Infrastructure Management, the maxim is virtualization and commoditization

IT enterprises see this as the only way forward to reduce costs while preserving the previous gains made in IT management.

IT organizations of very large and large enterprises are in the process of transforming into internal IT enterprises. These internal IT enterprises will leverage internal and external alternatives to better manage IT services and the delivery of IT services through IT infrastructure optimization where cost Vs value will be a major rider.

It is in this context that infrastructure management is fast becoming an economic issue rather than technical, of course with pre-defined SLAs.  Virtualization and commoditization of IT infrastructure is the anthem for these internal IT enterprises and they see this as the only way forward to reduce costs while preserving the previous gains made in IT management.

By the same coin, application performance management is now an integrated suite of products that includes end user experience management and database performance monitoring.

Running parallel to this integration of adjacent categories, new categories have appeared that will support what Forrester is calling "IT management software 2.0." Service catalog, financial management, integrated planning of data center resources (including the green IT movement), and contract management have all become part of the business management of IT.  Forrester believes that IT management software solutions will use a variety of delivery means such as platform integration, software-as-a-service (SaaS), cloud, or bundling into a hardware appliance. According to Forrester the IT management software taxonomy too has changed over the year from 2009 to 2010. What used to be network management and server management is today infrastructure management. DBMS management, application management and end-user experience management are all bucketed in Application performance and business transaction management.