The days of referring to the leading management software vendors as the "big four" are numbered, industry watchers predict, as challengers to BMC, CA, HP and IBM now include a variety of competitors, ranging from starts-up to software giants such as Microsoft and Oracle.
Microsoft has set its sights on becoming a dominant enterprise management vendor, but experts and users say it needs to define the scope of its goals, improve the platform, and prove it can be the caretaker of non-Windows systems.
Hardware makers in the PC industry have been working towards making the lives of IT managers easier in recent years by ensuring machines can be diagnosed and fixed more easily, especially in times of crisis.