Timothy Pritchett Morgan wrote an article titled, "Open Management Consortium to Drive Tool Integration" where he validates the needs for open source management tools.

"While this is all a necessary first step, in the long run, OMC will likely be the forge for a sophisticated systems management toolset. The members of the OMC took great pains to not position themselves against IBM's Tivoli, CA's Unicenter, and Hewlett-Packard's OpenView tools, which are the big three in systems management. "Replacement is not the goal--but integration with existing tools is," said Hinkle. While this is true, small and medium businesses don't use these big system management frameworks. They pay administrators to use all kinds of tools and write scripts and baby-sit machines."
 

 Read the full article here.