Tech-Ed: Idera Keeps Things Simple in Competition with Microsoft
Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) is a popular component of a very popular management suite, and it would take a brave third-party vendor to try to compete with it.
Idera is that vendor. In announcing this week at Tech-Ed SharePoint diagnostic manager v2.5, Idera is ramping up its battle with Microsoft in the market for SharePoint administration tools. But while SCOM and Idera's diagnostic manager are competitive products, they're not necessarily aimed at the same audience.
"SCOM tends to go to larger IT groups," said Marcus Erickson, director of engineering at Idera, this week at Tech-Ed in Atlanta. "They have the CIO saying, 'I want the solution for everything.' We're selling mainly to SharePoint administrators." Erickson adds that SCOM can be "intimidating" for SharePoint admins but that Idera's product is designed to be targeted and easy to use.
For instance, Erickson said, SCOM offers a large number of options for SQL database best practices to users, but Idera's tool identifies just the top 10 settings admins should set up in their SQL databases for running SharePoint. "We show the 10 you need to care about," Erickson said.
Priced at $995 per server, SharePoint diagnostic manager is also considerably cheaper than SCOM. It's not always a competitor, either. Erickson says that Idera often sells the product as a complement to Microsoft's management tool. And while the company targets customers in a broad range of sizes, small and medium-sized businesses tend to be particular fans of diagnostic manager.
"The small and medium [businesses] are just looking for tools that are reasonably priced that they can buy," Erickson said.
Also this week, Idera released SQL doctor 2.0, which helps database administrators tune SQL server performance.
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Posted by Lee Pender on May 18, 2011