Big Blue Gives Traffic Cop Software a Raise

June 28, 2007

Getting to an automated datacenter where all of the components run, deploy patches and upgrade without any manual help is a holy grail of sorts for IT managers.

That’s exactly the place IBM is trying to drive its customers with software such as the new Tivoli Compliance Insight Manager, which the company rolled out today. The product is designed to help businesses manage computer systems and meet security and compliance rules.

Tivoli Compliance Insight Manager will help track, report and investigate non-compliant behavior across a business’s computer assets, monitoring user behavior against corporate policies and sending providing alerts when information or technology assets are at risk.

The software, fashioned from assets IBM gained via its purchase of Consul InSight earlier this year, comes as security audit and compliance management have become a major bee in the bonnet of corporations all over the world.

Whether it’s Sarbanes-Oxley, PCI, or HIPAA, business sectors are under the command of regulations that govern how information is shared, stored and protected. Gartner expects the number of regulatory rules to double by 2011.

Lost data tapes and severe data breaches by hackers have compounded the issue because businesses must have products that not only automate business processes but interoperate with fluidity.

Tivoli Compliance Insight Manager collects logs of and creates reports on privileged users and access patterns. But now the software lets admins customize compliance management modules to meet an organization’s specific compliance requirements.

It also now supports auditing needs by translating captured security data — who, did what, when, where, where from, where to and on what — into forms that can be easily understood by an auditor or business manager who isn’t necessarily tech-savvy.

The product works with the Tivoli Security Operations Manager dashboard, providing detailed information when a Tivoli Identity Manager or Tivoli Access Manager admin or other privileged user changes the role or authorization status of individual users.

No surprise that IBM is fortifying the Compliance Insight Manager and making it a significant part of its Tivoli line, which has carved a leadership position in IT operations management, one of the hottest high-tech sectors where Big Blue, HP , IBM and CA all joust for market supremacy.

Gartner recently ranked IBM the worldwide market share leader in the IT operations management software market based on the vendor’s 2006 revenue.

Gartner said this market, which grew 11.4 percent last year to more than $11.3 billion, includes any software used to manage the “provisioning, capacity, performance and availability of the computing, networking and application environment.”

Tivoli Compliance Insight Manager, which IBM will begin selling July 6, falls squarely in that category.

In other IBM news today, IBM began offering Microsoft’s high-performance computing software for the IBM System Cluster 1350.

Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 for the 1350 is geared to let medium-sized businesses that don’t have the budgets of the biggest companies in the world employ high-performance cluster computing.