ManageEngine Enters DCIM Arena By Adding Facilities Management

ManageEngine has added facilities management to its IT management and integrated it as a full DCIM suite. The new offering, dubbed IT360, enables real-time management of both IT and facilities infrastructure components from a single console.

New features like workflow automation, network change and configuration, and a 3-D rack builder have also been added. The data center plays an increasingly important role in the enterprise, and ManageEngine has expanded to help manage the entire data center infrastructure.

“Energy management rivals IT management as one of the major challenges in running an efficient data center,” said Sridhar Iyengar, vice president, product management at ManageEngine. “Typically, the IT management and facilities infrastructure management are separate worlds, which prevent data center operations teams from readily correlating facilities and IT events. Now, IT360 unifies the facilities and IT management in a unified DCIM console, so data center admins can easily see facilities and IT relationships and manage the complete data center proactively.”

ManageEngine already touts more than 72,000 business customers worldwide, including 60 percent of the Fortune 500. A new entrant into facilities management, it has already established itself in the IT management world. It’s made a name in terms of application discovery and dependency mapping, as well as its advanced CMDB capabilities.

Zoho Pushes Into DCIM

ManageEngine is a division of Zoho Corporation. Zoho is perhaps best known for its suite of SaaS applications that rival Google Apps and Microsoft Office. It also offers CRM, email hosting, project management, accounting and app creation tools. The 1,600 employee company has the workforce to support multiple offerings, and now it finds itself squarely in the DCIM ring with the addition of facilities management to IT360.

Manual processes, multiple tools and consoles, inefficient power management and other challenges interfere with optimal management of the data center and underlying components. For these companies, an automated DCIM solution that supports IT and facilities management from a single console promises to eliminate many of the challenges to data center optimization.

“True data center infrastructure management consolidates the administration of all hardware, software and environmental components across a support stack onto a single console interface,” noted Steve Brasen, managing research director at Enterprise Management Associates. “By extending the IT360 solution to deliver functionality that targets key requirements in facilities management, ManageEngine has achieved a milestone in enabling holistic infrastructure monitoring and management that will drive proactive IT optimizations, efficiencies and cost-reductions.”

The new features in IT360 include: