Fighting to keep its lead among aggressive competitors, IBM Tivoli in the coming year plans to improve its IT service management offerings to help Big Blue deliver on its autonomic computing and On Demand Business promises.

For the past eight years, IBM Tivoli has successfully given IBM an edge with its systems management software. According to Gartner, IBM in 2003 led the market for enterprise systems management software with nearly 34% of worldwide license revenue, which overall grew about 11% in 2003 to $5.6 billion. Competitor Computer Associates trailed IBM with about 12%, followed by BMC Software at just more than 8% and HP with about 7%.

Within IBM, Tivoli also managed to make promising numbers. Overall, IBM's software group - comprised of five divisions - increased its revenue in the third quarter of 2004 to $3.6 billion, up 5% from last year's third quarter. Of that, revenue for IBM's Tivoli grew 19% overall, and specifically, Tivoli security software revenue was up 47%. IBM doesn't offer specific dollar figures for its software divisions.

In the coming year, Tivoli hopes to break further away from the big four management vendors and make IBM the leader in IT service management as well. Tivoli will play a bigger role in tying IT systems directly to business processes and objectives, and managing groups of IT components as services.

Expand the plan

For Tivoli, that means expanding beyond its systems management expertise and into server, identity, application, and change and configuration management, as well as IT governance, or managing the allocation of IT resources. Tivoli executives (mostly veteran IBMers) say the management software group will play a key role in helping customers enable automated IT service management across their enterprise networks.

"The transformation of Tivoli isn't about it becoming more absorbed into IBM. It's about Tivoli doing more than systems management," says Bob Madey, vice president of strategy and business development for Tivoli and a 24-year IBM veteran. "Tivoli is going to deliver the common architecture and common data models to link IT performance to business processes. Within the next three years, all Tivoli applications will be built on a [service-oriented architecture] and share an underlying data model to enable data sharing across enterprise systems."

Another example of how Tivoli plans to weave its technology throughout IBM is in Big Blue's Common Event Infrastructure (CEI), the future development of which falls to Tivoli and its peer WebSphere and DB2 software divisions. CEI is based on the IBM-developed Common Base Event specification, a standard format for event logs that devices and software can use to keep track of transactions and other activity.

CEI would enable WebSphere business process events and network device events from Tivoli monitoring products to be integrated, normalized and correlated on one screen for IT managers. The goal is to more quickly show the IT cause for a business process slowdown.

Tivoli also intends to head up Big Blue's push for automating IT actions along the lines of business objectives with technology centers and partnerships. For example, IBM last week announced the Advanced Tivoli Orchestration and Provisioning Technology Center, which is designed to help customers perform proofs of concept with IBM's gear and Tivoli's automated server provisioning software that it acquired from ThinkDynamics.

"The move to an On Demand operating environment is fairly heavy stuff. These types of initiatives, these technology centers, are designed to give our customers the practical experience they need to accelerate their adoption of automated IT management," Madey says.