Enterprises may be heading down the same trail to management challenges according to many sources, and our own research tends to bear out the main conclusions. IT organizations have many of the problems of service providers, especially the larger enterprises, but they have been slower to embrace the shift from a labor-and-equipment focus to a service focus.
Of the enterprises we’ve surveyed, only 18% have an explicit concept of “services” within their networks, and while more than half say that they support application-aware network behavior, less than a quarter actually have deployed anything to do that.
We believe that service management is becoming a critical problem for enterprises, not only because of the factors that drive its adoption but because of the barriers to enterprise implementation. Service providers have the wherewithal to create their own solutions through customization and integration, while enterprises almost always try to rely on one vendor.