EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

Nothing drives an IT industry analyst more nuts then when a term is repeatedly misused for marketing purposes. DCIM certainly falls into this category. In the recently release EMA Radar Report on Data Center Infrastructure Management, we looked at hundreds of products claiming to be DCIM solutions, but identified only ten (that’s right … 10!) that could reasonably lay claim to that distinction.

Desktop PCs and laptops are the backbone of business profitability.  Yes, yes … I know … last week I raved about the rising mobile device revolution – but that transition is still a few years off.  Today the PC desktop remains king in enabling enterprise workforce productivity, and, in fact, organizational success and ongoing profitability is tied at the hip to desktop and laptop performance in most modern enterprises.  Unfortunately, management of these endpoints persists in being a nightmare to perform.  Consider your own home PC environment – how much time do you spend on installations, patch updates, and performance improvements, not to mention repairs from system crashes, malware intrusion, and software incompatibilities.  Now extend these challenges to hundreds or thousands or even millions of endpoints, and you get some sense of the daunting task facing IT managers.

When designing the EMA Radar Report, I was unaware of this video of Gideon Gartner answering a question about the Gartner Magic Quadrant.  I only learned of this on twitter last week. Gideon is asked what he would do different if doing the Magic Quadrant today. His answer…he would use spider diagrams.  This is exactly what we do in the EMA Radar Report. First published in December 2009, we have published five reports to date with five pending for the first half of 2011 (see the list at the bottom of this post).