The Service Management Soapbox

As many of you have heard by now, EMC acquired Voyence last week. Voyence is a leader in the network compliance, configuration and change management market. I’ve been a long-time fan of Voyence, so I’m delighted to have them in the EMC family now.

I promise this blog will not become a podium for EMC marketing, but occasionally EMC will do something worthy of commentary here. The Voyence acquisition is one of these events. Not only is it an important step for both EMC and Voyence, it is also a notable step in the relentless (and necessary) consolidation in our market.

I wrote a research note on this specific market in 2002. I seem to have a pattern to my writings of those days. I find my predictions were usually correct, but I was about two years too optimistic with their timing! In my note, I referred to Voyence as Power Up Networks, their identity at the time. Voyence has made great progress since the Power Up days. All have. After all, it’s been 5 years since I published that note!

I will not (can not) share much about EMC’s future strategy for its Resource Management Software Group, where I and now Voyence reside, but some of these directions are obvious. As EMC continues to build out a broader vision for service management automation, Voyence represents a necessary step forward. Since acquiring Smarts in 2005, EMC has built a venerable reputation in the network domain. Voyence provides a means to “close the loop” for management of network infrastructures.

This closed loop model to management is true management as opposed to the partial execution we’ve come to know as network management. The truth is, we have done very little genuine “management” in our profession over the past few decades. We have made tremendous progress in monitoring, but management implies some action to respond to the monitoring. These actions have been almost exclusively manual. This must change and technology such as that offered by Voyence enables this action.

Voyence also fits very well into EMC’s overall configuration compliance analysis strategy. Our first step in this direction was announced and unveiled on September 17 at the itSMF USA conference. The IT Compliance Analyzer (ITCA) we announced assesses the viability of application configurations according to policies that are defined for internal governance (Do we have sufficient discipline within our application configurations?), regulatory (Can my company avoid unsavory publicity?), or industry best practices (How does Microsoft suggest we configure SQL Server?). What ITCA does for the applications, Voyence does for the networks.

This compliance analysis is quickly percolating to the top of priorities for IT organizations of all flavors. Just read the headlines about corporate misconduct, credit card data breaches, and compromised medical records and you can begin to grasp the demand for good compliance.

One such compliance initiative is the PCI (Payment Card Industry) standard. PCI defines several clear conditions that must be met to ensure the security of credit card records. Both the IT Compliance Analyzer product and Voyence Control provide out-of-the-box automation to assess PCI compliance. This has generated tremendous interest in both products and now both are under the same umbrella.

As excited as I am by the news, don’t necessarily buy into my enthusiasm alone. Many others view this as a good move:

• NetworkWorld: EMC acquires Voyence to broaden change management capabilities (note the very first sentence, “EMC this week acquired Voyence in a brilliant move intended to broaden the company’s impact on managing the server, storage and network infrastructure.”)
• Also NetworkWorld: EMC acquires network-configuration player
• eWeek: EMC Acquires Voyence
• Informationweek: EMC Buys Voyence To Expand IT Automation Portfolio
• Computer Business Review: EMC to acquire Voyence
• Computerworld: EMC buys change-management vendor Voyence

Here are two rather provocative titles:

• The Register (UK): EMC satisfies management fetish with Voyence
• 42internetworks: EMC strengthens position with Voyence acquisition…watch out HP!

What do YOU think?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 22:54 and is filed under ITIL, EMC, General ITSM, Management Tools, ITIL v3, CMDB. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.