Gartner Jumps on the Bandwagon...

If one uses the "Shift Key" to spell out "Big 4"- he gets "BIG $."

Gartner recently released a report entitled "'Big 4' Management Software Vendors Face Competitive Threats" that discusses the growing dissatisfaction with the "Big 4" proprietary software vendors.

In this report, Gartner states that the "Big 4" (HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter, BMC Patrol) are being threatened by open source systems management vendors mainly because the "Big 4" do not provide enough additional value to justify the magnitude more cost relative to open source alternatives. In January, former HP Executive Nora Denzel foreshadowed just this:

"...Inflexible, expensive proprietary solutions from the 'Big 4' vendors simply do not provide enough additional value, in comparison to open source alternatives, to justify the magnitude more cost... I predict a 'draining the cost pool' for customers and a paradigm shift in the way they view management solutions. Big fish vendors will be pushed down to the deep end where they can add value while the adoption of best of breed open source solutions will lower the customer cost water line in the shallow end..."

In my opinion, the collection and correlation (or monitoring) of data has essentially become commoditized by open source and this is a good thing for customers.

This is the first time I've seen a Tier 1 analyst firm say (and quantify) that customer loyalty to the "Big 4" is fragile and that the "...OSM [open source management] industry appears to be a more immediate threat to the major IT management software vendors that have no intention (for now) of offering OSM products..."

More than half (55%, 106 responses) of recent survey respondents said they would consider open source alternatives to those offered by the "Big 4" (up from 29% in 2004 survey).

The report notes that while support was still one of the major impediments to OSM adoption, GroundWork Open Source, Zenoss, and Hyperic offer packages of management functionality along with maintenance agreements. The report also discusses the dissatisfaction of "Big 4" customers with the interoperability (or lack thereof) of their proprietary tools, functionality that is inherent to GroundWork's open source solution.

One more reason that the "Big 4" should keep an eye open to open source.