Do enterprise network management apps have a "low surface area"?

I was interested to read Open Source: What Makes for Success? by Gordon Haff. Alex Fletcher has written an interesting follow up.

Gordon Haff points out that one property of a successful open source company is to pick a very difficult problem that doesn’t touch upon too many parts of an organisation. A so called low surface area.

Now, my question is this: are enterprise grade network and systems management applications low surface area or high surface area?

My suspicion is that it depends largely upon the organisation and how the IT function has been organised. If IT is wholly managed by a single CIO then the surface area has to be pretty low. In organisations where the IT function is spread liberally around the org chart, then the surface area is going to go quite high.