Capacity management software is a compromise. The definition of a compromise: nobody gets what they want

Imagine a fair system to vote for painting your office.  There are four choices: red, blue, green and yellow.  Three people share the office and rate their preferences as follows:

Preference	Color	Person 1	Person 2	Person 3	Total
1st	Red	1	3	4	8
2nd	Blue	3	4	1	8
3rd	Green	4	1	3	8
4th	Yellow	2	2	2	6

Choices are rated accordingly and totalled. The lowest total is on average the most preferred option, so the winning color is announced: yellow.  All three people groan: no one wanted a yellow office!

That’s the nature of a compromise – it can mean that no one actually gets what they want. 

Any packaged software is a compromise.  No packaged software meets every requirement of every user.  Packaged software by its nature attempts to provide the features that meet the needs of a particular segment of the market for that product.  This could be the most numerous, the most vociferous or a host of other criteria.  The underlying fact however is that not everyone will get everything that they want.

Capacity management software is a form of packaged software.  Vendors do their best to meet as many needs of their clients as they can, but it is impossible for any one product to meet all of a client’s needs.  It can be a simple thing: one client looks at memory first, another at CPU first.  Each would like their most common selection to be at the top of the menu.  It can be more complicated: you gather your data from IBM’s Tivoli for all systems and pass that data to your capacity solution, except for Application X which is not supported by Tivoli.  For Application X, you need another data collection method.

IT infrastructure gets ever more complex.  We had mainframes, we went distributed, virtualized chunks of our world and now we are putting some of it into the Cloud.  Having a product that can manage the capacity of all of that, out of the box, gets ever less likely.  Constraints on implementing IT infrastructure support software such as capacity management get ever more stringent, for example the need to meet tighter security obligations.

Having solutions for tasks such as capacity management that allow you to build on core facilities and tailor the package to meet your own needs are now ever more important. 

We have a very flexible solution here at Metron that can be used out of the box to meet the majority of your needs and constraints.  For those awkward areas that need a custom solution however, we have a variety of ways in which we can adapt our core facilities to ensure your problem children are cared for.

We’d be interested to hear about what challenges in this area you have had to overcome, whatever package you have started out with, so we can check we are on the right track.

Now, back to staring at my yellow office walls and deciding what to do next……

Andrew Smith

Chief Sales & Marketing Officer