Automating ManagementAutomating Management

Register HereIf IT managers can demonstrate a business case for automating their provisioning and management, that may come to seem like a worthwhile undertaking.

Today's IBM acquisition of a management company called Intelliden demonstrates the importance of automating management of large, dispersed networks. It's a topic that we'll also be covering in a VoiceCon Webinar next week, in which the focus will be on Automated Provisioning (you can register for the Webinar here).Register HereWhether it's provisioning and management of network devices or network users, automation is becoming the way to go, for some obvious reasons: It's more efficient, and therefore should save time and money in deployment; and it cuts down on configuration errors (as Terry Slattery of Chesapeake Netcraftsmen has pointed out, "The major cause of failures is fingers.").

Network management technologies are traditionally the poor stepchild in the budgetary world of IT; they're not sexy, they don't do anything that excites users--all they do is prevent things that would anger users.

But sooner or later, network management tends to come to the fore, usually when some pain threshold is breached--when deployments become so large or complicated that it's almost impossible to deal with them in the ad hoc way that IT has been doing.

One thing that I've found after a couple years of doing this blog is that certain posts become a kind of touchstone--they just ring so true and hit at just the right moment, so that you have a tendency to refer back to them to explain a lot of what you see going on. You have to be careful not to overdo this, but I think there's some justification for it.

Recently, the post that I keep going back to is Irwin Lazar's item, "Enterprise IPT Hits an Inflection Point." In that post, Irwin describes how IP phone deployments seem to be increasingly constrained by the costs of the facilities upgrades that are often required in order to deploy these IP phones. When I combine this fact with the fact that these facilities costs are by no means a secret--Gary Audin has been writing and speaking about them for years now--it seems to me that a cost which was, in the past, simply ignored, is no longer being ignored. That seems to suggest that IT decision-makers are digging ever-deeper for cost savings, into strata that up until now they didn't see as important enough to bother with.

So that's why I think automated management may have some opportunities in the coming years. I don't think the push to break new ground in cost-efficiencies is going to let up for quite some time--even if the economy improves faster than it seems to be doing. So if IT managers can demonstrate a business case for automating their provisioning and management, that may come to seem like a worthwhile undertaking.Register HereIf IT managers can demonstrate a business case for automating their provisioning and management, that may come to seem like a worthwhile undertaking.