IBM Corp’s systems management arm, Tivoli Systems Inc has announced a series of partnerships to help it deliver on its commitment to the service provider market. At the conference in New York yesterday, company CEO Jan Lindelow told analysts and the press that Cisco Systems Inc would be a key partner for the company going forward in this market. Tivoli has teamed up with Cisco to interoperate Cisco products using Tivoli software to enable companies control the applications and content driving through the network, prioritizing users and what they can do on the network.
This is another part of the deal signed in September when IBM relinquished its networking hardware business to Cisco and in return Cisco agreed to spend $2bn on IBM network processors. An important third leg of this deal involved IBM Global Services becoming a key Cisco Services supplier, maintaining computer networks for customers of Cisco. This is where Tivoli comes in, said Alan Bird, director of business development and alliances in Tivoli’s new Service Provider unit.
Cisco will embed Tivoli’s virtual private networking (VPN) software into its own, over time said Selby Wellman, senior VP of Cisco’s Interworks business unit. Right now we are in the organizational phase of the relationship, Selby said, we need to get the executives committed and the people assigned to get the momentum going on this. He said the products would be interoperable early next year and integrated six months after that. He said there would be other product tie-ups in the near future.
However, Cisco and Tivoli could be jumping the gun with this strategy, as the DoJ has yet to approve the IBM/Cisco deal mentioned above. The Justice department has one final issue with the partnership, ComputerWire has learned. IBM’s mainframe connectivity software and Cisco’s channel attached router card, for mainframe attachment, both do the same job and combined make up a significant proportion of the market This is not a big part of our business though, said Selby, so it is unlikely that the DoJ will have a problem with it. The two companies will also shortly announce a reseller agreement whereby Tivoli will resell Cisco’s CiscoWorks Blue SNA to IP migration software.
Other partnerships announced on the day included Applied Digital Access (ADA), CrossKeys Systems Corporation, Newbridge Networks, Open Networks Engineering (ONE) and TT1 Telecom Ltd – to combine Tivoli’s experience in providing traditional enterprise management with these partners’ telephony know-how.
