Time to Update the Management Toolkit

_{by Mike Vizard}

One of the things that drives a customer into the arms of solution providers more easily than anything else is anything to do with managing ongoing IT operations. Every customer out there falls in love with one application or another, but when it comes to living with that application they inevitably want somebody else to take care of it for them.

Fortunately for solution providers in the channel, things are getting more complex by the moment. Virtualization has introduced a whole new layer of software that frequently makes the underlying physical infrastructure invisible to the applications that run on it. Application performance anomalies are increasing as the number of systems that each application touches increases exponentially. And with the rise of cloud computing, there are all kinds of potential performance issues as applications increasingly span multiple wide area networks. Finally, the whole process of rolling out and then managing an application across virtual infrastructure is about to become significantly more complex as virtual machines and the application workloads that ride on top of them start to dynamically move across the enterprise.

The good news is that there is now a raft of new offerings that together take on the challenges associated with application management. Those new offerings include:

*BlueStripe Software provides a set of tools that correlates events across both virtual and physical infrastructure to create a holistic view of the entire environment.

*dynaTrace offers a new approach to application management that continuously monitors application events so no one has to waste time trying to recreate anomalies.

*Apparent Networks has a tool that identifies the weakest network connections to any given cloud computing service.

*rPath has an application delivery management system tuned specifically for virtual server environments.

There are probably at least another dozen or so modern application and systems management tools out there that collectively can give solution providers in the channel both a strategic and tactical edge. After all, most IT organizations today are encumbered by legacy toolkits that are anywhere from three to 10 years old. The opportunity for solution providers is to show up with the latest toolkits that allows them o easily convince customers that their applications are going to be in much better hands with the solution provider than anything they could do themselves.