Service Management Archives
August 2013 Fueling an ROI Hurricane Businesses today are making the case for integration by utilizing linked data and Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC). This applies to nearly any business context or IT infrastructure where communication between multiple vendors may share information and execute business processes. Integration is most impactful in the deeply automated and highly virtualized infrastructure of a cloud. OSLC-based integrations provide a reliable and consistent method of integrating any two solutions in such a way that it does not stop functioning every time those solutions are updated. This helps organizations realize a much higher overall ROI. There is no longer a need to update and re-update custom integrations which may frequently break down. This time can now be refocused on testing solution integrations to ensure they continue to function properly. Approaching the effort in this manner provides a faster and much less expensive solution. Find out how your organization can increase ROI by utilizing OSLC in the cloud. August 2013 New Solutions, New Roles, New Value Organizations today that utilize the System zEnterprise mainframe are familiar with its strengths including industry-leading security, scalability, hardware utilization, and most importantly, its flexibility. Although historically the System z mainframe’s focus has been on batch jobs and business transactions, now it is much more evident that the zEnterprise is also very well suited for new initiatives associated with attracting and interacting with customers, tracking their behavior and interests, and analyzing all the data that is connected to them. zEnterprise has the capability to provide much more than just a traditional mainframe architecture. When paired with the relevant solutions from IBM’s Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure suite, zEnterprise is capable of supporting nearly any IT or IT-related workload that an organization requires – including relatively new areas such as cloud computing, mobile computing, and big data analytics. zEnterprise has exceptional potential in the arena of cloud computing by making the best possible use of critical resources through deep automation and virtualization. Learn more about how your organization can benefit from the robust features and flexibility of the System zEnterprise mainframe. August 2013 Ivor Macfarlane: A Journey Not Quite As Planned Ivor Macfarlane, of IBM’s Tivoli organization, documents his travel delays and the importance of a well-organized customer centric management team while embarking on a trip from the UK to Australia. Two key service management lessons came to light during his journey. The first is to understand that providing great service management, through the eyes of a customer, is less about how well X is done than it is about the fact that Y was not done at all. Secondly, what a customer perceives to be reality is often more important than what actually occurred in the first place. In this article, he provides important lessons observed during his travels and valuable insight of an airline’s service management plan from a customer’s perspective. Read more about Ivor’s travel experiences and recommendations for improved service management today! July 2013 For Best Business Value, Automate Whenever Possible The benefits of owning an IBM System z mainframe are quite impressive, and increasingly so as automation plays a key role in driving value to organizations. The System z is well suited to fulfill current IT goals such as supporting new technologies like Mobile and Big Data, maximizing hardware utilization, applying security as comprehensively and proactively as possible, increasing service uptime and scalability, and including critical applications in an Enterprise private cloud. For organizations who are utilizing one System z mainframe, the introduction of the new IBM Automation Control for z/OS is a straightforward, fast and flexible solution to automating many of the most common and mission-critical tasks executing in a System z. It is capable of performing without requiring the use of scripts or custom coding in any way, and does not require significant time to install and configure. This means that the System z mainframe generates more value, more quickly, and with less effort while simultaneously achieving the intended goals of the organization because human error is minimized. Find out how your business can benefit from the powerful new automation delivered to the System z! July 2013 Multiply Potential ROI from Integration It is becoming increasingly more difficult for organizations to integrate their most critical IT solutions, particularly with falling budgets. Fortunately, the introduction of the OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration) specifications has made the cross-solution integration much easier and more cost effective than it once was. Tremendous results, including an impressive ROI, can be achieved by combining IBM’s Jazz for Service Management, an open architecture for integrating multi-vendor solutions, with the strengths of OSLC. Because Jazz supports cross-solution data links, it is possible to create a single, unified view of relevant, in-context data, which is the ideal resource for troubleshooting purposes. This helps to diminish both the time-to-resolve and cost for each specific issue. Jazz promises to improve business value in both quantitative and qualitative ways through simplified, accelerated, and resilient solution integration. Read more about IBM’s solutions that provide increasing opportunities to multiply your organization’s potential ROI from integration. July 2013 Comprehensive APM Support for Every Scenario For many organizations, downtime for applications which drive internal services may be extremely problematic, whereas application outages for external services provided to customers or business partners could be disastrous. Performance degradation and application outages can quickly turn into poor customer experiences, reduced revenues, and diminished brand strength, all of which inevitably will lead to a less effective organization the longer the downtime continues. In order to empower organizations with the resources necessary to keep applications running smoothly, IBM has developed a comprehensive suite of application performance management solutions. The flagship solution, IBM SmartCloud Application Performance Management, is specifically designed for the advanced, dynamic nature of today’s cloud and hybrid application infrastructures. The solution capabilities provide organizations with the specifics necessary to understand how and why performance problems have occurred, so they can quickly take action to remediate those issues. Learn how your organization can benefit from these robust application performance management solutions today! June 2013 IBM Drives Up Business Agility Organizations today that respond rapidly and effectively to change typically outperform those that do not. They do so by focusing on areas that can enhance business agility. More specifically, cloud computing, mobile devices, and smarter infrastructures all play an important role in making organizations more aware of and responsive to customer needs and interests. At the same time, they have the ability to maintain control over operational costs so that they can direct more resources toward strategic innovation. In the same way that clouds have taken IT infrastructures by storm in recent years, smarter mobile devices are revolutionizing the way that business services are typically accessed. Organizations are also experiencing impressive benefits through smarts assets and infrastructures. Learn how your organization can remain agile in today’s robust and fast-paced business market. June 2013 IBM Maximo Protects the Most Valuable Asset of All There is a complex asset base in every organization that requires management and monitoring to achieve business goals and sustain profitability. In order to preserve the health and safety of the most important asset, the human workforce, asset management solutions must be as comprehensive, unified, forward-looking, and effective as possible. Improving health and safety standards is important in any organization. By doing so, it has been shown that profitability and worker productivity both climb, operating costs decline, while the public perception of the organization and employee retention are both improved. IBM’s Maximo Heath, Safety and Environment Manager is a solution designed to help organizations improve their workplace safety as completely and proactively as possible. Read more about IBM’s solutions that provide increasing benefits to enhance your workplace safety. May 2013 See Inside the Black Box: IT Visualizes Public Cloud Workloads The case for public cloud is very strong: improved service scalability, reduced operational costs, and an increased focus on business goals and strategies instead of the technology needed to pursue them. The flipside to these benefits, however, is reduced visibility. Without direct control over the cloud infrastructure itself, organizations typically have a more difficult time monitoring workload performance and service health. IBM’s new offering, SmartCloud Monitoring – Application Insight, gives you visibility into how applications are executing in a public cloud infrastructure. This new solution is specifically designed to meet the needs of the mid-market customer with limited budget and limited time – installation typically takes only minutes and administration is very straightforward. Learn how you can gain quick and easy visibility into the public cloud to monitor your organization’s workload performance and gauge service health. May 2013 What’s Old Is What’s New Back from Las Vegas where he attended Pulse 2013 in March, Ivor Macfarlane reflects on some of the concepts discussed at the event. One such topic was this: the skills, processes, and even the technology required for delivering good service management apply in a similar way, whether that service is an IT one or not. So combining IT and non-IT service management will deliver benefits to a business through economies of scale—and in other ways, too. Even though popular topics such as cloud and mobile have taken over the headlines, the basic premise of combining IT and enterprise support remains central. Ivor shares his unique perspective on Pulse. Read about his observations and takeaways from this year’s event. May 2013 The Sky Really Is the Limit A long-time champion of the critical role that open standards plays in IT service management, IBM announced at Pulse 2013 that going forward its cloud services and software will be based on an entirely open cloud architecture: OpenStack. This suite of technologies addressing key functionality such as distributed