Users impart wisdom at Tivoli conference

By Jeff Caruso
Network World Fusion, 05/20/99

Nothing speaks quite as loudly as experience.

In some of the most heavily attended sessions at this week's Planet Tivoli conference in Nashville, large users shared their insights into the problems and successes they had implementing Tivoli's systems management software.

Sprint, for example, detailed its rollout of Tivoli software for its internal data network over the past few years. The decision to go with an overarching framework was made early on, as Sprint started to reduce the number of different types of software and hardware it had used, says Pat Smith, vice president of systems integration and technology planning at Sprint.

The company went from 10 different Unix vendors, 17 e-mail systems and 250 PC vendors to three Unix vendors, two e-mail systems and two PC vendors. On the management side, the company mainly uses Tivoli and BMC Software tools.

New computers are all configured with the Tivoli management agent, Smith says. "We're able to support them the instant the devices are turned on," he says.

The biggest gain the company has seen from Tivoli is electronic software distribution. Smith estimates that Sprint has saved $6.3 million in the past two years by not having to roll out software to each of the company's 75,000 desktops by hand. Plus, Sprint is saving money through Tivoli's remote control software. Because technicians can remotely take over end users' PCs, Sprint saves the $42,000 per month it would have to spend to dispatch technicians to remote locations.

However, the Tivoli software isn't perfect, Smith says. It still can't distribute software to legacy PCs, only new ones. He also says Sprint has encountered problems with "release integrity," or bugs, in new versions of Tivoli software. "It sometimes doesn't work right out of the box," he says.

Job 1

Ford Motor is another large enterprise implementing Tivoli's software distribution tool. Ford's 120,000 PCs, 12,000 Unix workstations and 2,000 servers present a special challenge in deploying applications.

"What we have to do is automate as many processes as possible to keep up with the pace of change," says David Grim, project manager at Ford. The company had its own in-house software distribution scheme, but the car maker decided to use Tivoli's software because it brought in servers running a new operating system, Windows NT.

Ford is using the Tivoli software to ensure that the company's many PCs and servers run the same programs and look more consistent. This way, it's easier to manage such a large number of them, says Brent Gordon, technical specialist at Ford.

With more than 70 applications running through the enterprise, one of the biggest difficulties is sticking to a naming convention for each version of each application that is distributed. The naming has to be somewhat convoluted because Tivoli's tool has a flat, rather than hierarchical, naming space, Gordon says.

Ford also had to write some code to ensure that Tivoli agents are running when their PCs are booted.

Business insurance

Prudential has made a concerted effort to get away from managing individual network and systems elements, and to move toward managing aspects of the business, says Ken Tyminski, vice president of information systems.

"It's not just about how the IT organization thinks IT is running," he says.

For example, the claims processing department may not care about a router being up or down, but it will want to know if it is able to process claims.

Prudential uses Tivoli's framework to collect network events, but those events are fed to a product from Accessible Software. This product sorts the events and attributes them to certain business processes. This way, Prudential can see how network problems might affect the claims processing department, Tyminski says.