Management vendors beat automation drum

IBM and BMC Software this week separately will announce product road maps that industry watchers say will begin to deliver real-time automation and service management features that vendors have long promised enterprise customers.

IBM will unveil the Tivoli Autonomic Monitoring Engine at its DeveloperWorks Live and Planet Tivoli conference in New Orleans. The company says the software will help customers create links among end users, resources and business processes to more effectively manage applications and services.

Network managers will configure the server software to monitor specific business services, such as help desk, or applications such as SAP's CRM software. From there, the autonomic engine will use rules built into the software (or tailored upon installation by the customer) to correlate data from disparate sources, detect potential problems and take appropriate corrective action.

The primary difference between Tivoli's Autonomic Monitoring Engine and automation features in products from IBM and others is that Tivoli wrote the software to include the most common problems and fixes to specific network devices, systems, servers, databases and applications. To activate automation in many management tools, network managers have to configure the software when installed to take corrective action. In this case, Tivoli executives say, the software comes with 300 resource models, or predefined if-then scenarios to help the software self-manage and self-heal, two tenets of IBM's autonomic computing initiative.

Rick Sturm, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates, says Tivoli is delivering an automation tool that can be slowly integrated into an enterprise network manager's tool kit. While IBM says it will include autonomic features throughout its WebSphere, DB2, Lotus, Rational and Tivoli software divisions, Sturm says the logical place for IBM to start proving it can automate computing is within its network and systems management arm.

Corporations have had to suffer through long deployment cycles and poor software in the past. Sturm says things are changing, but slowly.

"It's not going to be that suddenly everything is automated; it's going to be one piece at a time," he says. "Tivoli has been building intelligence into their software to make IT operations more efficient. No one is ever perfect, but they have been making significant strides."

The software is expected to be generally available this fall, and pricing has yet to be determined. An autonomic tool-kit version of the software is in beta trials with 15 independent software vendors. Tivoli executives say third-party vendors such as SAP can potentially integrate the autonomic engine into their products and sell it directly to corporate users. And network managers can buy it as a stand-alone product and tailor the software to their networks.

Tivoli competitors BMC, Computer Associates and HP are expected to announce similar product road maps soon: BMC this week, the others at their user conferences this summer.