One of the (at least theoretical) advantages of SaaS is that it allows smaller, more cash-strapped users to gain access to the same resources – or extremely comparable ones – that to date only big businesses have been able to afford. In the latest, very practical incarnation of that idea it should now become possible for even the smallest SaaS vendor, running on a tiny managed service somewhere in the corner of a far-distant datacentre, to legitimately boast: Service Managed by IBM Tivoli.
To the cognoscenti, of course, Tivoli is one of the biggest of big names in the management of very large and complex on-premise systems infrastructures. As part of IBM it has had to have capabilities as close to `bomb-proof’ as it is possible to get.
So to find that IBM is now starting to shower it down from the Cloud onto the small and mid-sized business marketplace is to see a demonstration of what makes SaaS so potential useful. To be fair, it is not all of Tivoli that is being en-clouded, not by a long chalk. But then again, the target market is hardly likely to know much about a z/Series mainframe system even if it formally introduced itself (which it probably could do).
To start with, then, all IBM is offering is a web-based service that checks the operational status of on-premise systems of between 25 and 500 nodes. There are two basic services available on a per-node/per-month subscription basis, plus an historical performance, capability and trends analysis service available for a bit more.
The idea isn’t new, of course; HP has been offering a more comprehensive SaaS-based systems management service for some time, but this has been aimed more at its own customer base rather than the world-at-large. But then again, HP does have a large and diverse customer base.
Indeed, HP is one of the largest suppliers of kit for use in datacentres, exactly the type of places where these days you will find the SaaS vendors basing themselves, so it is quite likely that some of those SaaS brands will have at least part of their management regime provided by a SaaS service rather than an installed on-premise solution. And that is the way it should be, and the way that it will certainly grow to be. I know that people like NetSuite CEO, Zach Nelson, feels that it should now be a `mark of faith’ (Ok, an over-statement but you know what I mean) that SaaS vendors utilise SaaS services in the running of their businesses.
It makes sense too; would you trust a SaaS vendor that admitted it didn’t want to use other SaaS services or, worse still, its own SaaS service?
So having high quality systems management tools start appearing as online, on-demand services is a good sign, and the more service providers that uses them, the better the overall services are likely to get. And the more that service providers – particularly the datacentre service providers – utilise it the more the likes of IBM and HP will put best of breed management tools into the Cloud arena.
Better management tools will attract other vendors, with other best of breed solutions, into the cloud to ride alongside the new vendors offering new services. Some of those current best of breed apps will, it is fair to say, fall by the wayside, but others will make it through, giving a far wider set of users a far richer and comprehensive set of services to work with.
So, management systems may seem mundane for many users – the domain of the pointy heads and nerds – but having it available in the Cloud is going to make life a whole lot better and a whole lot richer for everyone else.
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