Can MOM 2005 Help Small Businesses?

The Business Case
How do you make a business case for MOM 2005 in a small or midsized business? Michael responded that the value depends on the importance of the function you're monitoring and managing. "How well can you do without it? What would be the value if you just spotted the one problem that brought you down? If you solved that, what would be the benefit?"

The business case boils down to weighing MOM's cost against how much you can save by identifying and preventing potential problems and being able to dedicate fewer staff to operations management. "MOM will identify issues before they become end-user problems, allowing fewer staff to manage larger groups of servers and providing better service to the end user. You have to offset this against the cost of implementation."

Michael cited an example of a MOM early adopter and discussed how identifying one problem proved MOM's value for a large European financial institution. "They have an OpenView system and were very worried about putting MOM underneath just because it added complexity. One morning, MOM pointed out a memory pooling error that was beginning to happen on a trader desk—MOM told them what was happening, where the problem was, and even gave them the fix. So they corrected it. That day, they tell us, MOM saved them millions of dollars because the trader desk didn't go down. This was the first time in 3 years they'd ever got ahead of the problem. So if you think about the price of MOM and compare it to the cost of not having it, it justifies itself in one or two incidents."

I asked Michael whether this example also applies to small business. He replied, "That depends on how well you can do without your Exchange server or AD. If it's critical to your business, losing your system for a day might not cost a small business as many millions of dollars, but it's absolutely as important."

What Do You Want to Ask Microsoft?
In addition to concerns about cost and licensing and small- and midsized-business considerations, reader questions for Microsoft ranged from requesting an explanation of MOM to a request for a virtual demo. (You can download a free 120-day trial version at http://www.microsoft.com/Mom/downloads/eval/default.mspx.) Several themes emerged from the more than 300 reader questions:

• What's the difference between Systems Management Server (SMS) and MOM?
• How does MOM integrate with various third-party management suites?
• Does MOM work with other platforms besides Windows?
• How do I implement MOM, and how easy is it to use?
• What's the business justification for MOM (e.g., cost/benefit, ROI, TCO)?

Michael personally responded to these and other reader questions. You'll find his answers plus an audio recording of our conversation and the complete survey results online at InstantDoc ID 44426. For summaries of some customers' experiences, see the Web-exclusive sidebar "Microsoft Case Studies About MOM," http://www.windowsitpro.com, InstantDoc ID 44428.

Management software has traditionally been for the big enterprise. Is being able to diagnose and prevent Microsoft Exchange Server problems worth a $499 investment to a small business? Let me know what you think, and tell me what other topics you'd like to ask Microsoft about.

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