Open Issues
James Governor
06 May 02
Tivoli's P&A still has significant challenges ahead. For one thing, the group must quickly accelerate and deepen its support for other platforms. A good example of an important target platform is BEA WebLogic, which Tivoli has not supported until now. The organization says it will offer support for the app server by June 2002.
Tivoli has been pleasantly surprised to find that BEA Systems is a fairly easy partner for it to work with. This should encourage it try and work even more closely with other IBM middleware competitors, such as Oracle and Microsoft. Both of these firms want to ensure the widest range of systems management tools for their platforms, whether or not they are in a vicious war with IBM around other platforms. The closer Tivoli works with these IBM competitors, the better it can serve its customers and more attractive it will become as a central management platform. In the past partnering has not been a Tivoli strong point, but the firm is determined to improve on that score. Unlike Tivoli, the WebSphere group has proved wonderfully adept at creating a successful mutually beneficial partnering ecosystem. Some of the folks that have joined Tivoli from Websphere are now starting to replicate that model. If they succeed, the original promise of the Tivoli framework, circa 1994, will be fulfilled—that is a truly open systems management and organizational framework that partners can plug into to offer real value to customers without a proprietary lock-in.
Tivoli is also determined to do a better job of managing IBM's own middleware products such as Lotus Domino and MQSeries. In some cases in the past Tivoli has seen other firms, such as BMC and CA, offer better tools than its own for managing IBM middleware. It will fight tooth and nail to ensure this doesn't happen in the future. Quite simply, IBM SWG managers will not tolerate failure on that front.
Another challenge will be to smoothly make the transition to a world where management is a question of "riding the wild M-Bean." That is, managing from a standards-based perspective in a world of loosely coupled apps.
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