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Gartner: Digital Transformation and IoT Drive Investment in IT Operations Management Tools

The growth of digital business and the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to drive large investment in IT operations management (ITOM) through 2020, according to Gartner, Inc. A primary driver for organizations moving to ITOM open-source software (OSS) is lower cost of ownership.

"While acceptance of OSS ITOM is increasing, traditional closed-source ITOM software still has the biggest budget allocation today. Moreover, complexity and governance issues that face users of OSS ITOM tools cannot be ignored. In fact, these issues open up opportunities for ITOM vendors. Even vendors that are late to market with ITOM functionality can compete in this area," said Laurie Wurster, Research Director at Gartner.

Gartner believes many enterprises will turn to managed ITOM or ITOM as a service (ITOMaaS) enabled by open-source technologies and provided by a third party. With OSS, vendors can provide more cost-effective and readily available ITOM functions in a scaled manner through the cloud.

Through 2020, public cloud and managed services are expected to be leveraged more often for ITOM tools, which will drive growth of the subscription business model for both cloud and on-premises ITOM. However, on-premises deployments will still be the most common delivery method. This imposes multiple challenges to incumbent ITOM vendors. First, those vendors that do not offer a cloud delivery model will face continuous cannibalization from ITOM vendors that can deliver ITOM through both cloud and on-premises.

Second, platform vendors, such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), are providing some native ITOM functionalities on their public clouds. Customers that are running workloads solely on these platforms may prefer these native features. There are also "hybrid" requirements for ITOM tools that can seamlessly manage both cloud and on-premises environments.

Future of Cloud Services and OSS for ITOM

"Customer demand has driven traditional software vendors to transform and adapt to the changing technology and competitive landscapes. Competitive pressure from cloud (SaaS offerings) and commercial OSS (offerings with a free license plus paid support) is forcing ITOM providers to move toward subscription-based business models for both cloud and on-premises deployments," said Matthew Cheung, Research Director at Gartner. "This shift will eliminate revenue growth spikes as the large upfront investment seen in traditional models is spread out over time in a repeatable revenue stream."

The influx of new, smaller ITOM vendors focused on one or two major tool categories will continue to cause disruption for large traditional suite vendors. Given this situation, traditional vendors will need to react by changing how their products fit together. More importantly, traditional vendors need to change how their solutions are sold as customers exert significant pressure to shift to offering cloud-based services.

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Gartner: Digital Transformation and IoT Drive Investment in IT Operations Management Tools

The growth of digital business and the Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to drive large investment in IT operations management (ITOM) through 2020, according to Gartner, Inc. A primary driver for organizations moving to ITOM open-source software (OSS) is lower cost of ownership.

"While acceptance of OSS ITOM is increasing, traditional closed-source ITOM software still has the biggest budget allocation today. Moreover, complexity and governance issues that face users of OSS ITOM tools cannot be ignored. In fact, these issues open up opportunities for ITOM vendors. Even vendors that are late to market with ITOM functionality can compete in this area," said Laurie Wurster, Research Director at Gartner.

Gartner believes many enterprises will turn to managed ITOM or ITOM as a service (ITOMaaS) enabled by open-source technologies and provided by a third party. With OSS, vendors can provide more cost-effective and readily available ITOM functions in a scaled manner through the cloud.

Through 2020, public cloud and managed services are expected to be leveraged more often for ITOM tools, which will drive growth of the subscription business model for both cloud and on-premises ITOM. However, on-premises deployments will still be the most common delivery method. This imposes multiple challenges to incumbent ITOM vendors. First, those vendors that do not offer a cloud delivery model will face continuous cannibalization from ITOM vendors that can deliver ITOM through both cloud and on-premises.

Second, platform vendors, such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), are providing some native ITOM functionalities on their public clouds. Customers that are running workloads solely on these platforms may prefer these native features. There are also "hybrid" requirements for ITOM tools that can seamlessly manage both cloud and on-premises environments.

Future of Cloud Services and OSS for ITOM

"Customer demand has driven traditional software vendors to transform and adapt to the changing technology and competitive landscapes. Competitive pressure from cloud (SaaS offerings) and commercial OSS (offerings with a free license plus paid support) is forcing ITOM providers to move toward subscription-based business models for both cloud and on-premises deployments," said Matthew Cheung, Research Director at Gartner. "This shift will eliminate revenue growth spikes as the large upfront investment seen in traditional models is spread out over time in a repeatable revenue stream."

The influx of new, smaller ITOM vendors focused on one or two major tool categories will continue to cause disruption for large traditional suite vendors. Given this situation, traditional vendors will need to react by changing how their products fit together. More importantly, traditional vendors need to change how their solutions are sold as customers exert significant pressure to shift to offering cloud-based services.

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...