Forrester: - Making Leaders Successful Every Day

Data center automation (DCA) products have evolved from basic provisioning and software distribution tools into powerful platforms that govern many aspects of data center operations. While many products share a common foundation in configuration management, DCA products have broadened their reach into asset management, compliance auditing, and policy-based automation. As a result, firms are confronted with a wide array of DCA products with overlapping capabilities — particularly in configuration management. Forrester expects that vendors of large system management suites will integrate the whole range of DCA capabilities over the next two years — but at the cost of proprietary integration and point-product vendors that must compete with these large DCA suites.