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Tivoli promises greater IBM support to stop user defection

by Steven Mathieson and Colin Barker, Computing

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Tivoli has promised that its systems management product TME 10 will soon support more IBM products in a bid to stem lost sales.

Last week, IBM, Tivoli's parent company, said that software such as MQSeries, Cics, DB2, Universal Data Base and Lotus Domino will be made 'Tivoli ready' over the next 18 months.

All IBM hardware, including the RS/6000, AS/400 and S390 ranges, will be likewise ready by the end of this year.

There is evidence in the market that Tivoli has been losing out to its competitors because of poor support for IBM products.

Last week, Amdahl announced that it had won a major deal with Barclays Bank to supply Novadigm's EDM software management package, despite the fact that Barclays is a major Tivoli customer.

A leaked internal Tivoli memo shown to 'Computing 'indicates how the company has had problems selling to IBM users.

The Tivoli internal sales document tells its salesforce to consider killing the deal if prospective customers have an absolute requirement to support IBM mainframes or the Systems Network Architecture (SNA) network protocol.

As a last resort, the sales team is told to offer customers an older IBM product, Netview DM.

Stefan McKenzie, enterprise management specialist at Tivoli, admitted that the vendor's only current OS/390 product was IBM's Netview. He said that all Tivoli's core functionality, such as user administration, software distribution and security management, would work on the OS/2, OS/390 and OS/400 operating systems from release 3.6, due in September.

The 'Tivoli ready' programme will mean that hardware and software will work without users needing to install management agents on the devices or programs being monitored.

Tony Clifford-Winters, analyst at Bloor Research, said that IBM's goal of making all its products compatible with Tivoli software was helpful, as it would allow the system management tool to manage applications as well as IT infrastructure.

Steven Mathieson is a reporter on Computing. Colin Barker is consulting editor.

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