processing, storage management, and network management has support from organizations ranging from Intel to Cisco to VMware. IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator, based on open source technologies and standards, helps organizations create, deploy, and manage cloud-based services more easily, more quickly, and less costly than ever before. Discover how your organization can benefit from SmartCloud Orchestrator—from cloud cost tracking to integration of development and operations to time-to-market reductions—and gain a real edge in today’s competitive market. April 2013 Winning the Green Ribbon from Verdantix Those organizations that are able to implement energy management strategies stand to reap many benefits given that energy costs associated with data centers and other facilities are rapidly growing. However, putting those strategies in action is often easier said than done. Most organizations lack the visibility and quantification needed to understand how, when, and why energy consumption is changing. So it should be noted that IBM was recently cited as a leader in energy management software by independent analyst firm Verdantix. TRIRIGA, acquired by IBM in 2011, and IBM Maximo asset management solutions help to deliver the visibility and control organizations need to manage energy across all business domains, buildings, and campuses. Lean more about Verdantix’s analysis of the energy management software market and the firm’s detailed comparisons of 14 providers and their portfolios. April 2013 Driving Up Storage Performance, Availability, and ROI Cloud computing solutions often revolve around virtual servers and image provisioning, but for best results, storage should be incorporated into the architecture in an optimized way as well. Already, the demand for smart, cloud-optimized storage is high. IBM’s expertise in this area – considering that IBM already manages, in its own cloud, more than 250 petabytes of storage every day, used by more than four million transactions, for more than 200 managed clients – provides the insight and best practices needed to get the best results from storage in a cloud context. So it’s no surprise that IBM SmartCloud Storage – a compelling new family of cross-brand software, services, and storage that combines and augments the best elements of IBM's industry-leading storage portfolio – helps almost any organization utilize storage for best results in a cloud. And that's true regardless of whether the cloud model is public, private, or hybrid. How storage-savvy is your cloud strategy? Find out how SmartCloud Storage can help. April 2013 A Bonanza of Cloud Announcements To provide the greatest benefit to organizations, clouds should be more than simple engines for creating and spinning up new virtual servers and allocating resources such as processing power and storage. Instead, they should be embedded with analytical intelligence, predictive capabilities, and next-generation security intelligence. At Pulse 2013 held in March, IBM introduced a suite of new SmartCloud solutions that offer just that – spanning monitoring, control desk, and service orchestration domains. Also at Pulse, IBM announced a broad range of security intelligence enhancements for all cloud delivery models (public, private, and hybrid), and covering the gamut of security domains, from identity protection in accessing cloud-based services to data and application protection of several kinds to threat protection. Read about these exciting announcements and more from Pulse 2013. March 2013 Waiter, I'll Need A Workplace For Two Organizations are re-thinking their approach to facilities and workplace management. Common challenges include the increasing popularity of telecommuting, rule changes in building lease accounting, and growing emphasis on business Return on Assets. IBM TRIRIGA solutions, a leading provider of integrated workplace management solutions, can help implement new strategies to manage these challenges by allowing organizations to gain new insights into specific areas of real estate and building management. An optimized workplace reservation system is just one useful benefit, one that could allow for telecommuting on a larger scale, and cut building maintenance costs as well. Discover how IBM TRIRIGA solutions can help you optimize workplace management for your organization. March 2013 Rethinking Service Management from the Ground Up It’s become commonplace that service management is best implemented from the top down—beginning with a broad focus on value, and how best to create or improve that value—and then gradually proceeding to the specifics of the implementation. While this approach is useful and wise, it is not always pragmatic. Sometimes, circumstances make it nearly impossible. In this Real-World Service Management article, Ivor Macfarlane shares his unique perspective, suggesting the need to view service delivery improvements not only from the top down but also from the bottom up. After all, even “best” practices can only be as good as your ability to implement them. Read more and gain a new perspective on service delivery at your organization. March 2013 Accelerating IT Agility: Lessons from the World Wide Web As IT architectures become increasingly dynamic and automated, interoperability is more critical than ever, though methods to achieve it are limited. Lately, organizations have been pursuing a better idea: linked data to create interoperability that works across all domains. OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration), an initiative of which IBM was a founding member, aims to make any IT solution interoperable, using Web-like schemes and technologies. Since this method can also work for service delivery and service management, IBM is adding this functionality to its service management portfolio with Jazz for Service Management, an open and shared set of integration services. Learn how your IT operations can benefit from OSLC and Jazz for Service Management. January 2013 Get Up to Speed on Service Management In today’s competitive business climate, the ability to rapidly transform a business requirement into a business service is fundamental to success. For service management professionals, there’s no better learning and networking opportunity than Pulse. This year’s event, Pulse 2013, is being held in Las Vegas March 3-6 and offers expert insight from IBM business partners and industry analysts on the latest trends and solutions. Over 300 breakout sessions in five different streams—Cloud and IT Optimization, Smarter Infrastructures, the Mobile Enterprise, Security Intelligence, and Communications Service Providers—reflect the hottest IT and business topics today. Network with and learn from an expected attendance of over 8,000 IT experts, partners, clients, and peers. Learn more about the event, what you can expect, and how to register… today! January 2013 Make Your Voice Count The traditional model of developing an IT product in a strictly private manner within the organization and then publicly launching the product can be a slow and cumbersome process. At IBM, a new approach is underway. Transparent development—inviting customers, business partners, analysts, and really all parts of the solution ecosystem to track IBM progress and contribute their own thoughts and requests—is a growing trend that will enable IBM to satisfy customer needs more completely and more quickly. Service Management Connect is the place to go to access a diverse range of content pertaining to different solutions and solution clusters, from release information and access to code downloads to early designs, sprint demos, and product roadmaps. Read more and find out how you can easily get to the information you need, participate in relevant communities, and make your voice count. December 2012 Running IT With a Business Outlook IT services at many organizations have grown in an ad hoc manner over the years. As a result, operational domains have emerged and are managed separately from each other even though services may cross those domains. Unfortunately, all too often, the focus shifts to optimizing the domains rather than optimizing the end-to-end services. When technical issues occur that threaten service performance or continuity, the organization addresses the problem with a piecemeal approach—resulting in higher costs, lower service levels, and decreased customer satisfaction. Instead, problem resolution needs to happen in a prioritized, governed, and integrated way so as to deliver the best business outcome. Learn how you can mix and match IBM Tivoli solutions based on your requirements to make “business service management” a reality at your organization. December 2012 Getting Back to Basics Because of the rapid emergence of technologies and the myriad ways they’re used, IT has become a rather complex thing. Of course, IT is meant to solve complex business problems, which require complex solutions, combined in complex ways to deliver the best possible results. However, in service management, we must first understand and address the basic priorities underpinning all that complexity if we are to be successful. From his typically unique perspective, Ivor Macfarlane looks at customers and users—each usually having different priorities—and the need for organizations to clearly identify them and assess their needs in order to develop a balanced service management strategy. Don’t let IT complexity obscure service management essentials. Read Ivor’s refreshing perspective on getting back to basics. December 2012 Don’t Suffer From Insecurity: Get the Latest Trend and Risk Report Staying on top of the ever-changing IT security domain is a difficult task. That’s why the IBM X-Force Trend and Risk Reports—released twice each year—are so compelling. These reports offer not only detailed, quantified analysis of how attacks and attackers have evolved over the last six months, but also guidance on how organizations should respond. In addition this insight informs IBM’s own security solutions and services. Don’t wait! Download the latest report—providing industry-leading insight on emerging security threats, best practices, specific vulnerabilities, and other related topics—at no cost. December 2012 Link IT Development and Operations in the Cloud Organizations are increasingly pursuing custom software development in-house; however, many are falling short of their goals because of the way the software lifecycle spans two separate groups – the development team (creating the software) and the operations team (overseeing the production environment in which that software runs). Too often, these groups work independently, i.e., once development completes a build, they “throw it over the wall” into operations, which may result in delays and increased labor costs if the build has technical issues once deployed. Linking these teams and