“Worldwide System Management SaaS 2009 Vendor Analysis: Economic Crisis Creates Opportunities” is an excellent recent report by IDC.

Software as a Service started in consumer web, and then expanded into end-user-oriented business and collaboration sites (Salesforce.com, Google Apps). The question is whether the model can go from this to administrative tools so IT people can start using cloud services to manage their local on-premise systems they have.

As paradoxical as it sounds this actually makes a lot of sense because a lot of small-/medium-sized just cannot afford maintaining all the infrastructure required to run these system management solutions (servers, backups, redundancy, databases, reporting engines, patching all of that, and so on.) SaaS delivery model offers a more cost effective model and the ability to resell the product as service via service providers.

What’s more, according to an IDC survey quoted in the report most of the enterprise customers are either approving SaaS model for system management or neutral to it – which means that the model can grow beyond the SMB space.

IDC also surveyed a bunch of existing system management vendors to see their SaaS roadmap:

• CA – which created their On-Demand Business Unit and is already offering SaaS solutions for SMB disaster recovery, Project & Portfolio Management (PPM), governance, risk and compliance (GRC) service, and a network monitoring solution.
• HP – already boasting a big portfolio of SaaS solutions: ranging from project management to configuration discovery and management (CMDB). The company claims to have some 600 active SaaS customers.
• IBM – having SaaS products from their Micromuse (event monitoring) and MRO (asset management and service desk) acquisitions, and trying to adapt these and other technologies they own for private/on-premise cloud-like systems, and public cloud model (mostly for their own services).
• Microsoft – announced online IT management and security subscription services for 2010.
• Symantec – providing SMB-oriented online backup Symantec Protection Network.
• BMC Software – so far only supplying products for service providers’ operations but expected to enter the market.

And a few entrants:

• NimSoft - working on SaaS remote BSM monitoring and reporting service.
• Kaseya – offering managed service providers (MSPs) automated managed services for hardware and software discovery, inventory, patch management, user state management, monitoring, and help desk integration.
• InteQ – providing online ITIL-based Service Desk solution.

And finally the report has IDC’s predictions on which system management tools will get to the cloud first and which will probably only get accepted later in the adoption cycle.

All in all, this is a great report and a highly recommended read if you have extra $3,500 or are an IDC subscriber. Check it out here.

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SaaS, Cloud Computing, Microsoft, IBM, Analysts, Systems Management, CA, BMC, Symantec, NimSoft, Kaseya, InteQ, HP
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