YEAR OF THE ITTY BITTY BOOTH

If ever there was a time for certain independent software vendors to ante up for a booth, this could be it. Budgets are as tight as Marlon Brando's pajamas — that's no secret. But service providers do have needs. They have legitimate and growing concerns about security. They have made a lot of noise about expanding their managed services offerings. And they are getting serious about service quality.

So vendors whose shingles even hint at solutions for these issues should snatch up some of the newly discounted floor space at Supercomm and hang those shingles high. It could be their year.

The opportunity presented by managed services won't go only to small solutions providers, but also to the large players with broad product portfolios. Agilent CEO Ned Barnholt said demand has already begun. “We have seen it,” he said. “For service providers to build a service around managing customer networks, it will be very critical that they have the tools and software solutions to do it efficiently.”

Security and managed service don't always go hand-in-hand, but as carriers roll out their managed services portfolios, they are counting on security being part of them. Hand-wringing over security threats such as worms and viruses inspired 79% of local area network managers to spend more on security hardware and software in the second quarter than on wireless LANs, IP telephony and videoconferencing combined, according to recent data from research firm In-Stat/MDR. Those managers also said they would maintain their budgets in subsequent quarters.

This is encouraging for security vendors, but really significant to service providers in light of recent data from Sage Research that suggests a window of opportunity in carriers' pursuit of the managed services market. Sage found that while more than four out of five enterprises are satisfied with the reliability of current firewall solutions, fewer were satisfied with the installation process, and only 52% were satisfied with customer service and ongoing support.

“That's below average,” said Chris Neal, research director at Sage Research. “So if vendors aren't providing the level of support their customers want, it could be a way for service providers to get in and provide that support.”

One of the things service providers will need in order to deliver better support is management systems that give customers a view into the service levels they are receiving, which also spells opportunity for vendors. Neal said enterprises want the provider to be responsible for the service, but they also want to see what's going on. “And today, the user interfaces are not where they need to be to give customers that comfort level,” Neal said. “They want to see the cook cooking in the kitchen before they order.”

While service providers shop for solutions that offer customers visibility into their proverbial kitchens, they also want solutions to keep those kitchens clean. Solutions provided by companies such as CoManage — which may not be hanging the same 60-foot shingle they displayed two years ago at Supercomm — are nonetheless the kind of niche application that carriers will take a chance on, particularly if they are going to expose their network to the public.

CoManage will introduce the latest version of its TrueSource data integrity product, which, in addition to its core functions of network and service discovery, assimilation and reconciliation, adds something called “discrepancy analytics” for managing the accuracy of databases over time and prioritizing the correction of groups of discrepancies. It's a niche solution that has the potential to make other solutions perform better — and carriers already have all kinds of other solutions they don't need to replace.

Karl Whitelock, OSS program manager for Stratecast Partners, said large service providers absolutely must start thinking this way. “Their whole business mentality for years has been to deliver vanilla support for all their customers no matter what size,” he said. “This lets them give the customer the specialized care they probably wouldn't be able to any other way.”