor a viable choice for strategic or tactical investments, while planning for known limitations. Promising Shows potential in specific areas; however, eecution is inconsistent: Customers: Consider the short- and long-term impact of possible changes in status. Potential customers: Plan for and be aware of issues and opportunities related to the evolution and maturity of this vendor. Caution Faces challenges in one or more areas. Customers: Understand challenges in relevant areas, and develop contingency plans based on risk tolerance and possible business impact. Potential customers: Account for the vendor s challenges as part of due diligence. Strong Negative Has difficulty responding to problems in multiple areas. Customers: Eecute risk mitigation plans and contingency options. Potential customers: Consider this vendor only for tactical investment with short-term, rapid payback.