Free Stuff
James Governor
06 May 02
For customers the product line consolidation offers a cool perk: free stuff. For example, Tivoli is now literally giving away NetView as a component of its Tivoli Event Correlation (TEC) console, rather than just selling it as a separate product. The only limitation is that the minimum entry point for TEC is $25,000. On its own, NetView costs a minimum of $1,000, plus $5 per layer-3 node that is managed. For customers who aren't interested in buying TEC, that means it becomes cheaper to buy TEC if you are buying NetView to manage a network with more than 4,800 nodes. Of course, customers who like TEC in the first place get a significant extra boost at no cost.
Still, competing against Hewlett-Packard's OpenView Network Node Manager isn't easy. NNM utterly dominates the market for SNMP-based network management. You could say Tivoli has little choice but to give away software in an attempt to gain market share. However the giveaway does create customer value, especially since Tivoli has improved NetView considerably with the addition of new auto-discovery and switch-management options. Tivoli is also giving away a systems-management-oriented DB2 data warehouse with every software sale (but more on that later).
There is significant change at work here—in the past it tended to be Tivoli software that was "given away," to support, for example, IBM Global Services or IBM's DB2 sales. This meant Tivoli contributions to IBM Software were sometimes underestimated by Big Blue's bean counters. Today traffic is heading the other way too—free software from DB2, Lotus, and WebSphere is increasingly finding its way into Tivoli offerings.
This resource sharing is related to a wider program in Software Group (SWG) designed to eliminate redundancies. Far too often in the past, different organizations within IBM have developed essentially the same stuff. For example, both Lotus and WebSphere designed, developed, and supported their own servlet engines. IBM is determined to reduce such overlaps.
Resource sharing also illustrates that people, ideas, and products are genuinely flowing between the different organizations that make up SWG. The previous role of the executive who now runs P&A, for example, was to define strategy for the WebSphere group. He retains close connections with his colleagues at both formal and informal levels. This cross-pollenization, or colonization, whatever you call it, is healthy.
 |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|||||||||