“Gatekeepers of the Datacenter” vs Freedom of Choice in IT

I’ve written in the past about how enterprise management vendors can act as “Gatekeepers of the Datacenter” by virtue of what technologies they do or don’t support as part of their management solutions. This rather lame dynamic is a big part of the reason why a lot of otherwise great technologies dont make it all the way into the traditional enterprise.

The problem gets further compounded when one of these “Gatekeepers” is also a platform or stack vendor. See, it’s hard to resist the temptation of delivering the absolute best management for IBM products from a Tivoli solution while shortchanging non-IBM ones. Or, to lay this on one of the aspiring members of the big 4… how about getting support for SQL Server on Oracle’s Enterprise Manager. Hmmm… I’m gonna guess it sucks because Oracle wants you using their database. Besides, who uses OEM that isnt already an Oracle db customer?

Lucky for us, Hyperic has always aspired to be a completely independent management software company. We figure its important for us to deliver the best management solution for whatever technology you’ve chosen. Case in point, Mosso, a Hyperic enterprise customer was recently interviewed regarding their use of virtualization technology from VMWare. The key point from this interview was the fact that they’re open to switching to a different virtualization platform based on their requirements. Lucky for them, Hyperic will be delivering Xen support (as well as OracleVM) as soon as the Xen folks finalize their management API’s (c’mon guys, we’ve been waiting a long time) so their management solution will be in lockstep with their technology choices.

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