ITOM Software: SaaS and Cloud-Native Vendors Take a Leading Role

Posted by OpsRamp on November 29th, 2020

In the digital age, every organization needs the best capabilities for IT monitoring.  There’s simply too much at stake without having advanced tools for ensuring that user performance and SLAs are maintained, and applications are available and reliable, from any location.  Yet IT monitoring is just part of the picture.  The category of software called IT operations management (ITOM) entails the more comprehensive practice of managing an organization’s business-critical applications and underlying IT infrastructure. 

According to Gartner’s report, “Market Share: IT Operations Management, Worldwide, 2019,” the ITOM software sector includes: 

• Delivery automation.
• Experience management: IT service management (ITSM).
• Experience management: Software asset management (SAM), IT asset management (ITAM) and IT financial management (ITFM).
• ITOM mainframe tools.
• Other ITOM.
• Performance analysis: Algorithmic IT operations (AIOps), IT infrastructure monitoring (ITIM) and other monitoring tools.
• Performance analysis: Application performance monitoring (APM).
• Performance analysis: Network performance monitoring and diagnostics (NPMD) 

With the advent of cloud computing, much has changed over the years in terms of ITOM’s core requirements.  Enterprise IT infrastructure today can include virtual infrastructure such as VMware, private clouds, on-premises data centers as well as single cloud and multi-cloud environments.  This makes for a busy tangle of alerts and incident data which IT employees must navigate to resolve issues before they become real business problems. 

Individuals who work in IT operations management teams, such as NOC engineers, site reliability engineers, and IT administrators, are expected to align with business units and business priorities more than ever before.  Their job is to excel at multi-cloud and hybrid IT monitoring to maintain service uptime, availability, and performance for digital services.  They must understand the importance of one business service over another, and how to flexibly adapt infrastructure to meet changing needs such as new business offerings or customer segments. 

All the while, they must do their jobs efficiently and cost-effectively.  Enhancing IT monitoring with automation and artificial intelligence (AIOps) has been a major trend over the past two years to help meet these goals. 

ITOM technologies continue to be center stage for enabling digital transformation efforts. The IT operations management software market grew 10% in 2019, reaching .9 billion, according to Gartner: “Cloud-native, best of breed and OSS vendors continue to challenge the market position of established ITOM providers that have declined to an estimated 16% share.” 

Evolution of a Market

Many large enterprises that advanced into the computing age with ITOM suites from legacy tech vendors including CA, IBM and BMC are now finding that these older solutions don’t quite fit their needs today.  In this analysis of the IT Operations Management market, OpsRamp’s Deepak Jannu explains how the “big four” vendors lost their way.  He cites “a distinct absence of innovation, a strong dependence on legacy portfolios and maintenance revenues, and unwieldy product suites” as the core reasons for the decline in market share of the legacy players.  In many cases, these platforms have grown through acquisition – resulting in suites which lack tight integration and often require add-on modules, extensive customization and/or implementation support to achieve full functionality and ease of use. 

Today, modern SaaS startups are steadily taking back market share.  This has resulted in a broad and at times confusing marketplace of ITOM vendors. Buyers must navigate this market and determine whether to buy multiple best-of-breed solutions or go for a platform approach which can cover all of the key areas of IT monitoring and automation and also integrate existing point tools that are still required. 

It’s not an easy decision, and why so many organizations are still struggling to achieve the “single pane of glass” environment where engineers and service desk personnel can see metrics from all resources in one place. Some of the key challenges that infrastructure leaders face today to achieve high-performing IT include: 

1. Too many IT tools. Tool overload has proliferated as DevOps organizations have matured.  Nearly 40% of IT organizations are using more than 10 monitoring tools and almost 20% are using more than 20 monitoring tools, according to a DEJ survey.
2. The burden of technical debt. There are many definitions of technical debt but it’s akin to continuing repairs on the old clunker and you’re still left with a car that’s expensive to maintain and which will never drive well or fast again. There comes a time when added customizations and upgrades to old technologies no longer makes sound economic and business sense.  But change is thorny – and that’s why many enterprise IT organizations stick with the status quo, especially in infrastructure management which has little sex appeal.
3. The high cost of central visibility.  Many IT organizations need a unified view of services across divisions, lines of business and departments to understand and optimize overall infrastructure health, especially if they have a shared services model. Yet retrofitting massive legacy ITOM suites to achieve that single pane of glass (SPOG) is painful and expensive, especially with software maintenance fees.  The other path, integrating multiple toolsets to create that SPOG, is also expensive and time-consuming.  And then one must maintain those integrations over time. 

Enterprise IT buyers seeking a more agile, affordable and automated IT operations toolset will find plenty of options across all price points in today’s market. Tool rationalization and consolidation will be paramount in every business. Count on the ITOM sector to continue evolving with new SaaS players innovating and older players attempting to modernize their own suites through acquisition. 

About the Company 

The OpsRamp IT operations management (ITOM) platform is built to discover, monitor, manage, and automate the world's most complex hybrid IT environments. Now you don't need a bunch of disconnected point tools or a suite of duct-taped legacy ITOM solutions to bring order to your madness.