When will the time come when someone will offer systems management for $30-100 a month? There’ll be a website you go to, sign up for an account, enter your credit card number, and download a simple agent to install on your network. Then, you’ll just log into the site to check up on things. As needed, you’ll download more pieces of software — e.g., for receiving SNMP traps and other things that won’t fly over the Internet unencrypted.
That is, instead of being huge, “enterprise software” platforms, systems management will be as easy as downloading my favorite SaaS thick-app/website combo, the flickr uploadr and drag-and-dropping stuff on it with a few key-strokes and clickity-clicks. You’ll have to go to the central website, and you won’t control all the precious data. It’ll go down sometimes, and you’ll be totally lost for a day or two.
But you know what? Even $100 x 12 months is just $1,200. Compare that to the thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions you’d spend on traditional systems management software.
The last hurdle for systems management SaaS is a collective shift in the domain’s mind-set, for both the customers and the vendors: customer fear loosing control, and while vendors have the technology to deliver the systems management as a service, they need to go ahead from their customers before they’ll make such a dramatic switch, taking an equally big risk.
Of course, this is the nut of Christensen disruption, which, by definition, bodes ill for the incumbents.
If only you knew a group of people with experience in programming and creating system management and monitoring software.
The hurdles I see in this is the tier of business you would have to go after and their mindset on privacy and security. You would have to go after businesses that not only have mission critical software and servers that need to be monitored, but are small enough that they cannot afford or justify the bigger solutions. But they have to be big enough that they either host their own servers, or co-lo at a datacenter. Very small business are more likely to rent server space that would be monitored by the service provider, and not have access to install that kind of software. As for security and privacy, I think you will find that the more mission critical a service is the more security conscious the biz is likely to be.
I personally like the idea of a hosted solution, but I think there will be a sweet spot in the market where you offer less detailed monitoring to limit the intrusiveness of the software that needs to be installed ( if any), and belie any security concerns.
I don’t think you start by selling this to end-users or system owners (people that need computers but don’t want to admin them). You sell it to SIs building systems for those end-users and customers who want to cut the operational code overhead out of their delivery. Because in truth, writing operations code kills margin for the builder and it can be hard to get the end-users or system owners to stump up against the risk until they have been at the wrong end of a highly visable systems outage.
Btw, nagios: http://www.nagios.org/
I think Bill’s comment fits well with ScottD!’s: the people who could benefit the most out of the gates are those who need systems management not as their primary piece of software, but as support software for whatever they’re really selling.
Indeed, that’s kind of the whole magic of systems management software: the whole market exists to fill the gap of vendors who didn’t put management features (or rich enough features) in their products. That is, IT is running SQL Server, Oracle, SAP, Notes, etc., and wants to do more management and monitoring than those apps come with natively. So, they go out and get some systems management software to fill the void.
As ever, in a market that’s yet to be commoditized, there’s a good short to medium term win for whoever can move that market closer to being commoditized. It’s sort of like putting your neck in the noose of spirling prices yourself, but if you can get someone to shoot the rope out at the last minute, you can go round up some bills elsewhere while you’re enjoying the big pile of cash you got from commoditizing the market.
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