Orlando, Fla. - Tivoli Systems, Inc. yesterday divulged some of the details of a major new release of its systems management software due this summer.
A key feature of Version 3.6 of the Tivoli Management Environment 10 will be widespread deployment of the Tivoli Management Agent, a "lightweight" TME framework that runs on everything from IBM ThinkPad laptops to IBM S/390 mainframes. Systems equipped with the agent will allow users to download and configure Tivoli management applications - such as those for inventory, configuration and software distribution - on those systems without manual intervention, said Tom Bishop, Tivoli vice president of development and chief technical officer.
The agent is intended to bypass the time, effort and cost of configuring tens of thousands of desktop computers for management, Bishop said. It is currently shipping in TME 10 3.2 as part of Tivoli's Distributed Monitoring software, he said. But it will be much more pervasive in TME 10 3.6.
"We'll fill out the Tivoli product line and use Tivoli Management Agent as the client environment," Bishop said.
The agent is written in C++ and uses the CORBA object broker. However, future versions will be written in Java, Bishop said. But Java first needs to "evolve and mature" before it is ready for enterprisewide implementation for management, he said.
Other features of TME 10 3.6 are high availability and firewall support, Bishop said. For the latter, Tivoli will publish the TCP and UDP port numbers required for Tivoli applications to penetrate a firewall and manage previously secured resources, Bishop said.
TME 10 3.6 will ship in August, Bishop said.
At your service
For service-level management - a current industry hot button - Tivoli plans to tightly integrate the service management applications obtained from last year's acquisition of Software Artistry, Inc. with existing Tivoli packages.Tivoli this summer will unveil a version of Tivoli Service Desk - formerly Software Artistry's Enterprise Support Management product - that is tightly integrated with Tivoli Inventory, Enterprise Console and Global Enterprise Management packages, and the company's application management offerings, said Martin Neath, Tivoli senior vice president.
Tivoli wants to make the service desk a central control center for IT resource authorization, and product deployment and problem resolution workflow, Neath said.
"We want to generalize the notion of service desk to a process of request and response," Neath said. "The service desk becomes a control point within the organization for all types of problems" rather than a call center for product support, he said.
Tivoli's service management strategy also includes a big role for Service Desk's Decision Support software. Decision Support collects data and transforms it into IT trend and analysis information.
Tivoli envisions using Decision Support to mine through data collected by other Tivoli applications, such as the IBM InfoMan software, to produce meaningful information on past problem resolution and product deployment experiences, Neath said. To that end, Tivoli plans to unveil "decision cubes" for TME 10 3.6's software distribution, inventory management and monitoring applications that help users learn how to tackle IT problems using past experiences, Neath said.
"We didn't buy Software Artistry because they had a help desk," Neath said. "[They're] much more oriented around service management and workflow. Tivoli had great applications that did stuff. But we didn't have a process and workflow around that."
Tivoli will release a service management product road map detailing Tivoli/Software Artistry product integration in 30 days, Neath said.
