Gartner drop SAM Tools Magic Quadrant

A busy month as Gartner drop the SAM Tools Magic Quadrant, Ivanti & SoftwareOne both make more acquisitions, Oracle expand their tool acceptance, and VMware need a new CEO.

Gartner drop SAM Tools MQ

Gartner have decided not to continue with the Magic Quadrant for SAM Tools – replacing it instead with a less in-depth “market guide”, meaning there will no longer be any ranks or positions assigned to the various tools and so no more “top right” fighting – at least not in this category. Perhaps a new Magic Quadrant will appear in time – one that looks to combine SAM tools, SaaS management, and IaaS management for example.

Will this have an impact on how you, or those within your organisation, identify and select potential SAM tools?

Ivanti buy Cherwell

Ivanti announced this month (January 2021) that they’re acquiring Cherwell, further bolstering their ITAM & ITSM capabilities. Additionally, Q4 2020 saw Ivanti add Mobile Device Management (MDM) stalwart ‘MobileIron’ and also ‘Pulse Secure’ to their growing stable of products which now includes:

• Centennial
• Concorde
• Express Metrix (via Cherwell)
• LANDesk
• HEAT
• Enteo
• Absolute Software (parts of)
• Appsense
• RES Software

As with any acquisition, it will be interesting to see how the recent Mobile Iron, Pulse, and Cherwell technologies are folded into the Ivanti portfolio during 2021. Does this latest acquisition herald a renewed push into the ITAM world from Ivanti?

New Oracle 3rd party tools

Oracle have recently certified two additional third-party tools for license verification:

• Eracent
• Certero

Taking the total number of tools up to seven eight as Oracle have now additionally approved ServiceNow – the complete list can be found here.

Does this third-party expansion indicate that Oracle plan to rely less heavily on LMS when conducting audits? If so, does that signal a change in how Oracle plan to work with their customers around license compliance going forward? I’m sure we are all keen to find out!

SoftwareOne buys Google GCP partner

Continuing on the acquisition trail, SoftwareOne have announced their latest addition – Intelligence Partner, a Spanish based Google partner. This seems to indicate SoftwareOne increasing their multi-cloud IaaS capabilities – adding more Google knowledge alongside the Azure & AWS already in place. They are also adding Google Workspace (formerly known as GSuite) capabilities – for organisations that move to the cloud but don’t choose Microsoft 365.

VMware CEO moves to Intel

Pat Gelsinger is set to swap virtualisation for processors as he moves from being CEO of VMware to CEO of Intel on February 15th, 2021. As former Intel CTO, many are expecting him to help turn things around for the chip manufacturer with Intel shares rising up to 13% at one point.
During Gelsinger’s eight-year reign, VMware have moved beyond simply a virtualisation hypervisor with a portfolio that now includes security, mobility, container orchestration, and hybrid cloud offerings with the major providers as well as recent moves into the 5G arena too. I will be looking to see who fills the gap at the top of VMware and what, if anything, that might tell us about both their immediate and long-term plans.