Technology infrastructure is the backbone of today's business operations. IT plays a critical role in building and managing that infrastructure and keeping it performing at desired levels of quality. No surprise therefore that enterprise IT organizations make sizable investments in tools and technology that enable them to monitor and manage every component of the infrastructure that supports business critical services. While there is a surfeit of tools offered by network and systems management (NSM) vendors, few pass muster to meet the demanding requirements of scale and breadth of technology support required by today's enterprises. Consequently, analyst research and media reports point out that a majority of NSM projects never complete successful deployment.

This white paper examines the following:

• The organizational drivers for considering NSM mega-suite replacement
• The required attributes of an alternative 21st century NSM solution that fuel productivity and budget
• The drawbacks of NSM mega-suite ownership arising from legacy and proprietary architectures and acquisition led growth resulting in overlapping functionality
• Cumulative cost of ownership of an NSM mega-suite