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The rapid increase in the complexity and speed of change in businesses IT infrastructures, coupled with growing compliance requirements, is fueling a steep rise in operational costs and driving the need for better overall management, according to Al Zollar, general manager of IBM Tivolis software group.
Speaking at the Share user conference here last week, Zollar said IBM is on the verge of rolling out a series of Tivoli products designed to give users simpler centralized management capabilities that can reach from hosted environments of IBMs mainframes to distributed platforms of its RISC and x86 offerings.
“Today, if youve had a harrowing day, its a good day in IT,” Zollar said. “We are faced with a ton of challenges with managing complexity [and] managing the amount of change.”
Over the next few months, IBM will release a host of new management tools—based in large part on technology gained through its acquisitions of Candle Corp. last year and Isogon Corp. this year—that will further IBMs vision of managing IT like a business, Zollar said.
The rollout of the IT Service Management products next quarter and into next year is part of a larger plan by IBM to become a full-service provider for IT management, Zollar said. The Armonk, N.Y., company will spend more than $1 billion over the next two years investing in Tivoli products to grow what he described as a “diverse and broad portfolio.”
IBM is updating the Omegamon XE products acquired from Candle for the new z9 mainframe, introduced last month, as well as other platforms, Zollar said. In addition, the company is enhancing the Tivoli System Automation, NetView and Monitoring products for greater interoperability across diverse platforms, as well as rolling out the Tivoli Enterprise Portal to give users a single place to manage both their mainframe and distributed environments.
Zollar also spoke of the Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database offering, which features a workflow engine and configuration management capabilities for DB2 in an open and federated environment. On top of the database offering, IBM will roll out IT Service Management Process Managers, a series of tools for such tasks as service-level, workload, security and ILM (information lifecycle management). The first of these eight managers will appear in the first half of next year, with the rest rolling out later in the year and into early 2007, he said.