IBM revamps Tivoli portfolio

IBM has completely revamped and simplified its Tivoli software portfolio, announcing more than 30 changes and additions. The company said that the move will cut implementation times from weeks to less than an hour.

The changes form part of a strategy to align the management of IT infrastructure more closely with business processes and to make it more proactive, an approach that Big Blue calls 'business impact management'.

Milko van Duiji, IBM vice president for Tivoli Software, Europe, Middle East and Africa, said: "There is a new vision to manage the impact of IT on the business.

"The potential is to manage an increasingly complex IT infrastructure with higher availability, performance and security using fewer resources. In reality this can only be achieved by aligning IT with actual business needs."

He maintained that achieving this required building best practices into the software, providing predictive capabilities to avoid problems and leveraging integration where most important to gain more rapid return on investment.

In general, existing disparate products have been brought together into groups with a streamlining of implementation. "Average implementation will now take 45 minutes with none needing more than a hour. Previously some could take weeks," said van Duiji.

He explained that IBM now had four main software pillars: Lotus, DB2 database, WebSphere and Tivoli.

Other factors that had driven the change in direction included the need to extend systems management to the web, provide security through firewalls and manage distributed applications.

Clive Longbottom, service director at analyst Quocirca, commented: "All the main products of this type such as CA [Computer Associates] Unicenter TNG, BMC Patrol and HP [Hewlett Packard] OpenView suffer from the same problem of massive and expensive complexity.

"But CA and HP in particular have put effort into focusing their products. Tivoli needed to bring itself back into line."

But he warned that, if the software was to provide accurate forward-looking reporting which was very difficult, this would be a big step. After IBM's profit warning this week, it needed to show how it was addressing the problems, he said.

New Tivoli products include:

Service Level Advisor - applying patent-pending algorithms to performance metrics to help predict outages and so manage service levels.

Enterprise Data Warehouse - DB2-based consolidation of systems management data from across domains irrespective of vendor to simplify alignment of data from multiple applications with business objectives.

Switch Analyzer - for auto-discovery and populating of layer 2 network devices to assist end-to-end network management.

Enterprise Console integration with NetView - combining analysis tools for applications, servers, databases and systems to assist in determining the root cause of system problems.

Privacy Wizard - to help define, standardise and implement privacy policies across the enterprise based on both legal and organisational needs.

At the core of the Tivoli portfolio is IBM Directory Server 4.1, the lightweight directory access protocol multi-system server which Duiji said dramatically improves speed and scalability and made Tivoli security more user friendly. Linux and HP-UX support have been added to the existing AIX, Solaris and Windows.

Part of the process includes using the fruits of IBM's eLiza autonomic computing initiative that provides self-diagnosis, healing and optimisation for computer hardware.

Full details of the changes can be found here.