TheInfoPro

Written by Marco Coulter, Research Director for Storage

This Thursday’s TIP is based on a real-time update extracted with 71 in-depth interviews complete. Last Thursday’s TIP, we looked at 2011 budgets. This time, we look at how vendors will experience the closing quarter of the calendar year. How successful will vendors be in the Q4 CY11?

Brocade, Hewlett-Packard and EMC show the largest numbers planning spending in Q4, playing to their respective fiscal years. IBM goes against this model, with spending predominantly occurring by the end of Q2, possibly indicating overflow from the prior year coming into the first quarters of this year.

Symantec delivers evenly, with 80% spending evenly through the year. Before assuming that software delivers more balanced revenue than hardware, consider that the other listed software player, CommVault, has the lowest number of respondents indicating even spending. It is likely that Symantec sees more renewal revenue as the “gorilla” in the protection segment, while CommVault’s business is more new clients making initial commitments.

HDS goes significantly against the fiscal year “hockey stick” model. Thirty-six percent (36%) of storage professionals reviewing HDS planned their spending in Q3, well after the company’s fiscal year is concluded. HDS and NetApp look to have the least Q4 spending plans among our respondents.
Below is a table of the months that the listed companies conclude their fiscal years:
Fiscal Year End for Charted Storage Companies

March – Symantec, CommVault, HDS
April- NetApp
October – Brocade, HP
December – EMC, IBM

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Written by Peter ffoulkes, Research Director for Servers

IBM arguably leads the IT industry in succession planning, announcing Oct. 25 that Sam Palmisano would cede the role of CEO to Virginia “Ginny” Rometty in January 2012. Putting the aside the facile aphorism that “Behind every successful man is a surprised woman,” Palmisano is a hard act to follow, and Rometty has the track record to be able to do just that.

Reviewing the past two years of TheInfoPro’s server research for customer ratings of IBM across the 14 metrics by which our respondents measure vendor performance, Palmisano has delivered a solid, consistent and steadily improving set of results.

• “Lately they’ve been very strong – they went quickly from two to eight cores, with an incredible jump in performance. Quality and service are always high. But so is the price!” – server pro at a large-enterprise consumer goods/retail company
• “IBM has really stepped up for us. The customer focus has been excellent. Bringing problems and technical issues to closure has been wonderful. On the downside, IBM is still a little rigid. They still have great attention to detail.” – server pro at a large-enterprise financial services company
• “It is really reliable. Just a wonderful system. Their marketing is always pretty poor on that platform, but IBM was never a good marketer, only good scientists. It must be getting better; they’re selling a bunch to old HP customers. To attract them, it must be pricing or pricing/longevity. IBM has a better roadmap than others.” – server pro at a large-enterprise industrial/manufacturing company

We’ll be watching to see if Rometty just follows in Palmisano’s footsteps, or whether she steps up to Ginger Rogers’ fabled reputation: She could do everything Fred Astaire could do – in high heels and backward.

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Written by Daniel Kennedy, Research Director for Information Security

On Oct. 4, IBM announced the acquisition of security information and event management (SIEM) provider Q1 Labs for approximately $575 million, according to The 451 Group’s M&A KnowledgeBase. This is at least the third SIEM solution IBM will have established under its umbrella, but potentially also the most expansive solution when it comes to capturing the emerging combination of log management, network monitoring and security monitoring solution space. With this acquisition, IBM plans to create a new Security Systems division led by Q1’s current CEO, Brendan Hannigan.

Originally published as a ThursdayTIP to the respondent network of TheInfoPro. Would you like to receive all of the ThursdayTIP reports when they are fist released? Sign up here for TheInfoPro’s respondent network.

This move follows Hewlett-Packard’s acquisiton of ArcSight nearly a year ago, and precedes further consolidation in the space; NitroSecurity was also announced as being brought into Intel’s McAfee last week. With this shakeup, IBM is poised to occupy the fourth spot in SIEM market share, according to the results of respondent interviews for the Wave 14 Information Security Study. HP’s acquisiton of ArcSight makes it the de facto leader of the space, with 6% of in plan implementations also going its way. EMC’s enVision product (RSA) and Symantec round out the top of the pack.

SIEM enterprise market share, 14th security study.

The most recent information security study shows SIEM installations at a fairly mature 53% in use in enterprise environments, with 6% of respondents seeing new implementations in their short-term plans and 18% having SIEM installations on the radar in their longer-term project planning. Thirty-three percent (33%) of respondents see increased spending in 2012 on SIEM solutions, with 60% projecting a flat spend into next year.

