This article reports on the importance of information technology (IT) services and infrastructures to modern enterprises. The article explains why traditional solutions for managing and controlling the networked systems and services that sustain them appear to have reached their limits. Management systems do not scale easily, and they can become difficult to configure and use. They struggle to correlate service-level problems with problems in the underlying performance. Also, the authors questioned the ability of existing management methodologies to cope with future enterprise IT infrastructures and services.