Analysts agree that customers have plenty to gain from a unified tool set based on a shared view of IT resources and activities. "The suite is absolutely the endgame here," says Murphy at Forrester. Over time, major players like IBM, and perhaps even ERP vendors such as SAP and Oracle, will likely acquire point products to create their own suites for IT management. In the meantime, though, the specialist firms are continuing to work out ways for their products to share information with one another. "The big gripe is double entry of data," says Greenberg at Lehman Bros. "Don't make me tell another system data it already knows."

If there is a major weakness in these emerging IT-management tools, some observers say, it is their heavy, almost exclusive focus on discretionary spending — that is, managing development projects — instead of on the maintenance activities that actually consume the bulk of most IT budgets. Says Charles T. Betz, author of the erp4it.com Weblog, "These products have no story to tell about bringing efficiency to maintenance-related spending. It's really a challenge for them. But maintenance is the biggest IT risk for many companies. Some are looking at maintenance expenses that actually exceed their entire IT budgets, leaving them no money [with which] to innovate."