BOULDER, Colo., Dec. 11 -- Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a leading IT management research and consulting firm, today issued its annual take on IT management trends to watch for in 2008. The 2008 trends span the entire IT management market and represent many of the technologies that will be top-of-mind for IT professionals during the coming year, including the configuration management database (CMDB), service catalogs, datacenter automation and virtualization.

"EMA is uniquely positioned to speak to these trends because of our focus on IT management and the constant interaction among our close-knit team of analysts and consultants," said Dan Twing, COO at EMA. "This interaction both helps us identify areas where technologies are converging and keeps our research grounded in the real-world issues facing enterprise IT."

EMA has identified nine hot topic areas for the IT management market in 2008 and foresees the following:

• Configuration management database (CMDB) Systems -- EMA sees continued growth in CMDB adoption among enterprise IT in 2008 and anticipates that IT professionals will increasingly link CMDB initiatives to other key IT management technologies, including the Service Catalog and Application Dependency Mapping. In 2008, EMA analysts and consultants will put a special emphasis on helping IT develop effective metrics for assessing and communicating the value and impact of CMDB deployments.

• Datacenter automation (DCA) -- In 2008, DCA will be a hot topic for medium and large enterprises as they look to the datacenter to provide strategic value, agile service delivery and competitive differentiation. EMA expects substantial growth within this rapidly changing market space as the convergence across the 15 DCA disciplines identified by EMA in its 2007 research intensifies and market consolidation accelerates.

• Virtualization -- EMA predicts that virtualization will continue to change the face of enterprise IT and business operations alike in 2008. It expects virtualization to converge with traditional markets, new technologies to drive new use cases and enterprise IT organizations to expand virtualization deployments beyond the datacenter.

• Business service management (BSM)/service level management (SLM) -- EMA believes that the differentiation between SLM and BSM will become clearer to the enterprise in 2008 as BSM emerges as a strategic approach for running IT while SLM settles in to monitor and manage more traditional IT services.

• Next-generation asset management (NGAM) -- In 2008, enterprise IT organizations will be faced with increasing demands to run IT like a business. EMA anticipates that this pressure will drive convergence between traditional lifecycle asset management and other IT management disciplines, such as service planning and service portfolio management, chargeback and demand profiling, change and configuration management and capacity planning from a cost perspective.

• Automating IT service management (ITSM) -- During the next 12 months, enterprise IT will be faced with the challenge of automating the measurement of IT effectiveness based on best-practice process objectives such as ITIL, Six Sigma, COBIT and CMMI. EMA sees three key technologies that will evolve out of this need to automate ITSM: (1) service catalogs and service portfolio management; (2) automation of IT workflow and service provisioning; and (3) service desk and knowledge management.

• End-to-end application management -- In 2008, EMA will develop the industry's first end-to-end roadmap to identify the technologies that must be addressed to provision, monitor and optimize application delivery across global IT organizations with distributed infrastructures. It believes that application management will shape up as a "must-have" technology in enterprise IT, particularly as massively distributed systems that include SOA and Web services-based applications continue to gain momentum. In addition, it anticipates that application discovery, automated dependency mapping, application flow analysis, CMDB and inter-component analytics will all be a part of this end-to-end picture.

• IT governance and risk management -- Recent events have forced the technology-dependent enterprise to recognize that the responsible governance of the business is linked directly to the responsible governance of IT and that IT risk is, in fact, business risk. In response, EMA predicts that 2008 will bring major changes to the governance of IT and the management of IT risks, including entirely new approaches to configuration management, asset management and security as well as the emergence of solutions focused on IT governance, risk and compliance management.

• Software as a service (SaaS) -- In 2008, EMA analysts see the SaaS model continuing to gain momentum as a delivery option for companies of all sizes. SaaS is forcing companies to re-think their IT goals and objectives to identify utility versus business-enhancing activities, and to make strategic decisions regarding delivery options for each. In this climate, SaaS will become an increasingly attractive option and EMA expects significant growth in the SaaS marketplace throughout 2008.

"While we will continue to conduct research across a wide array of IT management practice areas, each of these hot topics will receive a considerable amount of attention from the EMA team in 2008," said Twing, "Expect to see new research, advisory notes and articles expanding on these topics in the future from EMA."

An overview of planned 2008 EMA research on these topics can be accessed directly at www.emausa.com/ema_collateral/EMA_ResearchTrackCalendar-2008.pdf.

About Enterprise Management Associates

Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst and consulting firm dedicated to the IT management market. The firm provides IT vendors and enterprise IT professionals with objective insight into the real-world business value of long-established and emerging technologies, ranging from security, storage and IT service management (ITSM) to the configuration management database (CMDB), virtualization and service-oriented architecture (SOA). Even with its rapid growth, EMA has never lost sight of the client, and continues to offer personalized support and convenient access to its analysts. For more information on EMA's extensive library of IT management research, free online IT Management Solutions Center and IT consulting offerings, visit www.enterprisemanagement.com/.

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Source: Enterprise Management Associates