* IBM’s announcements improve management picture
IBM has recently made a wide range of announcements that span a broad range of its offerings. There isn’t enough room to cover all of the news in a single article, so I’ve selected some that touch on management.
As can be expected, the announcements are in support of IBM’s On Demand initiative.
IBM recently integrated the products it acquired when it bought Candle. It’s IBM’s intention that the Omegamon products and brand will continue. The integration of the Candle product lines into IBM’s product families will enhance IBM’s offerings for mainframe management, performance, middleware management, automation, database, storage and Web-based applications.
The zSeries announcements show IBM leveraging the strengths of its mainframe platform, in support of an on-demand operating environment. The high availability of the zSeries platform, coupled with its scalability, helps IBM position the zSeries as a potential central coordination point for recovery based on business priorities, an enterprise trust authority, a secure vault, end-to-end workload management based on business policy, and the zSeries Application Assist Processor for WebSphere.
IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance (TMTP) picks apart transaction response times to help identify performance bottlenecks and the causes of slow performance. The new release of TMTP provides a transaction topology view that includes Web services, Web servers, CICS, IMS, DB2, Siebel 7.7 and SAP back-end services. IBM has also worked with Siebel Systems to integrate TMTP with Siebel 7.7, by instrumenting Siebel 7.7 to provide more transaction specific information to diagnose performance issues for Siebel 7.7 transactions.
The IBM ThinkPad T42 now sports a fingerprint reader that can be used in place of passwords for user authentication. It also has a security chip that stores passwords and does VPN encryption. The embedding of security in the ThinkPad moves IBM in the direction of securing mobile endpoints.
In addition, a few months ago IBM announced that it was joining the Cisco Network Admission Control (NAC) program. The NAC program allows access to networks and resources based on the security status of an endpoint, like a PC or server. IBM and Cisco have now announced that they have integrated Tivoli software to provide remediation if the endpoint doesn’t comply with IT security policies. Then once the non-compliant PC has been brought into compliance, the PC can regain access to the network and resources. There is huge potential in the IBM/Cisco relationship for their customers, as these two giants combine their strengths and continue to integrate their security and automation strategies.
These are just a handful of IBM’s fall announcements. All of the announcements address such a wide span of products and services, yet they are all positioned to support On Demand. IBM continues to deliver more capabilities that bring its On Demand and autonomic computing strategies closer to reality.
