IBM Tivoli Monday announced products and upgrades to help IT managers better integrate business processes and IT operations, and to enable IT service management across enterprise networks.

Big Blue says the new software and services will help IT managers automatically integrate disparate systems and data stores to establish standard best practices across IT workflows as well as business processes.

"We have utilized a lot of existing IBM software to enable the automatic integration of process and IT information," says Bob Madey, vice president of strategy and business development for Tivoli. "This will allow for the people hooking business processes together to also tie them to IT management on one platform."

To start, the company introduced its Change and Configuration Management Database, which is software built upon IBM's WebSphere Business Integrator middleware. The Tivoli CCMDB is less of a database and more of a platform for process information, Madey says.

It will serve as the platform for three new IBM Tivoli Process Manager applications. IBM upgraded 14 Tivoli products to automatically integrate and share data with the new management database software.

Tivoli CCMDB is installed on a server and collects data from other data stores to populate the database. It automatically discovers the underlying infrastructure and the relationships among applications and the network supporting them. The software can also communicate directly with point products and incorporate data collected by third-party systems.

Once the software is deployed, IT managers would use the workflow and policy engines within the software to establish alerts, events and reports on how business processes perform on the underlying IT infrastructure. The software includes a modeling tool that enables IT managers to establish standard IT service delivery models. The software would alert IT manages when parts of a process fail, either on the business side or on the IT side.

With this software, IBM says, customers can get a single view of an application that runs across more than a dozen servers. For instance, an IT manager could quickly determine which part of a business process across the enterprise network is falling down - whether it be a people problem, such as a business unit not signing off on a step, or an infrastructure issue, such as a poorly performing server.