sharing information across their tools is a logical solution to the problem. Learn how IBM’s integration of its development and operations solutions—the IBM Rational and IBM Tivoli portfolios—helps organizations get better software, faster. November 2012 Get Into the Spotlight at Pulse 2013 Every year, IBM’s Pulse event is the blockbuster service management showcase of the year. And 2013 will be no exception. Pulse 2013, to be held from March 3–6 at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, offers a rich opportunity to network with—and learn from—industry experts, analysts, and professional peers. But have you considered speaking at the event and discussing how IBM solutions have helped your organization overcome its challenges? If you’re chosen to speak, you’ll receive a free full conference pass to Pulse 2013. You’ll also gain access to the Client Speaker VIP Lounge, and your organization will be included in the Program Guide and SmartSite. Don’t miss out. Learn how you can get a free conference pass to Pulse 2013. November 2012 Shift VMware into a Higher Gear The logic behind the shift to cloud is clear: superior resource allocation, smarter and dramatically faster process execution, and as a result, a more cost-effective and agile IT infrastructure. That’s why many organizations have virtualized and consolidated the IT infrastructure via leading virtualization environments such as VMware. And increasingly more are taking the next logical step—transforming to a private cloud. However, private clouds require more advanced capabilities in areas such as asset monitoring, security, application management, and service orchestration. Learn how IBM SmartCloud solutions can transform your current investment in VMware into a cost-efficient and secure private cloud that can evolve over time—however your organization requires. November 2012 The Evolution of ITSM Service Management is neither a new concept, nor was it invented by IT. In fact, as Ivor Macfarlane sees it, some version of it must have existed in ancient times during the construction of such marvels as Stonehenge. Something like configuration management, capacity management, change control, and incident and problem management must have existed in the minds of the project managers overseeing these magnificent undertakings, given the size and complexity of these projects. What IT has done is take the discipline of these working ideas, adapted them, and improved them…and the process is still very much in development. Read about Ivor’s unique perspective on the evolution of ITSM, where it’s headed, and how IT is shaping its direction. November 2012 IBM Tivoli Ranked #1 in Service Assurance by Analyst Strong competition among today’s communications service providers (CSPs) and growing customer expectations for availability and performance have spurred CSP investment in service assurance solutions. This year, industry analyst Analysys Mason acknowledged IBM’s leadership in service assurance, recognizing the company’s proven success at forming partnerships with the major infrastructure suppliers, integrating diverse technologies to form a cohesive service assurance solution, and helping CSPs to consolidate and simplify overall management via the Netcool portfolio. Learn more about the Analysys Mason report and how Netcool is helping CSPs deliver improved customer satisfaction while reducing operational risks and costs. November 2012 SAP in the Cloud: IBM Extends and Enhances SAP Application Management Complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, including widely deployed SAP solutions, often manage applications in a fragmented or domain-specific manner—not in a way that maximizes the total business value those applications generate over time. Adding to the challenge is the growth of virtualization and cloud models, which make resource allocation to SAP applications less predictable. Traditional performance and availability management practices simply don’t apply, and this has caused risk-averse organizations to shy away from deploying SAP applications in a cloud. Find out how IBM SmartCloud Application Performance Management, part of the larger IBM SmartCloud portfolio, makes it easy and fast to get exceptional value from a private cloud—even those running SAP. November 2012 Get Insight Into the Technical Side of Business Process Management More and more today, businesses are viewing IT not as a cluster of technical domains, but as an instrument of business goals. And nowhere is this trend more apparent than in the emergence of business process management (BPM). BPM helps to visualize, control, and automate business processes so as to increase performance and availability while lowering the risks and costs associated with services of all kinds. However, this task can be complicated given an advanced, virtualized architecture. IBM’s new integration of IBM Business Process Manager and IBM SmartCloud Application Management supports BPM by focusing on the technical infrastructure supporting business processes—empowering organizations to optimize and accelerate those processes in ways they couldn’t before. Find out how these solutions can help you gain better insight into your organization’s business processes and minimize negative business impact. November 2012 Understand Customers and Reap the Rewards The market for communications service providers (CSPs) is hot and getting hotter—and more competitive—by the day. To be successful, they need to be able to understand their customers’ needs, quantify them, and fulfill them as completely, quickly, and accurately as possible—all while keeping costs of operations under control and dialing up revenue through strategic innovation. A new offering now available to CSPs is IBM Netcool Network Analytics—a centralized platform of customer experience analysis that CSPs can use to better understand customer context, track and quantify the success of services and strategies, and over time, align what they do as closely as possible to what their customers actually want. Discover how this solution can help CSPs reduce customer churn, increase efficiencies, reduce costs, and increase revenue. October 2012 InterConnect 2012: Ten Hot Topics Spur Business Innovation Leveraging IT as the central service delivery platform of an organization is the most promising way to pursue innovation. However, figuring out how can be a complex and difficult task. For a fast, effective way to get up to speed in this area, attend InterConnect 2012, to be held at Resorts World Sentosa in Singapore from October 9–11. Complementing IBM’s own solutions and insight with professional networking opportunities and from-the-trenches experiences of organizations around the world, the event focuses on 10 hot topics that address unleashing innovation, managing the velocity of change, reinventing relationships, and uncovering new markets. Learn best practices, collaborate with business decision-making peers, and meet face to face with technical decision makers and industry experts. Get the details here. October 2012 Optimize your Endpoint Management with the Accelerated Value Program How do you know you’re maximizing the value you get from an IT solution? It usually takes a trusted partner to help you optimize the way you use the solution at every stage—from initial deployment and integration through ongoing management, always with an eye toward your organization’s context and its unique needs. That’s where the IBM Software Accelerated Value Program really proves its worth. Personalized for each client, this program helps an organization understand the full power of a sophisticated solution, IBM Endpoint Manager for instance, then leverage that power for the best outcome. Through extended, customized support, you’ll realize full value from your solution much faster than you would have had you acted alone. Read more and find out how program participants have achieved an estimated 400% ROI on average. October 2012 Evolving Toward Cloud Virtualization has taken enterprise data centers by storm—and you'd think that private cloud implementation, as the next logical step, wouldn't be far behind. At many organizations, however, a number of barriers stand in the way of that happening. Some may be skeptical about cloud hype, uncertain about the security or compliance ramifications of such a unified architecture, simply resistant to change, while others may face more technical or procedural obstacles. One thing to remember is that it’s not necessary, or even ideal, to make the cloud transition in a single step. Instead, a private cloud is often better implemented in logical stages. Learn about the benefits of developing the cloud over time, and adding new capabilities that run parallel to evolving business goals and strategies. October 2012 The Service Focus: An ITIL Retrospective It’s been five years since ITIL Version 3 was launched, trumpeting the new focus on services and service management loudly and pervasively. Given the dramatic change in IT during this period—the growth of cloud computing, the prevalence of smart mobile devices, and the effects of the recession, to name a few—Ivor Macfarlane takes this opportunity to look at the last five years of the “ITIL service lifecycle” and the significance and influence of ITIL V3. Find out what Ivor has to say about service design, service management concepts across the whole organization, and service improvement in the post-design stages. August 2012 Optimizing Network Management in the Cloud Leveraging clouds to best effect often demands careful consideration of the way network elements are monitored and managed, not just server and storage elements. That’s because clouds are comprised of an ever-growing number of hosts linked by networks—they depend on networks to interact with users, and in the case of hybrid models, with other clouds. As business-critical workloads increasingly migrate to the cloud, the total reliance on network resources and capabilities will only grow in proportion. The IBM Tivoli Netcool portfolio provides enhanced visibility, control, and automation over network performance. Learn how you can get the most out of your cloud-based services through optimized network management. August 2012 Tivoli & Security Technical Conference: Key Info on Today’s Hottest Topics IT security threats are greater than ever—not only externally from hackers and malware, but also internally from potential abuse by insiders with special access privileges. The EMEA Tivoli & Security Technical Conference is a great way to get up to speed on the latest best practices and technologies surrounding security and service management. Held at the University of London September 18-20, the conference offers 170 sessions, at different technical levels, on today’s hottest topics including security, cloud computing, mobile devices, regulation compliance, and