Tivoli rolls out Enterprise suite

Tivoli Enterprise, announced yesterday, is a suite of products for systems and network management -- a market that is currently worth $11.4 billion according to IDC, and growing at 16 per cent/year. Among the big-name customers trotted out for the launch were Ford, the Halifax, and Reuters. Tivoli is an IBM company, headquartered in Austin, Texas that sees itself in the business of "harnessing technology chaos", and providing software for companies that "view IT management as a strategic weapon". The product has been under development for several years and is said to have the capability of managing enterprise resource planning applications (although only SAP is supported in the initial release: Baan and PeopleSoft are to follow, apparently. In addition, a variety of major databases, Internet and web environments, middleware (IBM MQ Series and CICS receive specific mention: fancy that), as well as users' applications can be managed. It is said to be more scalable. Tivoli claims that its Enterprise product (previously code-named Tsunami) is the first management software to offer self-installing, self-updating management agents, and that it has the ability to manage "hundreds of thousands" of network devices and desktops with a three-tier architecture. The lightweight agents were developed in association with IBM's artificial intelligence research group. Previously, Tivoli was available for UNIX, NT, NetWare, and OS/390. It is now pre-installed in OS/390, and versions for the AS/400 and OS/2 (it's not dead, you see, just snoozing) are now available. No Mac version was announced. Tivoli Service Desk, a product for measuring service delivery to internal customers, was also released yesterday. ®