* IBM’s ITCAM goes beyond simple Web services
When IBM recently announced the IBM Tivoli Composite Application Management (ITCAM) enterprise application management suite, much of the reaction focused on ITCAM for SOA – and for good reason.
Up to now, we’ve seen more activity in this market by segment leaders such as Actional, AmberPoint, Blue Titan, SOA Software (formerly Digital Evolution), Sonic Software, and Systinet, with some specific leadership niches within this segment, such as Systinet’s thought-leading Web services registry. Now that IBM has made its most substantial entry to date in the field, a turning point in this market has been reached. Virtually every management heavyweight now has a credible asset in play for the management of service-oriented architectures.
IBM’s entry follows HP’s introduction of OpenView SOA Manager in June, the culmination of HP’s acquisition of Talking Blocks two years ago. With Computer Associates having bolstered its Web services management portfolio with the acquisition of Adjoin at about the same time, and application management leaders from BMC and BEA to TIBCO and webMethods now in the fray, the SOA management market has fully entered its second generation.
This focus on the Web services aspect of ITCAM is a bit too narrow, however – and perhaps a bit too buzz-oriented. The more significant story is what ITCAM represents to IBM’s overall service management initiatives, as well as the role SOA management will play in the larger picture of IT service delivery and service support. Recognize those terms? If you said, “that sounds like ITIL,” you’re right.
In recent years, ITIL has become a significant influence on enterprise IT, emphasizing a range of architectural and process recommendations for IT service standardization. With its IT Service Management initiative, IBM has wholeheartedly embraced ITIL values. In the release of the entire ITCAM suite – which includes software specific to WebSphere and Omegamon as well as response-time tracking across a number of environments – IBM is producing a product set focused on aspects of composite application services central to IT service delivery.
This indicates the strong interrelationship between the impact of service-oriented architectures and the overall significance of IT service management. Within a few years, Web services architectures may well define the lion’s share of the technology of IT service delivery. In fact, we are already seeing this trend today, with large numbers of enterprises bringing Web services-based SOAs into production this year, and Web services becoming the lingua franca for the “loosely coupled” integration of disparate application services crossing many boundaries of technology and business ownership.
SOAs are more that just a new technology for distributed application integration. They are becoming a principal fabric for weaving together enterprise IT – inside enterprise boundaries, as well as across multiple domains. With technology this central to the future of IT, the stakes in SOA management are high, and the directions SOA management vendors take their products today could have a significant impact on just how manageable, and reliable, we can expect this vital technology to be.
