Dell’s VIS architecture learns new lesson from Netuitive deal

Dell and Netuitive signed a partnership deal to embed Netuitive’s innovative, market-leading behavioral analysis technology for infrastructure management into Dell’s virtual integrated system (VIS) architecture for cloud management. Ovum considers behavioral analysis the next major innovation for infrastructure and cloud management, and this deal gives Dell an edge over its main competitors.

An increasingly complex environment is straining existing approaches to infrastructure management

Ovum has commented frequently on the need for a new approach to infrastructure management, moving beyond scripting and complex policy setting. Netuitive has a patented technology that enables complex environments to manage themselves based on a few simple guiding principles. Recently Dell has been repositioning itself as more than just a “tin shifter,” and moved into the same market as IBM, HP, and Oracle – albeit on a smaller scale. Ovum believes this partnership will help Dell grow its market position in the mid- to large-enterprise market. Although Dell will face strong competition from its larger rivals at the top end of this market, the Netuitive deal should help Dell gain customers in the mid-market and provide it with a technology ideally suited to the complex issues of large, mature organizations.

For Netuitive the deal represents an opportunity to move beyond its traditional customer base of global financial institutions. Through Dell’s extensive channel, this technology will become available to a much wider audience. Ovum believes the need for a new approach to management is driven by the increased use of virtualization for mission-critical applications and cloud services. Behavioral analysis is not the only potential solution to the increased complexity and, hence, increased risk of managing highly virtualized and federated environments. However, it is one of the most appealing because it does what it says on the label: self-learn.

Increased use of cloud services will bring large-enterprise complexities to the mid-market

Cloud services are growing slowly. According to Ovum’s Technology Trends survey, on-site deployments are preferred more than three times as much as hosted solutions. However, when comparing the trend over time, the number of those preferring hosted solutions almost doubles from 2008 to 2010, and these averages hide both regional and use case differences. For example, in 2010 nearly 30% of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) preferred to buy BI as a hosted service, compared with 22% of large enterprises. The Ovum survey shows that cross-sector adoption in a wide range of markets and geographies is increasing, and Ovum expects this trend to continue over the next five years. Although much of this will be SaaS driven, an increase in PaaS and IaaS is likely to be more market and location sensitive.

The result of this adoption of cloud services will be to increase the sources of IT supply that CIOs must manage, integrate, and monitor. Ovum believes this will force many organizations to consider new approaches, such as model-driven architectures and increased automation. Although the former remains appealing, the lengthy deployment time needed before value can be delivered means its audience is a very specific sector. The model must be constructed from the many different elements in the enterprise, which can require an intensive data-gathering exercise. However, the results of the model approach demonstrate increased value in the long-term because once built, any change is faster to accommodate and deploy.

Increased automation has mass-market appeal, and many different solutions are currently on offer. The problem is that many of the current automation tools are script-based. The mid-market will find this becomes more problematic in a much more heterogeneous environment, in which many of the sources are beyond IT’s control.