Introduction
James Governor
06 May 02
Tivoli is overhauling its entire product portfolio in a radical simplification that should make it much easier for customers to do business with the IBM business unit. The group's portfolio had become too unwieldy—for both its account managers and for its customers. Tivoli will also increasingly bundle products from the other IBM Software Group (SWG) units—DB2, Lotus, and WebSphere—along with, or as a component of, its own offerings. This bundling is part of a broader SWG strategy to prevent overlaps and redundancies across different divisions.
A welcome side effect of this portfolio consolidation is that Tivoli will be driving costs down through product bundling, in the same way Microsoft does. The consolidation is also, at least partly, a response to changes in the systems-management market that demand greater standardization and consolidation of tools. Tivoli's tools, for example, will increasingly rely on standardized instrumentation rather than proprietary management methods and agents.
One important step in that evolution is Tivoli's decision to use commercial off-the-shelf software, IBM's DB2 database in this case, as its core repository for systems management events. That supersedes the organization's current proprietary event store. To really kick off that change, Tivoli is offering the database to customers for free. This Tivoli Enterprise Data Warehouse will underpin Tivoli's drive to offer business-impact management, that is, the management of infrastructure according to how it affects the business, rather than just managing infrastructure components.
In order to understand how Tivoli is responding to these changes it makes sense to look at the Tivoli group best placed to drive this response—its Performance and Availability (P&A) division.
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