Over the past few months, we have been working on a performance management roadmap. An industry-level view of how enterprises have viewed performance management, what they are doing with it today, and where it's going in the future. I wanted to share some early thoughts we've had in how we are characterizing the problem and the types of solutions the market is going to need in the future to solve the problems facing us.
In 2008, according to various industry analysts, the market for monitoring, service level management, event management, and performance management systems is approximately $2B. That’s a lot of money to be spent EVERY year on these solutions. Aggregate collection of all licenses across all years purchased makes for a pretty large number. To give you a sense of the size, $2B is half the spend in United States junior colleges each year, it’s larger than the total spend on global charter buses, and 1/5th of the size of the metal ore mining industry.
If companies are spending $2B / year on these systems – and it’s growing – then this feels like a market where the problems that have been set out to be solved are not solved. Essentially, monitoring is not a solved problem.
What is the problem then? Or more importantly, the goal?
“Source the root cause of any issue, whether it has happened, is happening, or will happen, and then prevent the issue from repeating.”
Seems simple enough and a goal that most people can understand and agree with. What’ the roadmap for achieving this? We’ve crafted The Performance Roadmap. We've visualized this here:
We’ve broken down the performance roadmap into three categories:
1) Historical. Which has primarily been dominated by systems that focus on WHAT metrics are collected and how they are collected.
2) The Present. Which is going to be dominated by systems that focus on ORGANIZATION and MANAGEABILITY of the mass of metrics collected.
3) The Future. Which is going to be dominated by systems that deliver INTELLIGENT DERIVATIVES on the environments under management.
In future blog posts, I’m going to elaborate more on where we think the problems of massive metrics, organization, manageability and intelligence live. Interim, I’d love to collect feedback and input from the community on the goal statement identified above. Are those the right goal posts? Are we attempting to solve the right problem?
Looking forward to chatting.
Tyler Jewell
Sr. Director, PM
Quest Software, Inc.