service assurance; hands-on labs and demos; certification opportunities; and personal and professional networking. Find out more about the conference and what you’ll gain from its combination of business insights, technical information, and best practices for real-world integration. August 2012 How IBM Tivoli Optimizes Outsourced IT Managed services have become a more attractive option for organizations in recent years, due to not only the turbulent business climate, but also advances in IT infrastructure such as cloud and mobile technologies. Outsourcing certain operations services to a third party enables organizations to focus on their core competencies. The IBM Tivoli portfolio is a first-rate service management solution that managed service organizations can use to support a diverse range of services—from completely outsourced data centers to telecomm-grade service assurance to managed service desks to data protection and storage management. Read about the Tivoli portfolio of products and see how they can help you deliver, manage, and monetize services to your clients much more effectively. July 2012 IBM Positioned in Gartner’s Quadrant for Workload Automation Workloads today often span multiple systems, operating systems, and even complete architectures. As a result, tracking down and resolving problems that threaten workload fulfillment has become more difficult. An automated management solution is the answer. Recently analyst firm Gartner, Inc. recognized IBM’s leadership in this area by including the Tivoli Workload Automation suite in its Magic Quadrant for Workload Automation. By deploying these Tivoli solutions, organizations can ensure that workloads execute more optimally—on time and under budget—while also simplifying management and increasing management flexibility. Find out how your organization can benefit from comprehensive, automated oversight of workloads, regardless of how complex its underlying infrastructure may be. July 2012 IBM Unifies and Optimizes IT Services IBM has integrated in new ways IT service and asset management in IBM SmartCloud Control Desk, which combines and links capabilities from many of the IBM Tivoli portfolio of products. Among this solution’s capabilities: a service desk and service catalog, a unified repository of asset configuration data, and rapid ITIL process implementation in the cloud. While Tivoli solutions have historically been feature-and-function integrated, this new solution’s single intuitive interface acts as a central point of command so IT staff can better visualize, control, and automate any task. With IBM SmartCloud Control Desk realize cloud computing’s business potential—lower business risk, improve efficiency and quality of service, reduce software costs, simplify copyright compliance, and lower cloud TCO. July 2012 IBM’s New Mobile Management Solution More and more employees today are leveraging mobile devices not only for personal use, but also for work, getting remote access to business data, applications, and services. IT is challenged to bring these devices, with their numerous operating systems, under some measure of management and control. IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices helps you track, administer, and secure not only laptops, desktops, and servers, but also mobile devices—up to 250,000 endpoints via a centralized server. The solution supports any number of operating systems via one smart agent, or, in the case of Apple iOS, by leveraging Apple’s application programming interface. Read how IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices elegantly reduces mobile management complexity, benefiting both the organization and today’s mobile employee. June 2012 IBM Trend and Risk Report: New Threats, New Strategies The 2011 IBM X-Force Trend and Risk Report provides important information on new attack trends, a documented reduction of application security vulnerabilities and spam, and the new challenges that emerging technologies such as cloud and mobile present for IT security teams. The annual and mid-year reports produced by IBM X-Force gather data from numerous sources, including its database of more than 50,000 computer security vulnerabilities, its global Web crawler and international spam collectors, and the real-time monitoring of 13 billion events every day for nearly 4,000 clients in more than 130 countries. Don’t miss out. Read the free 2011 IBM X-Force Trend and Risk Report to better understand the latest security risks, how to stay ahead of them, and what new challenges lie ahead. June 2012 IBM SmartCloud Application Performance Management: Shifting Application Performance into Higher Gear With private cloud architectures, new servers are continually being created and eliminated and resource allocation is difficult to predict, making composite application management an even greater challenge. IBM’s SmartCloud Application Performance Management solution addresses this challenge by providing enhanced visibility into application performance. New, role-customizable user dashboards present key data and performance metrics that allow managers—whether it be a business manager or an IT manager—to drill down into detailed information applicable to that role to oversee and improve application performance. Learn more about how to monitor your organization’s application performance in the cloud and minimize negative business outcomes. June 2012 Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained: Rethinking Risk Management In the risk-averse world of IT, is it possible to “right-size” risk? Ivor Macfarlane shares his thoughts and observations on risk management and how rightsizing risk—not necessarily eliminating it—can actually lead to better business outcomes. In his view, risk management should be less about reducing risk and more about consciously adopting the right level of risk to create the highest value. And that level of risk must be assessed from not only the organization’s perspective but also from that of the customer. Is “always minimize risk” your organization’s mantra? Find out what Ivor has to say and see if it’s time to rethink your organization’s approach to risk management. June 2012 Energy Efficiency: IBM TRIRIGA Provides Key Insight A recent study conducted by Gartner in collaboration with IBM TRIRIGA found that more than 80% of the best-performing organizations surveyed in the study aggregated and analyzed both energy and environmental data from building/facilities across all campuses. This statistic has value both at the organizational level, in terms of controlling and even reducing rapidly escalating operations costs, and in a global sense, where reduced carbon emissions slow the rate of global warming. IBM TRIRIGA solutions help you collect, analyze, and act on energy data—even at a granular level, providing data on specific buildings or sites. Discover how you can gain the insight you need to refine and extend your organization’s energy efficiency and sustainability strategies, and get rapid, quantified improvement fast. May 2012 IBM PureSystems: An Ideal Service Management Platform While the business potential of cloud computing is generally well understood, the specific implementation of private clouds is not, and often presents a stumbling block for organizations trying to make sense of the dizzying array of choices in areas ranging from processor architecture to operating systems to middleware to virtualization. Recently launched IBM PureSystems help organizations solve that problem. PureSystems are expert integrated solutions, that integrate IBM’s deep and proven expertise in cloud computing with its own broad range of cloud solutions, for deploying and managing private clouds rapidly, easily, and cost-effectively. Learn more about PureSystems and how the IBM Tivoli service management portfolio of products, which are built on open standards, integrate seamlessly with both PureSystems and third-party offerings. May 2012 IBM’s New Security Community: An Open Forum on Security Topics As IT architectures become more complex and diverse (consider cloud computing and mobile endpoints as examples), the need for timely, accurate insight and guidance in the area of security grows more pressing. To help keep you up to date on new developments, IBM recently launched a new community site for its Institute for Advanced Security. The site offers content from security experts specializing in a wide range of security subjects, and provides site members the opportunity to contribute insights of their own. Also participating on the site are members of IBM’s X-Force team, producers of the IBM Trend and Risk Report published twice each year. Find out more about the Institute for Advanced Security community. Explore the blogs, videos, webcasts and rich resources the site has to offer, and join in the conversation. May 2012 Take Your Storage into the Cloud In organizations today, data volumes are rapidly growing, insights from smarter analytics are driving more business strategies, and cloud computing is gaining momentum. More than ever, IT needs a centralized way to handle both diverse storage tasks and diverse IT architectures. Discover how the IBM Tivoli service management portfolio’s storage management and backup/recovery solutions leverage smart features, open standards, and proven best practices to help organizations get their arms around the complete storage challenge. From managing unified backup and recovery to improving storage infrastructure optimization to reducing your data storage footprint and more, discover how the IBM Tivoli service management portfolio can help you protect your data and realize better business outcomes. April 2012 Pulse 2012: Business Value With Cloud + Mobile Cloud computing and endpoint management are two of today’s most important technologies. At Pulse 2012, IBM made a number of announcements directly addressing these topics. Leading the list of new mobile solutions at Pulse was IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices, which offers superior security and lifecycle management via both agented and agentless mechanisms. This solution benefits both the organization and the employee by helping to ensure that both company and personal data remain secure. In the area of cloud computing, IBM announced its new SmartCloud technology, now in its third generation. SmartCloud Foundation—enabling exceptionally flexible and scalable private and hybrid cloud architectures—and related offerings are compelling new solutions for cloud optimization. Learn how the solutions discussed at Pulse can help you increase performance and scalability while reducing costs and business risks. April 2012 Maximizing Employee Health and Safety: IBM Gives C&P Organizations a Helping Hand In the chemicals and petroleum (C&P) industry, asset management solutions are critically important in not just increasing the business