NETWORK WORLD NEWSLETTER: LISA ERICKSON-HARRIS ON
NETWORK/SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT
07/04/05
Today's focus: Peregrine-Mercury deal raises service desk
question
Dear security.world@gmail.com,
In this issue:
* Ramifications of partnership between Peregrine and Mercury
* Links related to Network/Systems Management
* Featured reader resource
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Today's focus: Peregrine-Mercury deal raises service desk
question
By Lisa Erickson-Harris
Last month, Mercury Interactive and Peregrine Systems formed a
partnership to focus on synergies among the companies' change
management, asset management, and IT governance software. Of
course, there is the question of the service desk - how will the
dynamic work among Mercury, Peregrine and IBM?
Only time will tell, but here are some thoughts to ponder.
While there are innumerable lesser-known service and help desk
products on the market, the leading offerings have long been
those from HP, Computer Associates, Remedy, and Peregrine. (One
other product that steps out of the pack is FrontRange, though
the company has not focused on the large enterprise.)
There is a lot to be said for the relationship between Mercury
and Peregrine. Both companies are making significant investments
to integrate products. Peregrine will resell Mercury's
Application Mapping technology directly. Other product sales
will be handled as reference sales with all support remaining
with the provider of the technology.
Even though the service desk is not the central theme in the
partnership announcement, there are reasons to pay attention to
this aspect of it. The primary reason is that the service desk
is becoming more and more important, in large part due to
increased interest in process models in general and the IT
Infrastructure Library in particular. Incident and problem
management is a good starting point for many large enterprises
that are adopting ITIL.
In addition, the service desk is used not solely for events and
failures - especially at the high-end of the market where
products are highly customizable and often have multiple
purposes. Enterprise Management Associates has seen products
that track incidents and problems, initiate service requests and
new user facilities, track asset changes, perform change
management, and on the business side may track customer
satisfaction activities in addition to specific problems.
Inherently, this all goes back to the configuration management
database, with a service desk front-ending it.
You might be asking, what about IBM? Peregrine's ServiceCenter
fills the service desk need for both IBM and Mercury. IBM, in
fact, owned the ServiceCenter technology at one point and then
sold it to Peregrine. Both Mercury and IBM also work with other
service desk products and have an open strategy.
However, from a competitive standpoint, Peregrine's is the
cleaner product. IBM also continues to have a close relationship
with Peregrine and in fact announced further efforts to work
together at about the same time as the Mercury announcement.
The key question to consider is what would happen if either
Mercury or IBM should choose to pursue an acquisition of
Peregrine. Perhaps this is an opportunity for a shake-up in the
service desk market - a small but clear opening for a vendor
such as FrontRange or Axios Systems (a broad provider of an
ITIL-based service desk software) to take on a more prominent
role. Clearly, there is not enough competition at the high end
of the service desk market, and there are innovators that could
step up to the plate.
Will Peregrine be absorbed into Mercury? Or maybe IBM? Perhaps
it will stand alone and these relationships will help it grow
and become more prosperous. Again, only time will tell. In the
meantime, it will be interesting to watch this unfold and to see
just which service desk products are able to take advantage of
this rare opportunity.
_______________________________________________________________
To contact: Lisa Erickson-Harris
Lisa Erickson-Harris is a research director with Enterprise
Management Associates <http://www.enterprisemanagement.com/> in
Boulder, Colo., a leading analyst and market research firm
focusing exclusively on enterprise infrastructure management.
Lisa has more than 18 years of experience working in all aspects
of IT, including network administration, software development,
product management, and strategic partnership development. Her
current focus at EMA is service-level management, partnership
strategies, and management systems for the SMB/SME environment.
She can be reached via e-mail at
<mailto:erickson-harris@enterprisemanagement.com>
Download a free copy of the new SLM Buyer's Guide at
<http://www.slm-info.org/>
_______________________________________________________________
This newsletter is sponsored by Ciena
NetworkWorld Special Report - The Adaptive WAN: The factors
driving WAN evolution
A combination of business and technology trends are changing the
demands on the enterprise WAN. This NetworkWorld Special Report
explores some of the key business and technology trends that are
driving and enabling the evolution of the enterprise WAN and how
the enterprise WAN can become adaptive to support these trends.
http://www.fattail.com/redir/redirect.asp?CID=107745
_______________________________________________________________
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FEATURED READER RESOURCE
FOCUS ON RECOVERY
IT professionals are changing the way they back up and recover
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touted - find out if attendees agreed and if faster storage
solutions will soon be available. Click here:
<http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/062005-data-recovery.html>
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