It applies concepts of change management utilized in software engineering to data center management, enabling system administrators to automate changes in system infrastructure and resource availability based on business policies. The result is a highly complex offering of products, templates, and services that IBM is rolling out in phases beginning this quarter.
The announcements, bundled under the service management umbrella, expand on IBM’s year-old OPAL (Orchestration and Provisioning Automation Library) framework of workflows for change management.
It includes 14 product enhancements, primarily for Tivoli, plus a suite of new services and process models that have been developed by IBM Global Services.
The new releases include standard change management process templates, but adapters, modelers, and software development kits for customizing change management workflows directed at infrastructure provisioning.
Initial releases this quarter include a new Tivoli Unified Process that adapts RUP, with the goal of mapping IT management processes to the ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) and COBIT, covering service management and IT governance, respectively.
Specifically, the new Tivoli process mimics the RUP website, providing system administrators a list of tools and actions that they can use to physically implement service management and IT governance processes specified by ITIL and COBIT, respectively. It includes links to actual process templates.
For instance, administrators that want to policy automate software release and distribution are provided links to prepackaged Tivoli Release Management role management models that use the WebSphere Business Integration EAI toolset to activate processes in Tivoli Provisioning manager. By using the templates, software is automatically provisioned based on predefined roles for administrators and recipients.
Tivoli and WebSphere products being updated with new capabilities to support the new offering include Tivoli Configuration Manager and Tivoli Provisioning Manager for improving patch management; WebSphere Studio Application Monitor, Tivoli OMEGAMON XE for WebSphere Bus.
Integration, Tivoli Monitoring for Virtual Servers for managing service availability in J2EE environments; Tivoli Business Systems Manager, Tivoli Workload Scheduler, and Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator for applying policy-based workload management.
Later, in Q3, IBM will release a new change configuration management database that will act as the repository for the new change management capabilities. It will support the ability to store information on the relationships between different software and hardware infrastructure configuration settings, provide enhanced automated discovery of configurations necessary to support specific business processes or policies.
The new configuration management database will be designed to work in federated mode to work with third party systems that act as the system of record for certain processes.
To help customers get started, IBM will release templates for core processes including release management, availability management, and information life cycle management.
These templates will include starter processes and policies, a software development kit and set of adapters to help data center administrators customize change and configuration management policies, and a new version of IBM WebSphere BI (business integration) process modeler to help administrators design and simulate new change management processes.
Of course, the devil is in the details, with one of those details being integration with third party programs and tools that are common in data center management. For instance, while IBM is offering out of the box links to Peregrine, a help desk and problem resolution system, integratin with the more popular Remedy, owned by IBM rival BMC, relies on custom links developed by IBM Global Services.
Speaking in a conference call, Al Zollar, general manager for IBM Tivoli Software conceded that the change management offering is an ambitious work that is still in process.
When asked about the sales cycle for the cross-disciplinary offerings, which touch system administrators, database administrators, software engineering, and business analysts, Zollar conceded that IBM had not yet fully figured it out.
For instance, the initiatives could be sparked by the need to better coordinate identity management, compliance with service level agreements, or more effective source code control with the release management process.
For a long time, Tivoli built products with their own processes embedded in them. This abstracts the process to a higher layer that is more codified and integrated, using standards like BPEL, he said, adding, This won’t happen all at once.
