A few Facts about NMS Systems

NMS stands for Network Management Systems or Network Monitoring Systems, I've even seen one website that said it stands for Network Management and Security.

In any case, NMS is (and if it's not it should be) a major part of the organizational IT. This systems allow the IT team to gave centralized management over the Networks Performance, Failures and Security, Including Asset Management. These Systems have been around for about 15 years, but analysts and consultants tell me the only know the market seems to be showing some real interest in these systems.

Everyone are willing to spend money in order to save more money. NMS allows you to save on downtime costs. An average large Enterprise spends around 30$ Million on downtime (in direct and overhead costs), that's around 2.2% of the revenues! While an advanced Multi-Vendor and Multi-Technology NMS costs only 300,000$. That's why I would expect CIO's to push their organizations into investing in NMS.

The top high-end commercial systems are considered to be:

• IBM Tivoli
• CA Unicenter
• BMC Patrol
• HP OpenView
  

There are also some Open Source Solutions, like:
• Nagois
• Open NMS
• Ground Work
• Zenoss
• Pandora
• NeDi

If you read Hebrew, There's an upcoming PCON issue on NMS.