The products include IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database and three types of IBM Tivoli Process Manager software.
Tivoli’s CCMDB is part of a trend by systems management vendors to support a key element of ITIL (IT Infrastructure Libraries), which calls for a Configuration Management Database to record the history of all changes made to back end infrastructure.
With the new release, IBM is integrating functionality that came from last November’s acquisition of Collation, a firm that maps software and data into the infrastructure on which it runs.
The resulting IBM product, Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager, will be embedded into the CCMDB. It’s a product that competes directly with OpsWare, a company that just reported glowing Q1 numbers coming atop a strategic alliance with Cisco.
Other releases include several flavors of IBM Tivoli Process Manager. They include Tivoli Availability Process Manager, which correlates the impacts of outages on the business and, when an outage occurs, identifies failing components by automatically launching diagnostic tools.
Additionally, Tivoli Release Process Manager provides a higher level of automation for deployment of software releases, patches, and upgrades. It supplements Tivoli’s automated software distribution with workflows and impact analyses of deploying new software.
The last piece to be release will include Tivoli Storage Process Manager, providing workflows for discovering storage resources and supporting workflows for correlating storage requirements to available infrastructure.
In a separate initiative, IBM announced its intention to develop with other vendors a draft standard specification governing the sharing information between different CMDBs that are now becoming mainstays of systems management products.
Given that this is merely the first shot in the battle, IBM did not announce whether any vendors had agreed to sign on with its initiative or nominate potential candidate standards bodies where it would submit the work.
