At IBM subsidiary Tivoli Systems Inc’s 10/Plus Association conference in Austin, Texas last week, the systems management maven leaked a few details about the next release of its TME 10 framework, reports Unigram.X. Version 3.6, codenamed Tsunami and expected some time in 1998 will try to address some of the installation headaches with TME which have been brought to light by the Gartner Group and other analysts. A tsunami is a swiftly traveling tidal wave, found in the Pacific Rim and the release was given the name because the company believes Tsunami will cause havoc with its chief rival, Computer Associates International Inc. It will include some Microsoft-style wizards to simplify software installations, along with balloon help and other user aids. Also by the time of the Tsunami release, the company’s partners and vendors should have written application modules which conform to Tivoli’s Lightweight Client Framework (LCF). The LCF should enable systems to be managed remotely, and should improve portability across platforms by offering a Java front-end. The Java support within the actual framework is already there, in the form of the company’s TME 10 Global Enterprise Manager – now complete. Tsunami will also add full support for IBM’s AS/400 servers and DB/2 database, only partially supported today. There will be support for 12 languages, which the company will need when it starts to attack the Russian, Chinese and Japanese markets, next year. The company is also to offer a stripped-down version of its framework aimed at the medium enterprise or at the departmental level of larger corporates, codenamed Bossman. It may lack some of the functionality of the enterprise version, but will be cheaper, and run only on Windows NT and the major Unixes. Tivoli says that by the time it is ready to release Bossman it should have the level of support it requires in place – it admits it’s not ready today.
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