Tivoli Systems has made headlines in the past two years, but for all the wrong reasons.
The company lost its CEO, laid off staff for the second time in 12 months, angered customers by selling off its service desk software to Peregrine Systems and lost money on IBM's balance sheet.
Last year when competitors Computer Associates and Hewlett-Packard announced new modular software products aimed at simplifying network management chores, Tivoli barely made a peep. Then at its Planet Tivoli 2001 user show, parent company IBM detailed how Tivoli would become one of four divisions inside IBM's software business, but Tivoli's software packages remained pretty much the same.
"For several months last year, Tivoli was in quite a bit of a slump. They didn't seem to have any direction," says Jean-Pierre Garbani, an analyst with Giga Information Group.
The long way back
But Tivoli seems to be working on getting back to its technology roots and delivering good news instead of bad.
In April, the company kicked off the spring by introducing a slew of products geared toward helping users manage Web services and other emerging technologies. Using its tighter integration support from IBM, Tivoli Enterprise Data Warehouse, a DB2-based data repository, will be built into Tivoli software free of charge. The idea is to let users aggregate systems and performance management information from disparate systems in one location and use that information to measure the impact of problems on specific parts of the business. IBM plans to embed Tivoli security features inside the new version of its WebSphere application server.
The company also recently consolidated its large portfolio of products. Tivoli did not reduce features, just the overwhelming amount of products it offered - all in an attempt to reduce the decisions users must make when selecting products.
Tivoli General Manager Robert LeBlanc also stepped up. The 20-year IBM software veteran says reports of customer dissatisfaction surfaced a bit too frequently for him to ignore. His first priority on the job was to talk with customers and learn what problems they had with Tivoli.
"Mainly, Tivoli customers were upset and frustrated with deploying the software. It simply took too long," LeBlanc says.
So as part of the recent product news, Tivoli wrote code that included its framework software, making it transparent to users, says Carl Kessler, vice president of products at Tivoli. That means Tivoli software would now integrate with other Tivoli products and IBM wares without lengthy configuration by users. And as Kessler says, "It's not any new, brilliant technology. We rewrote some of the software to include our underlying framework and make it easier to use."
At least some of Tivoli's moves are working. While IBM does not report Tivoli earnings as a separate line item, the company says software revenue "rebounded at the Tivoli unit" in the first quarter of this year. Overall, first quarter IBM's software earnings fell less than 1% to $2.90 billion from $2.92 billion a year earlier.
Not playing catch
"I wouldn't say Tivoli is playing catch up with anyone because no other vendor has ready access to IBM as we do," LeBlanc says. "Maybe Tivoli could have done it sooner, yes, but we're not behind."
To LeBlanc's credit, some Tivoli watchers say the company's revamped products are helping land Tivoli back in the game.
"Tivoli has become completely infused with Blue blood, and now with IBM working so closely with it, Tivoli is becoming a truly formidable force in the software industry," says Bill Gassman, an analyst with Gartner.
At least one user also likes what he sees.
"In general, I prefer not having to deal with multiple account people, and I'm definitely enjoying the steeper discounts we're getting from [IBM and Tivoli] now," says David Hamilton, director for telecommunications and technical services for Sutter Health in Sacramento, Calif.
Hamilton uses one of Tivoli's newer software offerings, IBM Tivoli Service Level Advisor, which is said to let customers track how well a service is delivered to end users by monitoring all the components comprising the application.
Regardless of Tivoli's past, Gassman says IBM's message is consistent whereas vendors such as HP seem a little more unclear in their software strategies. HP held a press conference May 8 detailing its new launch with Compaq on board and only briefly touched on the direction its network management portfolio, OpenView, would take inside the new HP.
Clear direction
One path is clear for Tivoli, experts say. Unlike HP, Tivoli is moving away from the service provider market and aiming its software releases toward large enterprise users, or its "bread and butter," which made it successful to start. Others agree that with HP targeting more of a service provider customer, Tivoli and CA will fight for enterprise management customers.
"Tivoli and CA have really made it clear they're in it for the enterprise customer. They both can offer customers a pretty complete software strategy," Giga's Garbani says.
LeBlanc says he also realized it was time for Tivoli to take advantage of its strengths in managing enterprise networks and fuse that with the best parts of IBM: its scale, its salesforce and its support.
"Tivoli essentially had been allowed to run as a separate company, while still being connected to IBM in ways. Last year, we made a conscious decision to bring Tivoli closer to the fold and use IBM where it made sense," LeBlanc says.
Industry watchers in the past worried that the innovation that made Tivoli a success would smother and suffocate under the control of the famously conservative IBM.
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