IBM automates management software

ORLANDO - IBM's Tivoli software group this week will unveil upwards of 25 upgraded products, all which now exploit automated computing technology that first showed up in IBM servers.

Tivoli says the upgrades in its performance and availability, configuration and operations, and security and storage management software now can automatically take actions based on information and models built into each product. The upgrades take advantage of technology developed through IBM's Project eLiza, which involves hardware and software that can perform self-healing, self-configuring, self-protecting and self-optimizing functions.

"The software can monitor for events or series of events and take the actions that the user wants," says Steve Wojtowecz, director of strategy for Tivoli.

Among the upgrades is IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Databases, which now includes a model for Oracle databases and preset thresholds that when triggered by an event will take action to prevent or solve a problem.

Some of the automated functions will work out of the box, while others will require customization.

Tivoli also will introduce identity and storage management products enhanced with technology IBM acquired this year through its purchases of Access360 and TrelliSoft.

IBM, working with VeriSign, also this week will start providing a managed service for corporations that would prefer to outsource authentication of employee or e-commerce partner passwords and certificates than purchase and maintain their own access control server.

The VeriSign Access Management Service is based on the Tivoli Access Manager for e-Business product, which is maintained at VeriSign data centers. The customer must install a special proxy server behind the corporate Web portal to enable communication for authentication purposes with the service. Companies also have to be willing to share details of their security policies with VeriSign.

The service will be priced per-user and cost from a few dollars to $30 per year depending on the size of installation. Tivoli Access Manager software costs about $20 per user.

IBM Tivoli competitor RSA Security is undecided about whether to offer a similar service, although it has noted some interest among carriers of late.

Meanwhile, RSA this week will announce the latest version of its ClearTrust authentication and access control server software. New in Version 5.0 is support for the single sign-on industry standard SAML 1.0 and embedded RSA BSAFE certificate authority server components. ClearTrust can't use any other vendor's certificate authority, although it can authenticate certificates from other vendors. The software costs from $10 to $26 per user depending on the installation.