Oracle and Others get into Network Management

Oracle Corp. recently announced that it was getting into network management with a new set of utilities. In other news, some network monitoring vendors are increasing their focus on selling management into small and medium business (SMB) users, with a focus on ease of use.

Focal Points

• Officials from Oracle recently announced the availability of its Utilities Network Management System, version 1.8.0. Officials said the software will improve distribution management, as well as reduce the time it takes to identify outages and do root cause analysis. This new release includes applications for locating faults, helping achieve service restoration, and optimizes voltage use. Officials also said that this product leverages Oracle’s database as well as Fusion middleware for its operating environment. The new product integrates with supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems. It can also perform closed-loop switching actions within 60 seconds without dispatcher interaction.
• Several vendors have been increasing their presence for selling network management solutions into the small and medium business (SMB) space. Some of these vendors include Ipswitch, Inc., with WhatsUp Gold, and Castle Rock Computing's SNMPc 7.1. While some IT executives in SMBs will go for no cost open source network management solutions, they usually lack these ease of use and feature sets that the commercial products focused on SMBs have. Other companies that have gotten into this space include SolarWinds, Inc., which increased its network management tools with its acquisition of ipMonitor. It recently released version 9.0 of ipMonitor. These products are starting to include higher-end features, such as performing synthetic transactions to monitor end-user experience with applications.
• Officials from Aruba Networks, Inc. recently announced that it intended to acquire AirWave Wireless, Inc., a maker of wireless management technology. It agreed to pay $37 million for AirWave. AirWave's wireless network management solution can monitor up to 50,000 end users. AirWave’s solution is capable of monitoring any wireless equipment, including Cisco Systems, Inc.'s wireless networking gear. Aruba has its own wireless local area network (WLAN) management software, which officials say it will continue to sell after the AirWave acquisition. Officials stated it plans on selling AirWave as its own separate management product.

Experton Group believes network management will continue to prosper as a separate management function, even while there is a rush to merge many separate management disciplines into an integrate enterprise management solution. It makes sense to centralize processing enterprise events, but each domain will always have the best set of tools to deal with the unique configuration, fault, and performance problems specific to its domain. IT executives should centralize service desk functions and event management, but use best of breed products for optimal domain management tasks.