They also differ in whether they use agents to collect information or use agentless technologies.

While demand for mapping tools will no doubt grow, Colville expects stand-alone products to disappear by 2008 as they are merged into other products such as application monitoring, IT asset management and configuration management suites. She notes that there has been a series of recent acquisitions of mapping vendors. For example, IBM bought Collation, Mercury acquired Appilog Inc. and Symantec Corp. purchased Relicore Inc.

"They're all getting gobbled up," Colville says. Nevertheless, she adds, "it's still a good value, and I think clients should buy it. A lot of data centers have no idea what's there.... They're not ready for compliance initiatives. These tools, because they can discover in mostly real time what's out there, offer a really big advantage."

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The agent debate