SaaS is disrupting the IT management software market

Forrester Research (Nasdaq: FORR) claim SaaS based tools are disrupting the IT management software market. The link to the report plus a couple of other reports relevant to IT Asset Management are below:

• How Big Is SaaS In IT Management Software?, November 17, 2008

“Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is disrupting the IT management software market. Incumbent software vendors are setting up new business units and adding SaaS offerings to existing portfolios; managed service providers are repositioning their offerings to leverage the trend; and new pure-play SaaS operators are extending their success by taking advantage of product churn in various established vendors’ service and asset management customer bases. Forrester has developed a market forecast model for IT management SaaS that shows that SaaS will grow from making up just over 1% of the $18 billion IT management software market in 2008 to 10% by 2013, by which time many of the brand SaaS providers could be well established. Strategy professionals at IT management software vendors should therefore be planning now to compete in this segment in the medium term. Long term, the more general trend toward SaaS will reduce the total IT management software market by cutting the number of enterprise environments to be managed.”

• The IT Asset Management Software Market, June 8, 2007

“The IT asset management (ITAM) software market is a high-growth segment within the IT management software market — thanks to increased buyer attention and energized vendors recognizing that ITAM is a strong leadership project in new business opportunities. The “big four” vendors — BMC Software, CA, HP, and IBM — are all now equipped to compete for ITAM business, but there is also a rich seam of midtier vendors that are able to win ITAM business by being more agile and promoting a better time-to-production than the larger solutions. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is looming over this market; it will transform the market from a software business to a services one. ITAM vendors must recognize that ITAM is a business application project and that they must sell it differently than the traditional system management tools. “

• Knowledge Management For Business Service Management – You Need An Asset Database And A CMDB October 16, 2007

“Forrester sees an effective IT asset management (ITAM) system as a prerequisite for establishing business service management. The reason is simple: If you don’t know your IT estate, you cannot build and support sophisticated service levels. Nor can you record accurate financials and establish a financial chargeback system for the services. Underlying many ITAM solutions is a data repository known as a configuration management database (CMDB). But the CMDB is an application that, perhaps leveraging an effective ITAM system, maps the linkages between business services, their metrics, and the configuration items (CIs) being maintained by an IT infrastructure. Forrester believes that the implementation of a CMDB is a key next step after IT asset management is established; the CMDB is used to provide the logical and physical picture of how these assets are connected to the business services or applications of a business.”