value of assets, but also helping protect the most valuable asset of all: the workforce. This industry utilizes large-scale, distributed assets deployed on both land and water. In order to hit business and operational targets, these assets must be continually configured, monitored, and maintained properly—all while maintaining employee health and safety levels. IBM Maximo Health, Safety, and Environmental Manager empowers C&P organizations with unified, best-practices-driven oversight of safety initiatives and operating environments in real time. Read how this new solution’s comprehensive reporting and analysis capabilities enable C&P organizations to access and analyze data in order to gain insights into how to minimize risk and maximize employee health and safety. April 2012 IBM Surfs the Mobile Wave: Build, Connect, Manage, Extend According to the 2011 IBM Tech Trends Report, the top three mobile adoption concerns expressed by organizations are: (1) security, (2) development cost for multiple platforms, and (3) cloud integration. IBM’s new Mobile Enterprise initiative addresses these concerns and more. A key part of this initiative is IBM’s acquisition of leading mobile application solution provider Worklight, whose solutions enable organizations to create new apps for smart mobile devices using a single codebase, then roll out versions of the app instantly for all platforms. Also part of the initiative is IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices and a powerful suite of mobile solutions to foster social business. Discover all the ways IBM’s Mobile Enterprise initiative can help your organization address today’s mobile adoption concerns while optimizing workforce productivity and customer care. April 2012 Ivor Macfarlane: Recollections and Take-aways from Pulse 2012 FIvor Macfarlane shares his thoughts and personal experiences from Pulse 2012 held this past March. For Ivor, one of the highlights was Manoj Saxena’s discussion of Watson, IBM’s natural language technology, and how its innovative capabilities—dredging through massive volumes of data, weighing the possibilities, and deciding on the best answer—relate to real-world needs. Another highlight was the service management simulator games that involve teams of players who work collaboratively to implement best practices in order to solve simulated real-world challenges. Ivor notes, too, the Expo’s educational value and the advantage of learning about new technologies that could influence business strategies down the road. Ivor shares other take-aways from the event, including the value of social collaboration with attendees from around the globe, and how you can benefit from Pulse Comes To You offered throughout 2012. March 2012 IBM Wins Coveted Magic Quadrant Award for OSS Few, if any, industries are as competitive as telecommunications, so communications service providers (CSPs) have turned to operations support systems (OSS) solutions to increase operational efficiency, create new and innovative services, improve the customer experience, and leverage new technologies. Gartner recently named IBM as a Magic Quadrant leader in its first-ever award for the OSS field, distinguishing IBM as “the leading worldwide OSS player and overall OSS market share leader.” IBM’s Smarter Communications offering, built through innovative developments and strategic acquisitions, helps CSPs drive down costs, drive up time-to-solution, and enhance customer experience. Read about how IBM’s OSS portfolio, which is interoperable with solutions from completely different vendors, can increase CSPs’ competitiveness, position them for future growth, and help them more quickly adopt new technologies to enhance their overall business value and succeed in a rapidly changing marketplace. March 2012 IBM’s Software Accelerated Value Program: Maximize Your Software’s ROI Staying on top of your organization’s software investment — implementing new solutions, updating current software, integrating software management solutions, managing technical issues — may sometimes require more expertise than your in-house IT team may have. Extended software support can help. Through IBM’s Software Accelerated Value Program, you can create a tailored support package that includes expert technological insight and human collaboration. The program is available for all the software IBM offers, addressing the complete lifecycle of software in every case, and includes a dedicated Accelerated Value Leader as the liaison between you and IBM’s full scope of resources. More technical support is also available as is on-site assistance. Learn how IBM’s Software Accelerated Value Program offers an exceptional return on your software investment, allowing you to choose support where you need it, and not where you don’t. March 2012 Smarter Real Estate Management: IBM TRIRIGA Drives Strategic Planning Impending accounting rule changes, requiring organizations to move operating leases from the income statement to the balance sheet as a capital asset and liability, will likely be finalized this year, greatly affecting organizations with large or distributed sites. According to recent findings by CFO Research Services, while most large companies are aware of the changes, a staggering 92% of those companies surveyed are not adequately prepared to capture, organize, analyze, and report on the probable balance sheet impact. In addition, 58% of executives anticipate new or upgraded enterprise asset management or real estate management systems to comply with the new standard. IBM TRIRIGA helps companies collect and analyze information pertaining to buildings and campuses at every phase of the real estate lifecycle. Find out how TRIRIGA can help you not only address the new accounting rule changes, but also maximize the efficiency of your organization’s assets through centralized information aggregation and analysis. February 2012 Pulse 2012: A View into the Future of Innovation Pulse 2012 turns the spotlight on emerging business challenges and how service management can help you address them for a better business outcome. On the agenda for this year’s event: Cloud Computing, Mobility and Intelligent Endpoint Management, Smarter Physical Infrastructures, and Security and Compliance Analytics. Exploring exciting IT development in these areas and more will be engaging and exceptionally well-known session speakers—among others, IBM Tivoli’s Danny Sabbah, general manager, on cloud computing, to Jamie Thomas, Vice President of Strategy and Development, on IBM’s roadmap for “optimizing the world’s infrastructure” (the Pulse 2012 tagline), to Steve Mills, IBM Senior Vice President, on smarter computing best practices, to Manoj Saxena, General Manager of IBM Watson, discussing some of the new areas where Watson’s value through natural language comprehension and deep analytics will be applied. Attendees will also hear Steve Wozniak, co-found of Apple Computer, share his unique perspective on how business and technology have changed, and where he thinks they’re heading. February 2012 IBM Service Management Simulator: Back By Popular Demand One of the front-running attractions at Pulse 2012, to be held March 4-7 in Las Vegas, will surely be IBM’s Service Management Simulator Workshop. The Workshop, scheduled for Sunday, March 4, from 2:00 to 5:00 pm, is a hands-on activity that engages players in a game that helps them rapidly understand the real-world value of collaborating across domains, communicating both within and outside the company hierarchy, visualizing challenges and their effect on the bottom line, and implementing leading best practices. It encourages all participants to think and cooperate in new ways, providing just enough pressure to keep everybody invested, and also to accurately reflect the fact that emerging problems really do require a quick and effective response. Read more about this adrenaline-generating game and learn how you can be a part of it at Pulse 2012. February 2012 Pulse 2012: A Portrait of the Smarter Planet, Courtesy of IBM The world’s infrastructure has changed dramatically in recent years, becoming digitally more instrumented, intelligent, and interconnected. To drive positive change on a truly global scale, it takes a world leader in IT. IBM is just that leader and will showcase the organization’s full range of capabilities at Pulse 2012: Optimizing the World’s Infrastructure to be held March 4-7 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. At Pulse, IBM will showcase its range of capabilities—including cloud and virtualization, business service management, network and service assurance, security, storage management, automated operations, application lifecycle management, and enterprise asset management. Be among the expected 7,000 attendees and learn about new solution releases, roadmaps for forthcoming development, sessions with domain experts and real-world clients, and solution demos. February 2012 Pulse 2012: Rethink IT, Reinvent Business with Cloud Computing Cloud computing adoption is clearly on the rise. Forrester Research estimates that total cloud spending will more than triple from 2011 to 2015, going from $41 billion to $150 billion. As a leader in cloud computing, IBM has added a suite of capabilities to its SmartCloud Foundation solutions, introduced last April, to give organizations enhanced Visibility Control Automation™ of IT services, and enable them to drive down costs and risks while driving up business value. Announcements will be made at Pulse 2012, to be held March 4-7 in Las Vegas, where attendees will learn about NEW IBM SmartCloud capabilities in the areas of security, asset monitoring, change management, storage, server provisioning, and more. Attend Pulse and get a peek at IBM's latest solutions, strategies, and insights into cloud computing. January 2012 IBM Service Management Simulator: Back By Popular Demand One of the front-running attractions at Pulse 2012, to be held March 4-7 in Las Vegas, will surely be IBM’s Service Management Simulator Workshop. The Workshop, scheduled for Sunday, March 4, from 2:00 to 5:00 pm, is a hands-on activity that engages players in a game that helps them rapidly understand the real-world value of collaborating across domains, communicating both within and outside the company hierarchy, visualizing challenges and their effect on the bottom line, and implementing leading best practices. It encourages all participants to think and cooperate in new ways, providing just enough pressure to keep everybody invested, and also to accurately reflect the fact that emerging problems really do require a quick and effective response. Read more about this adrenaline-generating game and learn how you can be a part of it at Pulse 2012. January 2012 IBM’s Role-Based Identity Management: Access Control Made Agile One of the most challenging aspects of IT security today is