Tivoli Systems Inc, the systems management unit of IBM, is planning a push into mid-range territory. Tivoli, as an IBM satellite, has inevitably concentrated on building bigger and better solutions for the mainframe oriented environments of IBM’s blue chip customer base. Now though, the Austin, Texas company is planning a June assault on the sub-enterprise sector currently dominated by Hewlett-Packard Co and Computer Associates International Inc.
A spokesperson for Tivoli told ComputerWire, This market is not being adequately serviced and we realized Tivoli Management Software could be written specifically with this market in mind. The company has deliberately not written a new code base for the products so that customers can grow into Tivoli’s high-end management products without having to learn new skills. It also means Tivoli’s existing channel will can sell the product without requiring further training, Martin claims. The company will be making several additions to the channel to be announced in May. Likely corporate resellers will be Morse, Hamelton Systems and Acuma.
Tivoli sees two key differences between the enterprise customer and the next segment down. These customers also have heterogeneous environments which require cross-platform products and management disciplines, said Alisdair Martin, Tivoli marketing manager for Europe, but they need to show a much faster return on investment, unlike larger organizations which take a longer view and they need more help with installation and configuration. To these ends Tivoli claims its new products will be competitive on price and the company is supplying out-of-the-box software to help with setting the system up. Four key business areas have been pin-pointed for management suites including: change management, security, applications management and Y2K.
The products will be available for all mainstream platforms including NT and between twenty to thirty distributed compting platforms including all flavours of Unix, said Martin. Tivoli-watcher, Milind Govekar from the Gartner Group said: It isn’t clear what market Tivoli is after here and they must be conscious that HP has this mid-bracket sewn up.
Tivoli’s principle competitor in this new space will be Hewlett-Packard with its Openview management software. The Gartner Group estimates that as much as 70% of the mid-range market uses HP Openview. Godfrey Jordan, marketing manager for HP Openview said: Tivoli needed to do something as framework systems are dead. What Tivoli doesn’t realize is that customers at this end of the market want a return on investment in six months and I’d be very surprised if Tivoli, which has traditionally been very expensive can offer this. A typical framework setup takes two years before you see any payback. He was also skeptical of the product’s ability to scale down. Tivoli products take an incredible amount of expertise to install and will require training and familiarization, not just out-of-the-box software.
Mark Lillycrop, director of Xephon, a specialist IBM watcher noted: Historically Tivoli came from the mid-range market, working at the applications level and grew these products into the large scale framework. It has been a gradual task for the last three to four years to totally integrate the Tivoli set with IBM’s mainframe systems management. Part of IBM’s strategy is to move into the SME market and away from just the Fortune 1000 corporations. This is beginning to filter through all its subsidiaries. It explains why Tivoli is hiving off chunks of the total framework and packaging them up for the mid-range market.
