Who manages the management software?
Shimon Hason, CEO of Intigua, dropped by to introduce me to both his company and a concept they're developing — software defined operations. He stressed that today's management tools are fragmented and complex, making it difficult to align IT with business requirements. He believes that it is important for organizations to move towards tools that solve management problems for the entire lifecycle of workloads.
Virtualizing everything leads to a large portfolio of management tools
We discussed the fact that as organizations increasingly place functions into virtual environments, that usually means that they have to rely on an ever-growing list of management tools — including tools that manage virtual machines, virtual access, virtual networking, virtual storage as well as individual tools that manage each application. This herd of tools means that companies need to have on staff experts in each tool. Moving towards a software defined environment is being hindered by this complexity.
Intigua believes everything needs to be automated
Intigua believes that everything needs to be fully automated. Their approach is to create capsules that contain management domains so that they can be automated according to policies, to the most optimal use of systems and workloads and to reduce the requirement for expertise in each and every tool.
Snapshot analysis
While I found the discussion interesting, I had concerns at first about adding yet another layer of technology between IT staff members and the work being done by the company's applications. It seemed counterintuitive that adding another layer would make things work better and more efficiently.
TechRepublic
The longer we spoke about how current customers were using the technology, the more sense the whole concept made. It would be nice to have a layer of technology that could monitor and operate everything regardless of what tools were used to actually manage any given product or workload.
I began to see similarities between the things Intigua was saying and things said by people from IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, HP and many others about unifying management so that underlying layers of technology could be easier to use and support. After thinking about it more, it seams that Puppet Labs' and Intigua's comments were the most similar.
This means that Intigua needs to work on refining its messages to draw a strong distinction between what they're doing and what competitors offer.
Intigua is a young company and appears innovative and interesting. We'll just have to watch to see how the company evolves over time.