IDC Pegs IBM, HP as Juggernauts in Performance and Availability Management

Published: September 11, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the big areas in the systems management software space is the subset of the market that has to do with managing the performance and availability of servers and operating systems. It may be hard to believe, but when you add up all of the data centers in the world, according to IDC they spent $4.1 billion on such software in 2005.

That is an increase in sales of 6.7 percent, which is considerably larger than the growth in the server market itself, attesting to the fact that management of servers is in many ways a bigger problem than getting server capacity. The amazing thing is that companies consumed $51.3 billion in servers in 2005, and they then had to spend another $4.1 billion to keep these servers and the other ones they have on site working well.

In any event, as you might expect, the two dominant server makers, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, dominate the performance and availability management software space. IDC reckons that in 2005, IBM sold $759 million in Tivoli and related mainframe products--including many from its acquisition of the former Candle. HP came in second in this space, with $538 million in sales, and its OpenView products that relate to performance and availability management, while working on mainframes, are sold mostly on Unix, Windows, and now Linux platforms. In third place in this market was CA, with $493 million in sales and in the fourth position was BMC Software, with $418 million in sales.