The sneaker net has never been anyone's favorite efficiency model. Fishback considers the two projects necessary complements to each other. In an ideal world, all those systems management tools would happily pass alarms and status information back and forth. But that is not the case. While some standards are in place, there likely always will be some discord among the many vendors occupying ESM niches, says Meta Group's Byrnes.
Vendors compete by differentiating their products.
Now all you have to do is get Sun and HP to agree on what a server is, what memory is, how memory is located and what a 'processor busy' message means. That will not happen. According to Mistr, one of the biggest mistakes a company can make when undertaking ESM is to assign the project on a part-time basis to IS workers whose primary duties lie elsewhere. At the beginning of the project, Fishback pulled together a team of workers dedicated to the ESM project from a variety of IS functions. The group formally coalesced at the beginning of this year into the dedicated ESM team.