A framework for growth - SCC Communications, Prudential Insurance and Shared Medical Systems are implementing enterprise systems management frameworks - includes related articles about Computer Associates giving away Unicenter TNG Framework free at CA World, competition from IBM's Tivoli subsidiary, HP's OpenView policy - Company Operations

Software Magazine, Nov, 1997 by Colleen Frye

When CTOs declare that efficient distributed systems management is a matter of life and death, they don't usually mean it literally. SCC Communications Corp.'s Stephen Meer does.

Meer's company, through its National Data Services Center (NDSC) in Boulder, Colo., provides Regional Bell Operating Companies and other local telephone companies with services and software for operating the Enhanced 911 network throughout North America. To do so, SCC's emergency services infrastructure incorporates a network of more than 20 Tandem Himalaya systems running SCC applications in a fail-safe, fault-tolerant environment. The bottom line is 100% system availability.

"The system we operate affects 160 million people's ability to dial 911," says Meer. "I wake up every night with that."

To help Meer sleep easier, SCC needed an enterprise systems management solution that provided a consolidated view of the enterprise, supported a heterogeneous network and an increasingly complicated telecommunications landscape, and would scale with the fast-growing company. While saving lives is the firm's top business concern, Meer's other big business issue was to ensure that personnel costs didn't keep pace with system complexity: "I needed smarter tools. The real pressing business issue is, as we get bigger we need better tools so we don't have exponential growth of people as we get more complex. I want to save our people for important things like writing new software and adding value to the marketing, not for watching alarms going by [on-screen] to make sure someone didn't trip on a wire in Omaha."

For Meer and other CTOs who must manage increasingly diverse and complex systems, enterprise systems management frameworks promise the robust management disciplines of the mainframe world, multiplatform support, and the openness to plug in best-of-breed products. Though their business goals may vary -- from saving dollars to saving lives, to improving customer service or freeing IT staff to develop revenue-enhancing applications -- their technical goals are to achieve a consolidated view of the distributed enterprise, with the ability to preserve their investment by integrating existing applications as well as plug-in new solutions.

At this point, however, integration is a sticky issue. Although technology chiefs want their solution to come with open APIs and adherence to industry standards such as SNMP and Corba so they have the option of doing the integration themselves, what they'd prefer is to see the vendors build integration hooks into their products and maintain the integration as those products are upgraded and enhanced.

What users may have to get used to is that this emerging framework market is much like an "ecosystem," says Paul Mason, VP of infrastructure software research at International Data Corp. In this case, he says, the ecosystem leader lines up technology partners. "Once people latch onto a leader they'll have to adapt as the ecosystem leader adapts." At the same time, he says, the leader has to manage its relationships with its technology partners. "At that point it's a mutually reinforcing process; one cannot live without the other," says Mason.

The two main contenders for ecosystem leadership are Computer Associates and Tivoli, Mason says. Tivoli started with a framework, the Tivoli Management Environment (TME 10), and has been adding features and functions, while CA started with the Unicenter integrated suite of systems management products and has been taking steps to open the product, first by publishing APIs and delivering a software developers kit (SDK) last year, and more recently by unbundling the Unicenter TNG Framework from Unicenter TNG.

Tivoli has the larger "ecosystem" today, encouraging partners from the get-go to integrate with the framework. CA got a later start, but in July announced partnerships with a number of platform providers and ISVs in conjunction with the Framework debut.

Also contending in the systems management framework space are Hewlett-Packard's HP OpenView and Bull Information Systems' ISM OpenMaster.

However, Meer cautions that these and other systems management products "are not an apples to apples comparison." He says IT must "look under every rock" when evaluating solutions and choose one that fits the business.

IT leaders evaluating such products need to normalize feature/functionality by factoring in the cost of implementation, the cost of platforms it will run on, and the amount of work required to reinstrument existing applications, says Meer. They must also determine if the company needs a niche solution, or a platform to build the business around.

What made sense for SCC was Unicenter TNG, which the company recently selected to handle three major areas. The first is consolidated network monitoring. The second is managing the computer hosts at the hardware and operating system levels, for information such as available disk space, cache rates, and high-water marks for CPUs. And the third and probably most critical area, says Meer, is monitoring the information flow and processes of the NDSC.