Interestingly, the absence of this capability in early SNMP platforms from then-market leaders such as SunNet Manager and HP OpenView discouraged some large users from implementing those platforms and left the door open for new platform players, such as Cabletron's Spectrum, which are now among the market's top sellers. Large organizations also are relying on platform vendors to provide systems that can process large amounts of data very quickly and can support larger numbers of operators. IBM's Systems Monitor and HP's Tornado Release 1 are examples of recent platform enhancements designed to reduce the load on the SNMP workstation and increase the number of operators that each workstation can support. When SNMP-based management platforms first hit the market in the late 1980s, the problem was that they could not gather enough information to present a full view of the entire enterprise. Thus, a critical requirement for today's platforms is the ability not only to gather systems and network data, but to manage it effectively.
Most large organizations employ many individuals to handle the management task.
Filtering may be handled by many different criteria, and it is important to select a management system that fits the operator paradigm in the organization. In some cases, organizations have divided the management domains by protocol or by data type. A third key issue is the ability to provide some form of local management capability to reduce the workload on the enterprise management platform. There are many approaches to this requirement. Some LAN vendors, such as Novell and Microsoft, offer direct interfaces between their local management systems and the SNMP-based platform.