Forrester Case Study

Executive Summary

Change and configuration management is clearly emerging as one of the top investment areas for IT Operations. Management software vendors have been quick at picking up the trend, as witnessed by their acquisitions of smaller players in the space. Typical recent examples are Novadigm’s acquisition by HP Openview and Marimba’s purchase by BMC Software .
In many companies, keeping track of configurations, planning changes and insuring that only authorized persons correctly apply all patches to operating systems and applications has become increasingly difficult due to the sheer number of servers. Increased security threats and new regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley also contribute to magnify the issue.
Software and patch distribution is regarded as a relatively mature technology, and few innovations have been brought to market in the past few years. Any new entrant in the space must show that they are bringing significant technological and economical advantages to sit at the market table.
Autonomic Software just introduced a new lightweight and versatile agent served by an n-tier architecture, which promises to bring a new level of automation, agility and scalability at a fair price. Forrester interviewed several Autonomic Software clients to understand what perceived technological and economical advantages were driving their choices.

A July 2003 spin-off of integrator Leveraged Solutions, Autonomic Software has developed an n-tier architecture called Autonomic Network System & Administration (ANSA): a cross-platform, agent based solution for asset discovery, configuration management, patch management and software distribution. A small footprint and its ease of use characterize the ANSA agent. The multi-tier architecture of the solution promises scalability.

Server Configuration Management

Managing upgrades and patches in a server operation is an increasingly hazardous and costly proposition.

• Excessive manpower resources are required to maintain the different versions of software in a current and secure state
   

• Lapses in deploying the necessary upgrades and patches can lead to increased downtime and potentially to security breaches.

What Clients Want

The clients interviewed by Forrester expressed clearly their interest in solving immediate issues as quickly as possible, within a reasonable cost envelope. These clients run multiple platforms, mostly Windows and Solaris
 

• Inventory assets and applications. While gaining or regaining control of a large infrastructure is a solid foundation for sound infrastructure management, Sarbane-Oxley, compliance is an incentive to automate the inventory process. OpenWave provides a perfect example: “We have thousands of servers in our development world, and we have to know what they are and show that everything is properly licensed”.
   
• Stay current on patches and changes. “The need to keep everything current and aligned with the latest configuration patches is critical to keep the business running” (OpenWave).
   
• Reduce the cost of maintaining servers manually. Operating systems may need up to 25 patches a year on average. Applications may change also several times a year. The cost of applying these changes to thousands of servers

• The single running agent has a small footprint. The ANSA agent does more than other agents and can be customized without increasing the size of the small footprint.

“The agent technology is sweet: the size is small, and you don’t even know that it is running. The agent takes up about 500K and it can go up to six or seven megabytes but then it goes right back down to 500K. . . . Patchlink has three or four agents just for patch management and for asset management Autonomic’s competitors need to deploy from six to 24 agents. Autonomic uses just one agent for everything.” (IS Inc.)

• Cheaper than other competitors especially Microsoft and Computer Associates. CA’s solution would have cost OpenWave between $500 thousand and $1 million, while Autonomic was much cheaper.

“Microsoft SMS wanted to use consultants for a preliminary analysis. . . . Because of the design and some of the interesting things Autonomic has done with agent technology, we can fit the cost of the ANSA system just in the amount of money saved expanding memory in individual CPUs.” (TDSC)

Availability of the product on multiple platforms as well as its ease of use were added bonuses:

• Autonomic was deployed on platforms such as Windows, Linux and Solaris. Although other products are also cross platform, ANSA was found easier to use and cheaper. (IS Inc.)
   

• The setup wizard is powerful and easy to use. It allows users to add agents to client machines remotely from the centralized console and to setup on new servers in 15 minutes.

“They’ve got a strong install wizard which makes the system very easy to install: we were up and deploying agents in 45 minutes and were able to start patching within a few minutes after that.” (TDSC)

• Follow ITIL best practices and reengineer the whole change and configuration management process, starting with the implementation of a CMDB and adding workflow management as well as automating the implementation of change.
   
• Tackle the areas where the pain is severe first, and work one step at a time to a complete process in an ad-hoc fashion.

Supplemental MATERIAL

IS Inc.

OpenWave

TDSC

¹See Thomas Mendel’s “Infrastructure Management Spending”, May 26, 2004, and the accompanying survey conducted at Gigaworld 2004.

²See Ideabyte: “Automating Application Deployment”, JP Garbani, 7/24/2002

³See IT Market View: Change and Configuration Management”, JP Garbani and Thomas Mendel, 11/8/2004