Open Source and Appliance Software Delivery Open Up New Worlds for Small and Medium Enterprise IT

I just read that 95% of IT folks are happy with their jobs.

But when you start to scratch the surface, a lot (87% in fact) of IT people are still working nights and weekends.

Luckily, I bet the percentage of happy people in Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) IT will be increasing, and the percentage of people working overtime will be decreasing.

Why?

Because enterprise-grade IT management software is finally making its way down to the mid-market.

Basically, I see two major driving factors.

Open Source

First, we see a lot of open source products that are carving out territory that used to be dominated by the big expensive IT management firms like HP, CA, IBM and BMC (sometimes called “The Big 4”). Previously, smaller companies would either have to shell out the big bucks to purchase a solution by one of these firms designed for a larger enterprise (and deal with the accompanying feature bloat and inflexibility) or try to have the IT staff monitor their network manually, an arduous process. Open source allows companies to use less expensive, but still robust, products to do things like network monitoring that used to require a lot of time, money, and energy on the part of the IT staff. GroundWork is good example of this in the IT monitoring space.

Appliance-based Software Delivery

For SME’s that do decide they want to go the proprietary route, there is also a growing trend for proprietary software to be delivered via an appliance. Forget Software as a Service (especially for IT Management). Many IT folks in mid-market companies are beginning to realize they now can get some pretty heavy duty IT management software that’s installed on an appliance inside their firewall. The advantage of appliance-based delivery is that it’s easy to use, and because support is cheaper, the cost is cheaper than traditional software. KACE and Levanta are two companies that come to mind that are tackling this space.

Whether through open source, appliance-based delivery or other distribution methods, I look forward to seeing my IT friends a lot more at weekend BBQ’s.