The answer to most of the pains being experienced by organizations with large historical investments in event management, correlation, and service desk technology is not to 'rip and replace'... it is to focus on upstream AUTOMATION. I have some clients that are considering ripping out their Network Management and Event Management Systems in favor of open source or commodity-play products, or even switching to one of the other large platform players. These considerations are driven by a genuine frustration with difficulty in driving additional efficiency improvements from the systems. Indeed the systems represent a tremendous investments within their environment and with the increased focus on cost savings today, there is an understandable feeling that perhaps the cost of maintaining the platform is prohibitive.
There are several considerations I would counsel a client to make prior to moving in this direction:
1) There is significant innovation occuring above the Event Management layer - Business Process Management, Run Book Automation, etc. Unless the system is broadly adopted, it will likely not be part of the broader ecosystem of innovation. Adopting a new Event Management system may reduce maintenance costs in the short term, but it will impede your ability to drive further efficiencies into the process itself.
2) Small software companies / aggressive development teams can often deliver quick integrations that prove difficult to maintain and constrain interoperability in the future
3) Scalability is an ongoing process. Maintaining pace with growing computing complexities and taking advantage of the latest advances in application architecture require substantial capital investments. A low cost provider will have difficulty investing sufficient capital to keep up the pace of innovation.
4) In a mature technology market (like event management) low cost providers have historically either (1) been gobbled up by a larger player or (2) relegated to a niche customer segment where the particular technology market is only marginally relevant to the business, or (3) gone out of business due to being over extended without an operating model that is sustainable.
