* Why Think Dynamics and IBM make a good pair
IBM’s acquisition of Think Dynamics earlier this month fits in nicely with IBM’s On Demand strategy. The idea of On Demand is to let companies quickly adapt to changing demands by using technology, processes and people. On the technology side, that requires management tools to be more self-managing and more automated.
There are many point tools that can provision individual elements of enterprise infrastructure – for example, tools that provision a server with operating system and application software, or a tool that’s used to reconfigure routers. They typically do the specialized job they were designed to do, and they do it well. But an “On Demand” environment may require dynamically shifting resources (system, network, storage, database) from one application to another, at different times of the day and with heterogeneous pieces of equipment.
What’s needed is something to command and control all of the different pieces to get the job done, across the infrastructure. That’s what Think Dynamics’ products do. They interact with elemental provisioning products to provide comprehensive, cross-platform, cross-discipline provisioning of infrastructure.
For example, take a Web application that’s experiencing performance problems due to a sudden spike in traffic to the Web site. In the point product scenario, an administrator would have to use a server provisioning tool to load the appropriate software on a server, turn to a network tool to add the server to the network, then use a storage management tool to provision additional storage capacity. There would be all different consoles, each with a different look and feel – and most importantly, there would be little to no interaction between the tools and each action would be disjointed from the others. There would be no consistent process flow.
Think Dynamics changes that. It provides, in IBM’s words, “policy-based orchestration,” where the tasks that must be completed to fully provision and add a server with storage to the infrastructure are completed in one consistent, best-practices process. It works with and leverages the capabilities of the native provisioning tools, and manages the processes from a higher level.
Think Dynamics’ offerings include workflow capabilities to develop those best-practices processes. They verify that predefined tasks have been completed and provide automation. In addition, they are based on industry standards like the Open Grid Services Architecture, the standard for grid computing, and they use Web services and XML, which makes it easier to integrate with other products.
What’s exciting about this acquisition is the opportunity for IBM to integrate those products with Tivoli products, and to integrate them more broadly across IBM’s offerings. For example, this would seem to be a great fit for IBM Global Services, as well as Rational and WebSphere.
The Think Dynamics products will raise the bar for provisioning. It’s no longer enough to just throw software out on a server; the server must also be integrated on the network. And maintaining good service levels of the applications must be a major focus.
In my opinion, this is a great acquisition for IBM, Think Dynamics and their customers. It’s also a nice trend for the industry – the move to more complete service-oriented provisioning of IT resources that support business.
