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One of the most dramatic innovations in the infrastructure management marketplace in the last five years is the rise of Network Change and Configuration Management (NCCM) as a strategic requirement. In the past, network configuration management had been relegated to a pure-play element management approach associated with the “care and feeding” of new network device assets.
However, NCCM in 2008 is helping to reshape infrastructure management toward a more strategic, process-aligned discipline with a wide range of benefits. These include supporting service integrity and service performance, minimizing risk, optimizing security and compliance, managing network assets more holistically, and achieving what in the past were undreamed of new levels of operational efficiency.
Moreover, recent EMA research and consulting dialog consistently reinforces the fact that NCCM solutions provide significant savings in capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenditures (OpEx), reduce total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) due to operational gains in managing network assets, and lead to a more cohesive approach to lifecycle asset management.
This white paper will focus on the strong values that NCCM can bring to reliability, risk and cost management, as well as some of its powerful operational and lifecycle asset values. In doing so, this report will draw strongly from EMA research conducted in 2007 on real world requirements and adoption patterns, as well as EMA’s ongoing research into available technologies and products in the NCCM marketplace.
This report will also introduce the CA SPECTRUM Network Configuration Manager (NCM) as a distinctive leadership offering in the NCCM arena. CA SPECTRUM NCM offers cohesive functionality for integrated service, fault and configuration management. EMA will examine the implications and benefits of such an integrated solution, while looking at some of its broader advantages in the areas of risk management, operational automation and asset management. Finally, this assessment will place CA SPECTRUM NCM in industry context – as an innovator with unique values for network operations and IT as a whole.
Market Requirements are Taking IT Management to a Tipping Point
IT organizations that run as standalone overhead without clear business accountability are becoming a thing of the past. This is true across all markets – SMB through enterprise, public sector, and service provider. The reasons for this have a great deal to do with macroeconomic trends and business competitiveness. IT services can now contribute to business and operational efficiency and help businesses reach new markets, buyers and partners. They can directly generate revenue and so become a business service in and of themselves – and this accelerating trend goes far beyond Internet-centric businesses. IT services can even help to create new business models and new ways of doing business.
A look at macroeconomic and competitive pressures across each sector is worth mentioning:
Enterprises can enhance productivity, achieve new revenue targets, reach new buyers and partners, and even create new business models by leveraging their IT infrastructure and its services. In parallel, many enterprise business environments are becoming more service provider-like themselves – especially within industries such as healthcare and financial services, which increasingly depend on centralized IT expertise to support new modes of business operations.
Governmental IT services are changing the face of how and where state agencies work interactively with each other, how they interact with federal agencies, and how and where the state reaches out to new constituencies.
Service providers are facing increasingly steeper competition for customer loyalty, and hence to demonstrate QoE (Quality of Experience) as it is becoming increasingly easy to switch providers. Moreover, service providers are also facing new types of competition, such as from cable companies and even Internet companies like Google and Yahoo. And finally, if they don’t want to be just one more component in someone else’s solutions, service providers have to become more varied and application centric in their service offerings, which in turn places extreme pressure on them to manage their networks cohesively in support of the delivery of application and other business services.
One factor behind this trend is the sheer growth in quantity and type of new IT services, such as Web Services, Web 2.0, VoIP and wireless. The volume and heterogeneity of new services that depend increasingly on network transport is enough to put network managers in all sectors in a state of alert. EMA research (Figure 1) shows that most enterprise, public sector and service provider environments expect to provide a wide range of application services for their constituencies.
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