IBM Corp. Monday announced three new Tivoli systems management software products, plus the Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database, which federates IT information across multiple databases -- allowing IT administrators to track a single application running on a dozen servers.
The database and the three software products are shipping with limited availability this summer, said Bob Madey, vice president of strategy and market management for IBM"s Tivoli division. Pricing for the software hasn"t been announced.
The new IBM Tivoli Process Managers -- IBM Tivoli Change and Release Management, IBM Tivoli Availability Management and IBM Tivoli Information Lifecycle Management -- are designed to coordinate application deployments across software, hardware, storage and network devices, Madey said.
Tivoli competes against systems management products from Hewlett-Packard Co., Computer Associates International Inc., BMC Software Inc. and a host of other smaller vendors.
Madey said the new database makes IBM the "only one to announce a truly federated approach with a database."
The idea of having a centralized database for tracking IT assets in an organization arises from long-standing recommendations by the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and other systems management groups. BMC has already announced a centralized database, but IBM believes a federated approach makes more sense because many companies have infrastructure databases already, Madey said.
"Federation allows you to be more flexible and more scalable" and to implement faster various process-oriented improvements to IT more quickly, Madey said.
IBM today also announced IBM Tivoli Unified Process, an online software tool that"s designed to help implement ITIL recommendations.
The new Process Managers are built from a number of related products in IBM"s Tivoli, Rational, WebSphere and DB2 middleware lines, as well as new innovations in self-managing autonomic technology, according to a company statement.
As for the database, IBM is working with several business partners to collect system information for a "discovery library" that will be available later this year. Those partners include Cendura Corp. in Mountain View, Calif., Collation Inc. in Redwood City, Calif., NLayers Inc. in San Jose, Relicore Inc. in Burlington, Mass., Peregrine Systems Inc. in San Diego, and HyPerformix Inc. in Austin, Madey said.