A New Touch of Tivoli

Software assets that IBM picked up from its acquisitions of MRO, Micromuse, Rembo, Collation, Isogon and CIMS Labs have been trickling out this year at a healthy clip.

The stream continued today, as IBM  introduced new software from its Tivoli line designed to offer customers IT service management, a growing segment populated by rivals CA , BMC  and HP .

IT service management is designed to automate IT processes, network operations and physical assets, driving greater efficiencies in datacenters by absolving IT administrators from tedious manual tasks, such as patching or other configurations.

Service management can help coordinate stock trades, voice over IP calls over computers, and data integration from RFID tags in one computer system, curbing performance bottlenecks and choreographing different hardware and software products on a network.

IBM’s new Tivoli Capacity Process Manager helps customers pare network slowdowns and outages by better predicting computing capacity and performance. The software, adapted from the recent MRO purchase, will be available in the fourth quarter.

IBM also announced a new version of its Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB) software, which details servers, storage devices, networks, middleware, applications and data on a computer network.

For example, the CCMDB, which is not an actual database but more of a map of IT resources, detects changes in a system that prevents business processes from coming to fruition. The new version of the IBM CCMDB will be available later this month.

Such software applications are a key function in keeping processes in datacenters from crashing to a halt; CA recently made its configuration management database available and will add automated dependency-mapping technology to correlate configuration with business services later this year.

IBM also added two software tools to help customers begin to get a grip on their assets.

The IBM Tivoli Unified Process Composer provides information to help organizations employ service management.

The IBM Service Management Self-Assessment toolkit is a free online tool that helps customers decide where to start and what to focus on when they move to a service management architecture.