What do respondents think of the product IBM has acquired? The trend in responses bends positive:

• “Q1 Labs’ product is very innovative.”
• “[We’ll look at] enVision, Q1 Labs, Symantec.” (In response to a question about spending plans for 2012 for SIEM solutions.)
• “We are in woeful need of consolidation. We are evaluating whether to continue on with enVision or use something new. We did a POC with Q1 Labs, or [we may] go to SecureWorks as a third party.”
• “Just had this discussion; there are others, like Q1 Labs and EMC enVision.” (In response to a question about switching off another SIEM vendor’s product.)
• “The company [Q1 Labs] is innovative. They remain fresh in terms of feature set. They are a small company, and they are subject to being swallowed up! They need to keep the system ‘capable’ at all times, especially keeping up with the patches.”

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Written by Daniel Kennedy, Research Director for Information Security

It has been eight years since a well-known technology research company declared intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDS/IPS), those sentinels at the edge of the network that scream out alerts every time they think they see bad traffic masquerading as allowed flow through the firewall, a market failure. Scoring 10th (IPS) and 16th (IDS) on the Heat Index (a relative measure of user demand) for the Wave 14 Security Study, and sitting at a healthy 70% implemented in enterprise environments, the death of IDS has been greatly exaggerated.

Originally published as a ThursdayTIP to the respondent network of TheInfoPro. Would you like to receive all of the ThursdayTIP reports when they are fist released? Sign up here for TheInfoPro’s respondent network.

Market share, intrusion detection systems.

Intrusion detection systems stand at 70% in use with 15% of respondents reporting implementations in their plans. Intrusion prevention systems are at 60% implemented, with 13% stating that implementations are in their plans. Spending holds steady, with 71% maintaining their spending level and 17% anticipating a greater level of 2011 spending. The sweet spot in pricing and implementation falls under $100,000, with 30% spending between $100,000 and $500,000 on their implementations.

Two of the problems identified nearly a decade ago, cost and throughput, continue to be an issue according to user narratives:

• “IDS/IPS in-line – the price point to have a certain level of performance is very high.”
• “Opex this year as we move from NIPS to NIDS – it’s a bandwidth issue. We’re increasing bandwidth pipes, and IPS is less effective and creates problems. Moving to IDS and go on alerts vs. blocking.”

The original postulate that many of the functions of the IDS would be subsumed into other edge equipment including the firewall also still holds water for some IT managers:

• “I’m not spending anything directly on IPS/IDS – it’s in the firewall.”

And a number of firms have moved to managed services offerings:

• “We have a package deal with IBM for security – vulnerability management, NIDS/NIPS, etc. – and that’s about $3 million a year.”

All that said, the product vertical is still going strong in enterprises, with winners and losers being enumerated as we continue to study the results of the Wave 14 Security Study:

• “Since TippingPoint was acquired by 3Com, then HP, there have been some support issues.”
• “I like the Sourcefire IDS.”
• “I really like Sourcefire! They have an event classification within an IDS product. Compared to their competitors, they use open source rules. TippingPoint or Cisco, you can’t do that. Sourcefire has a great management console as well. I can’t think of any weakness since they fixed the backup issues.”

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Written by Sean Hackett, Research Director for Cloud

Originally published as a ThursdayTIP to the respondent network of TheInfoPro. Would you like to receive all of the ThursdayTIPs the minute they are released on a complimentary basis? Then join TheInfoPro’s respondent network.

When we asked interviewees what the leading inhibitor to cloud adoption (SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS) was, the top response was security, right? Nope. In fact, security came in fourth, with only 13% saying it was among their top three inhibitors. According to our results, change/learning (52%) and complexity (32%) were the top two responses. So what does this mean? To us, it signals that companies are really getting tactical when thinking about the external cloud and therefore no longer answering with the default security answer. And it also means good things for the professional services community.

Early pie-in-the-sky cloud thinking (pun intended) suggested that the cloud would become the great integrator: just swipe a credit card and instant whatever. Not so fast! The reality is that the use of technologies like virtualization and external delivery models like SaaS and IaaS represents significant challenges and often increases complexity. For example, governance models fracture the more you use external cloud services. In addition, processes get more and more fragmented as you mix and match on-premise and off-premise cloud services. And what if you create a customer record in Salesforce.com and also want that information to be reflected in your legacy SAP ERP system? Not so easy.

As we have seen in the past, most notably with the ERP explosion of the late ’90s, the combination of increased change and complexity serves as a great driver of professional service revenue. As a result, the traditional consulting/systems integrators like IBM Global Services, Accenture and HP IT Services, which started out with private cloud acceleration services, are now ramping up their hybrid cloud-consulting services. Of course, both cloud vendors and service providers, like VMware and Verizon, both have sizable professional services organizations. And pure-play consulting firms like Cloud Technology Partners (started by Chris Greendale, former co-founder of Cambridge Technology Partners) and HyperStratus are both enjoying early success. We fully expect that the number and size of professional services projects to rise significantly, especially during the public cloud’s early goings.

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