access governance—establishing which employees are authorized to access which resources, and with which privileges, then monitoring and updating those access privileges on an ongoing basis as workers come and go, or change job responsibilities. This has led to the rise of role-based access control systems, in which access privileges are established by the role an employee performs, and logical groups of such roles, as based on models developed from current access data. Learn how Tivoli Identity Manager and its IBM Security Role and Policy Modeler provide you with a business-centric approach to planning, understanding, and modeling the security roles and separation of duty constraints for securing access to critical resources. January 2012 Ivor Macfarlane on Persuasion 101: Selling new technology to skeptical business leaders Having spent many years in IT, Ivor Macfarlane has noticed a pattern: If you’re an IT professional and you want your executives to support something new, you’ll probably need to think very carefully about how you pitch it. Even if you really think it’s amazing—especially if you really think it’s amazing—you’ll probably want to keep your pitch at a very practical, everyday level. Ivor shares his thoughts on how to carefully cross the gap between the tech-informed IT pro perspective and the practical, business-centric management perspective where emphasis is often placed on current business problems that need solutions now. Read Persuasion 101 to learn how to get your business leaders to support your technology pitch. And gain credibility along the way—for the next time you’re pitching something new to your executives. December 2011 Achieve Continuous Compliance with IBM Security Solutions Regulatory compliance is a necessity for business and IT managers alike. Often times, organizations implement ad hoc compliance approaches. However, organizations that incorporate compliance throughout their business processes can usually benefit from a reduction in required resources, simplified processes to achieve compliance, greater ability to adapt to changing requirements, and ready access to the information required to satisfy an audit. Just as IT security has rapidly evolved, so too must compliance strategies. IBM Security Solutions offers the expertise, insight and experience to help your organization stay in continual compliance with all applicable regulations. Learn how IBM’s solutions and services, including expert consultation, can help you at every stage of a security and compliance initiative, from initial evaluations to subsequent strategy and implementation to ongoing management over time. December 2011 Business Agility as a Factor for Change Business agility is one of the most essential elements to an organization’s success. Consider that an organization that is quick to change can anticipate a new opportunity, respond to shifting market conditions, or, more importantly, satisfy customer requests. But how do organizations swiftly enhance and optimize their IT infrastructure to enable agility? IBM and its Business Partners are equipped with the solution portfolio needed to do just that. IBM Tivoli delivers quality services, manages risk and compliance, and accelerates business growth through prioritized business service management, higher service availability through predictive analytics, and improved collaboration between IT development and IT operations. Read about how your organization can change quickly and become more agile with solutions from IBM Tivoli. December 2011 Gartner Identifies IBM as a Leader in the 2011 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) This year, about $2 billion will be spent worldwide on Application Performance Monitoring (APM) licenses and first-year maintenance contracts. While detecting bottlenecks in the application chain is relatively easy, isolating them to root causes, and eliminating those root causes, is not. As a result, APM is rapidly expanding and evolving to encompass end-user experience monitoring; runtime application architecture discovery, modeling, and display; transaction profiling; event tracing; fine-grained monitoring of resource consumption; and analytics. IBM has optimized, refined, and integrated families of APM solutions into an overall infrastructure focused on all five dimensions of APM capabilities. Learn how IBM Tivoli solutions can help your organization maximize application availability and performance and why Gartner has named IBM a leader in the APM field. November 2011 At IBM’s Pulse 2012 Gain Insight into a Portrait of a Smarter Planet The world’s infrastructure has changed dramatically in recent years, becoming digitally more instrumented, intelligent, and interconnected. To drive positive change on a truly global scale, it takes a world leader in IT. IBM is just that leader and will showcase the organization’s full range of capabilities at Pulse 2012: Optimizing the World’s Infrastructure to be held March 4-7 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. At Pulse, IBM will showcase its range of capabilities—including cloud and virtualization, business service management, network and service assurance, security, storage management, automated operations, application lifecycle management, and enterprise asset management. Be among the expected 7,000 attendees and learn about new solution releases, roadmaps for forthcoming development, sessions with domain experts and real-world clients, and solution demos. November 2011 IBM X-Force Reports: Insight to Shield Your Organization Every year, the array of security threats increases not just in number, but also in sophistication, intelligence, and persistence. Keeping abreast of new developments is, by itself, a full-time job. IBM X-Force® trend reports provide security professionals with accurate and timely information on emerging security trends and risks. Published twice a year, these influential reports are organized into four categories—Threats, Operating Secure Infrastructure, Secure Software, and Emerging Trends, including mobile technology and vulnerable databases. These reports provide a comprehensive look at how Internet security has changed, how those changes may impact business, and what organizations can do to mitigate the impact. The 2011 Mid-Year Trend & Risk Report is a must-read for security professionals to bring themselves up to speed on the major trends in a quick and convenient way. November 2011 IBM SmartCloud Foundation: Building a Better Cloud How can you put an infrastructure in place to scale up for demand, if you don't know what that demand will be? Not knowing demand, how can you provide service assurance to keep core services up and running in the face of fluctuating conditions? Worse yet, in a very uncertain world, how do you deal with the increasing security threats coming from inside and outside your organization? For CIOs looking to make a successful transition into Cloud Computing, a very sophisticated virtual infrastructure is absolutely critical. IBM’s SmartCloud Foundation provides an automated cloud service delivery platform that automatically creates and provisions new virtual servers based on business policies, using a library of images to dramatically lower the costs and risks of managing a cloud computing initiative. Learn how you can reduce administrative and labor costs while rolling out applications 35 times faster than before using a cloud infrastructure. October 2011 Pulse 2012: Business Without Limits Achieving breakout success in today's business climate means facing and moving beyond your operational limitations. For a fast, efficient way to learn how, you won't find a better opportunity than Pulse 2012: Optimizing the World's Infrastructure, to be held March 4-7 in Las Vegas. The event streams will focus on such topical areas as Cloud and Data Center Optimization, Smarter Physical Infrastructures, Leveraging Mobility, and Managing Security and Compliance. Join more than 7,000 attendees and learn how IBM can help your organization drive a better business outcome via enhanced Visibility, Control, and Automation. Listen to industry experts, learn about powerful new solutions and services, get a sneak peek at product roadmaps, achieve certifications in areas that match your organization’s needs, and, of course, interact with professional peers from around the world. October 2011 Pursue Cloud Strategies Via Modular IBM Entry Points With 60% of today's CIOs planning to use cloud architectures, according to the 2011 IBM study The Essential CIO: Insights from the Global Chief Information Officer, it will be critical for organizations to pair the right cloud model to the right cloud architecture. To get a high return on investment, however, will depend on understanding the many complexities involved. Learn how to leverage the successes of other organizations with a trusted cloud development partner with experience in many kinds of cloud deployments—experience spanning both IT and business perspectives—to minimize risks and costs. October 2011 IBM SaaS Offering: Service Management from the Cloud Learn how small to medium-size enterprises can leverage Tivoli software as a service. While IBM Tivoli is best known as a leader in enterprise-class IT software, mid-market organizations can leverage SaaS offerings that include IBM Tivoli Live – service manager, an IBM hosted suite of five integrated services that address configuration management, problem and incident management, IT asset management, service catalog, and change and release management. Since not all IT clients will need all five services, IT clients can configure Tivoli Live – service manager as a tailored package of services that meet their specific needs today, while remaining adjustable over time. September 2011 IBM’s Cloud Platform: Optimized Service Management, Tailored for Your Needs Today’s organizations are faced with new complexities and new opportunities each and every day. Among other challenges, they face market shifts, technological and business transformation within the organization, an increasing emphasis on flexibility and differentiation to stand out in a competitive market, and strict government regulations. Cloud architectures can address all of these complexities—transforming business infrastructure and services to foster innovation and generate superior value. Moving forward with a cloud initiative, however, will mean implementing cloud in a way that makes the best business sense given the specific context of the organization. Toward that end, organizations will usually benefit from a trusted partner with extensive experience in cloud, to ensure they get the right cloud implementation for their circumstances (both now and going forward). IBM is exceptionally well positioned to be that partner, offering some of the industry's most experienced and informed consulting, applicable to organizations of