Market Projections For 2010: IT Management Software

The past decade has seen a considerable improvement in IT management software, especially where operational effectiveness is concerned. However, the economic downturn as well as new technologies such as virtualization and new thinking such as green IT will force IT to optimize its costs beyond operational efficiency in the coming decade. To achieve this, IT organizations will have to manage themselves as fiscally responsible entities globally, like any other enterprise and service provider. This will bring up a new set of tools aimed at global decision support. In the meantime, operational solutions such as infrastructure management will become increasingly commoditized, forcing the larger vendors to seek revenue in new value propositions. Forrester believes that this will have a strong impact on the market for IT management software solutions and, by the end of the decade, will move the center of gravity of this market squarely into the global management and optimization of IT resources. To prepare for these changes, Forrester has created a new taxonomy of IT management software categories that we will use from now on to report on the IT management software market.