Abstract

This IDC study considers two functional markets within network management: the network performance management (NPM) and network packet broker (NPB) markets. Recent years have seen significant evolutions in the market dynamics of this industry including:

• The network management market continues to be dominated by incumbent pure-play vendors. While incumbents still control a large portion of the market, there are a variety of companies that have been founded within the past 5–10 years that compete and are growing market share in the network management market.
• While the network management market continues to see growth, it has slowed in recent years as pure-play enterprise NPM vendors face increased competition from network infrastructure vendors that are offering network management capabilities natively in their infrastructure management platforms.
• Network management vendors are extending their platforms to cover more aspects of the network, from the datacenter to the enterprise access layer to the edge of the enterprise network and out into public and private cloud environments.
• In addition to extending their tools across the enterprise networking domains, network management vendors are also increasing the software capabilities of their platforms by integrating machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms into the analysis engines of their data repositories. This is helping enterprises identify and resolve network problems faster than they did before.

"The network has never been a more critical component for connecting enterprise employees, customers, and partners. The network has also never been more complex. Today's enterprise networks span from internal datacenters to a range of public cloud and Internet of Things endpoints," said Brandon Butler, senior research analyst, Network Infrastructure, IDC. "In an effort to better secure and automate their networks, enterprises are looking for deep levels of visibility and analytics regarding their network operations, performance, and management. This data is foundational for ensuring high levels of service, automating tasks within the enterprise, and ensuring security in this dynamic environment. Visibility into what's happening in the network has become an important demand for organizations around the world, and it will continue to be for the years to come."

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