all sizes and challenges in all industries. September 2011 IBM Tivoli Delivers Swift, Complete Data Protection for Virtual Servers It's no exaggeration to say virtualization has significantly transformed enterprise data centers. However, virtual servers imply new ramifications for IT managers to take into account. Consider how virtualization can affect data backup. Legacy backup solutions were certainly not designed for today's world, in which many virtual servers may be running in parallel on a shared physical host. Data backup becomes even more significant in the case of cloud architectures. Clouds leverage virtualization in an exceptionally deep and automated way, generating new virtual servers to fulfill unpredictable demand levels for cloud services. As a result, the number of virtual servers existing in a given cloud may be continually in flux. Backing up all the data in all the servers in a cloud is no simple task. It may require new backup solutions or strategies more sophisticated than anything the enterprise has deployed to date. Fortunately, via two IBM solutions—Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack and Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments—data backups running in even the most advanced virtualized infrastructures can be backed up in a business-savvy, resource-optimized fashion so that all data is preserved, and can be restored on demand, while simultaneously minimizing the impact on IT services. September 2011 Smarter Storage from IBM: Get Virtualization-Savvy Management With the swift deployment of virtualization in enterprise IT, getting highest value from business data requires a smarter storage management strategy—and virtualization-savvy solutions designed to make that strategy an up-and-running reality. That means taking into account the full array of information sources and IT assets commonly in use by the enterprise today: databases, server images, file systems, storage array provisioning, tape libraries, and many others. How can IT managers get their arms around these various complexities? One suggestion is to think in terms of centralized management of key storage domains, including discovery, performance management, configuration management, and reporting. The goal should be to achieve a holistic command of them all: end-to-end network configuration, as opposed to management of individual components. IBM Tivoli Storage Productivity Center includes features and functions that align with each of those domains, giving storage administrators a central point of control over storage in as much, or as little, specific technical detail as required. Using it, they can simplify storage deployment, optimize performance and utilization, federate end-to-end management in general, and in many cases, automate everyday tasks in which efficiency and consistency are more important than direct human oversight. August 2011 IBM Fosters Innovation: New Cross-Domain Links Create New Value In today's competitive economy, software-driven innovation can be a royal road to business success. However, one of the foremost service management challenges organizations face today is this: while software drives services, the IT Development teams that create it and the IT Operations teams that manage it usually work largely in isolation from each other, instead of collaborating cohesively in the pursuit of shared goals. This de facto wall between the two groups leads to a diminished outcome in many ways. In order to succeed, new links are needed to integrate these two groups and by integrating them across the full software lifecycle—Design, Deliver, and Manage—organizations can spur innovation and significantly improve the business value their software-driven services create. Fortunately, as a world leader in both IT operations and IT development via the IBM Tivoli and IBM Rational portfolios respectively, IBM has both the expertise and the solutions organizations need to enhance the way software-driven services are designed and delivered. August 2011 IBM Empowers the Utility Grid: New Intelligence Yields Better Service Management IBM’s Smarter Planet concept envisions a world in which, through innovative, cross-domain management of information and infrastructure, it becomes possible to create more value through smarter services. If that idea seems a little abstract at first, consider it in the specific context of electric utility grids. Electricity is clearly a central, critical service required by virtually all individuals and organizations every day. It stands to reason that by optimizing the way that service is monitored, managed, and optimized—making it, in a word, smarter—we all stand to benefit in many ways. What's more, new benefits will extend to energy providers as well because they face many significant complexities going forward that require a new approach. Improving service management in a more holistic sense—by keeping the focus on the complete service being rendered, and implementing change designed to enhance that service—will enable utilities to better meet their customers' needs, mitigate many forms of risk, reduce costs and management complexity, and ultimately experience an improved business outcome. August 2011 IBM Unveils Smarter Computing: Designed for Data, Tuned to the Task, and Managed in the Cloud Three years ago, IBM unveiled its vision of a Smarter Planet—an interconnected, intelligent, instrumented world in which information and services could be linked in new ways to create compelling new value. Making that vision a reality, however, does involve rethinking the technological infrastructure, then pursuing a new approach, which IBM has called Smarter Computing. This new approach enables organizations to overcome some of today’s significant infrastructure challenges, such as those characterized by: Sprawling IT, that grows larger and more costly with each IT investment; Inflexible IT, that limits integration; and Incomplete Data, that results in ill-informed decisions. Smarter Computing enables organizations to design their IT infrastructure to reduce costs and create new opportunities because the approach is Designed for Data, Tuned to the Task, and Managed in the Cloud. Many IBM clients are already translating Smarter Computing optimizations into real-world benefits. July 2011 Pulse Comes to You: Experience the Pulse Roadshow More than 7,000 attendees, from 70 countries, were on hand at Pulse 2011 to learn how Integrated Service Management can help organizations deliver innovative services more securely, efficiently, and cost effectively. If you didn't get a chance to go to Pulse, you can still catch up by attending Pulse Comes to You: a global roadshow offering some of the most pertinent and compelling sessions and presentations from Pulse 2011. Presentations will be led by IBM experts and executives as well as by service management leaders from a variety of industries. Event keynotes will vary from city to city, but for every city, IBM has carefully selected content that best addresses the needs of the local market, ensuring exceptional value for attendees. Informational session topics have been handpicked for best value in each specific market as well. Pulse Comes to You events, replete with the latest insights on topics ranging from service management best practices to cloud computing, are free of charge. It’s hard to imagine getting better return on investment than that. July 2011 IBM Increases Building IQ for Superior Efficiency, Reliability and ROI In an unpredictable economy, getting the best possible return on investment from an organization’s assets—the full scope of assets, including entire buildings—is key to business success. Yet building ROI is often difficult even to establish—let alone optimize. How can organizations best manage large campuses of buildings, or diverse real estate investments, to improve their efficiency, increase tenant satisfaction, and create more favorable leasing terms? Answering such questions accurately will require innovative solutions designed to deliver information that organizations can use to drive up building ROI and efficiency while driving down costs and management complexity. IBM’s solutions for Smarter Buildings empower organizations to aggregate building information (spanning many diverse assets and services), analyze that information, correlate it across domains, and compare the results to targets and business policies. The solutions also empower organizations to take effective action—both automated and manual—to drive a better, smarter outcome. July 2011 IBM Empowers CSPs to Cloud-ify Services As customer needs and interests expand and change, communications service providers (CSPs) must respond in parallel and with agility. Conventional CSP infrastructures, however, often yield less-than-ideal agility. Cloud computing promises a superior approach. Via a cloud, CSPs can create new services by utilizing the existing infrastructure in new ways, and, by leveraging virtualization and automation at a deep level, can deliver services in an optimized fashion. As more resources are required by unexpected demand, those resources are allocated fluidly. To best fulfill this compelling vision, however, CSPs will need an integrated, optimized solution to manage and govern the cloud, and the services it delivers, for best business results over the full service lifecycle. One such solution is IBM’s Integrated Service Management for Cloud Service Providers—a complete, centralized solution for creating, deploying, and managing cloud-born, carrier-grade services. It supports all the types of clouds CSPs may wish to deploy, whether public, private, or hybrid. Furthermore, it applies not just to customer-focused services, but also internal services used by the CSP itself, thus helping to maximize the business value the CSP gets from the cloud. June 2011 IBM Empowers Utilities: Smart Management for Smart Meters Network "Smart" assets are quickly becoming the norm, not the exception. And for utilities providers, who are currently deploying smart meters en masse, that comes as very good news…if they have the end-to-end service management solutions needed to take full advantage of them. IBM’s Intelligent Metering Network Management delivers centralized insight into, and control over, even the largest and most complex utilities infrastructures, empowering them not just to collect information, but also to analyze it and take swift, effective action for a better business outcome. This offering is comprised of a foundation of smart IBM management solutions, each integrated with the others and each based on open standards for maximum compatibility with existing infrastructures. IBM Intelligent Metering Network Management simplifies overall service management by allowing utilities to consolidate events and alarms into a single logical environment—a "manager of managers.” What