Tivoli touts service mgmt.

By Jim Duffy
Network World, 5/25/98

Tivoli Systems, Inc. last week outlined upcoming product developments that will go a long way toward filling out the company's service management offerings.

At the Planet Tivoli conference here,Tivoli also discussed a new release of the Tivoli Management Environment software -- TME 10 3.6 -- that will be released this summer. For users, the new products will make Tivoli's TME 10 more of an overarching enterprise IT service manager, rather than a system and software deployment and event manager. The new products should also make it easier for users to deploy and implement Tivoli management applications.

With that in mind, Tivoli plans to meld its enterprise management software with the service and help desk offerings of Software Artistry, Inc., which Tivoli acquired late last year (NW, Dec. 22, 1997, page 6). Tivoli's strategy is to make the service desk a central control center for IT resource authorization, product deployment and problem resolution workflow, said Martin Neath, Tivoli senior vice president.

"Tivoli had great applications," Neath said. "But we didn't have process and workflow around that."

Tivoli this summer will unveil Tivoli Service Desk, an application suite that lets users track and resolve problems, set up change management workflow, keep tabs on IT assets and evaluate trends from a central console. These capabilities will be tightly integrated with the Tivoli/Enterprise Console and Global Enterprise Manager console, and will augment the respective event handling and application management aspects of each package.

Service Desk will also be tightly integrated with Tivoli's existing Inventory asset tracking tool, and the company's other application management offerings, such as Tivoli Software Distribution, Distributed Monitoring and Remote Control, Neath said.

Tivoli's plans hit home with users.

"This makes for a much easier interface going forward," said Diana Beecher, senior vice president and chief information officer at Travelers Insurance in Hartford, Conn. "Our expectation is to use Software Artistry on all help desks so everyone can have the same view."

Tivoli's service management strategy also includes a big role for Service Desk's Decision Support software application. 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 Information Manager (InfoMan) change management software, to produce meaningful information on past problem resolution and product deployment experiences, Neath said.

To that end, Tivoli plans to unveil software modules, dubbed "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 can create end-to-end application management processes, including [data] capture and decision support," using these enhancements, said Jae Sun Lee, a vice-president at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York.

Tivoli will publicly unveil the service management product roadmap within 30 days, Neath said. Shortly thereafter, Tivoli plans to ship TME 10 3.6, which will feature pervasive use 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 let users download and configure Tivoli management applications without minimal manual intervention, said Tom Bishop, Tivoli's 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.

The agent is currently shipping in TME 10 3.2's Distributed Monitoring application, but will be much more widespread in TME 10 3.6, he said.

``Well 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.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina is expecting some NetWare management enhancements in 3.6 as well.

"There will be NetWare Loadable Module monitoring in [TME 10 3.6's] Distributed Monitoring [application]," said Jane Rigsbee, project manager at the insurer. "NetWare will be a fully managed node."

TME 10 3.6 will ship in August, Bishop said. It will be priced the same as previous versions of TME 10, which cost approximately $65,000 for the Tivoli Enterprise Console.