might have been an unwieldy, sprawling infrastructure based on potentially millions of separate assets becomes instead a unified infrastructure—one that can be managed from a single point of control for an agile, effective, and cost-effective response to many classes of challenges and issues. June 2011 Secure Clouds Proactively for Sky-High Value In recent years, cloud computing has been a major focus of attention in the world of IT...and that attention has been amply justified. Cloud architectures promise superior service levels, reduced business risks, and accelerated innovation: a truly optimized platform of service delivery as measured by almost any metric. If cloud computing has an Achilles heel in the mind of decision-makers today, though, it's probably the security ramifications. Toward mitigating these security risks and complexities, many organizations will benefit from a trusted partner—a partner with extensive, proven expertise not just in cloud computing, but also in business computing in a larger sense, including the full array of security complexities that clouds may involve. IBM is ideally positioned to be that partner. Among other strengths, consider IBM's thought leadership: the real-world insight, gleaned from hundreds of successful customer engagements, needed to get the best business value from any cloud initiative. June 2011 Manage Virtual Images Across the Complete Lifecycle with IBM Tivoli Virtualization has transformed enterprise IT—and virtual images have made that transformation possible. This is why organizations, as they seek new ways to leverage virtualization for business value, will find that optimized workload image management—across the complete image lifecycle—will play a key role. If virtualization is really going to optimize IT operations in the intended way, it's essential for IT to know which virtual images are deployed on which virtual servers, the applications and services they're associated with, the logical elements included with virtual images, and many other aspects. But keeping track of this information is no simple matter, and the more images that are created, the harder that task becomes. IBM offers a wealth of best-in-class solutions that can be combined in a modular fashion to fulfill workload image management functions throughout the IT infrastructure, whenever and however they're required, driving down operational costs and driving up service levels as a result. Specifically, by addressing the three basic stages of the image lifecycle—build, manage, and deploy—in an intelligent and deeply automated manner, IBM solutions can empower IT to get more business value from virtualization than ever before. May 2011 IBM’s Integrated Service Management: A Smarter Infrastructure for a Smarter Planet As our planet's collective infrastructure evolves, it is becoming more intelligent, interconnected, and instrumented. Today we are able to aggregate more information than ever before and analyze it to create the tailored, optimized services we need to solve any given problem or achieve any given goal. Toward these ends, IBM's vision of Integrated Service Management, essentially one of enhanced visibility, control, and automation, can play a key role. By seeing what's happening in the infrastructure in real time, then taking effective, business-prioritized action, the infrastructure can become a superior instrument of overall strategies, as well as meet the needs of customers and clients more effectively and cost-efficiently. "Integrated" in this sense also means that management of the infrastructure is no longer divided separately into strictly technological or business tools; instead, management converges. One set of tools and information can be used to support both contexts. IBM is uniquely positioned to help organizations in all industries focus on what matters most—the services they deliver, and how those services can be optimized to better meet customer needs while also driving down costs and risks. May 2011 IBM Solutions for Smart Business Manage Services, Application Performance Centralized, cross-domain IT solutions have become much more appealing for small and mid-market organizations, where basic resources—staffing and funding—typically aren’t abundantly available. However, from a service management perspective, they can be difficult to manage. IBM Service Manager for Smart Business and IBM Application Manager for Smart Business are turnkey appliances designed for quick and easy implementation and integration, yet both deliver exceptional value across a broad variety of different IT domains and tasks. They help organizations turn the focus from the technology per se to what really matters—minimizing interruptions of core business processes and simplifying the implementation of business strategies. They also epitomize what IBM means by "smart business": instead of simply more infrastructure, the goal should be more efficient, cost-efficient, and business-prioritized utilization of the infrastructure. For small and mid-market organizations with limited staffing and funding, that's very smart indeed. May 2011 IBM’s 2010 Trend and Risk Report Delivers Key Security Insights and Analysis Security is no place for compromise. Faced with increasing pressure from a diverse range of security threats, organizations must respond with smarter, more proactive security solutions and strategies than ever before to address those threats as early, and as comprehensively, as possible. That's why twice every year the IBM X-Force® research and development team releases a trend and risk report—a summary of the insights and discoveries made by this group of security specialists over the course of six months. Along with valuable analysis of just how the security landscape is changing, each report provides guidance on how organizations can respond in kind, and better protect their infrastructures and services against the complete range of threats. Download and read the extraordinarily valuable information in the 2010 Trend and Risk Report. It is a great way to keep current—a consultation with the best experts in the security field, and available for free. May 2011 Innovate 2011: Collaborative Development and Operations In a perfect world, IT operations and development would work smoothly and collaboratively in the pursuit of shared business goals. However, in the past, this ideal has been largely a goal unachieved. IBM—an industry leader in both operations and development, via its Tivoli and Rational solution portfolios—has made particularly impressive strides in connecting these two groups in many innovative, powerful ways. IBM’s Innovate 2011, held in Orlando from June 5-9, focuses on software development as a platform for business innovation. Learn how to achieve greater organizational collaboration between enterprise architecture, development, and operations—for every stage along the way—from code writing to testing to deployed applications. The event also includes many relevant sessions that can help organizations capitalize on cloud strengths, and mitigate cloud complexities, for the best possible return on software-driven services. May 2011 Real-World Service Management: Ivor Macfarlane’s Thoughts from Las Vegas Vegas is, to someone with a background in service management, an extraordinary place in many respects—a concentration of services, in terms of the intensity with which they're delivered and the experience of the consumer. It's all about more: bigger and gaudier hotels and casinos, bigger jackpots, and, of course, more money gambled, more quickly. Beyond intensity, one could also say Vegas accelerates the evolution of service management in a local context. It's a microcosm in which different services rapidly emerge and flourish, or fail and are replaced with others. And because of that, Vegas also offers many useful lessons for those of us who work in service management. Ivor Macfarlane shares his unique perspective on service management via analogy and stories in the real world—this time, service management observations from Las Vegas. May 2011 Get High-End Storage Management at a Mid-Market Price Every logical resource that drives IT services today demands effective, and efficient, management. Storage—a critical IT resource by any definition—is a great practical example of this idea. The better IT manages storage, the higher will be the service levels of all the services that depend on storage (which is to say, all of them). And those higher service levels, in turn, will translate into higher satisfaction levels from employees and customers—the final, and arguably the most honest, metric of service management quality. Enter the IBM Storwize V7000, specifically intended to help mid-market, growing organizations get superior utilization, ROI, and service levels from data center storage via an enterprise-class combination of features and functions without an enterprise-class price tag. It seamlessly integrates with several different members of the IBM Tivoli service management portfolio to give IT a centralized, single point of management control over all of the storage the solution supports. March 2011 Pulse 2011: IBM Spotlights Innovative Solutions, Services At Pulse in February, IBM pulled back the curtain on an incredible range of new solutions and services collectively aimed at making service management easier, faster, simpler, more innovative, and more cost-effective—in short, smarter—than ever before. In addition to officially launching its new Smarter Computing initiative at the event, IBM unveiled offerings designed to centralize management, and maximize business value, in areas from virtualization to cloud management to network endpoints. Other new solutions in the area of service management related to smart building management, end-to-end management of utility infrastructures, and real-time asset location. And to improve the business outcome of services, such offerings as analytics tools, service desk solutions, and improved security systems were also announced. These new solutions and services clearly illustrate IBM's vision of Integrated Service Management: a better outcome via smarter services and smarter management of them. March 2011 Quantify Cloud Costs and Maximize ROI via IBM Tivoli Cloud computing has brought with it an impressive suite of new business possibilities. Via clouds, organizations can create and deliver services faster, and at a generally lower cost, than ever before. While service delivery costs will typically fall, however, the complexity of tracking those costs can increase. Quantified cost insight is essential for the cloud to realize its full potential. Toward that end, IBM suggests organizations think of cloud cost management in lifecycle stages and provides a number of compelling, best-in-class offerings organizations can use to implement these stages and thus get an improved business bottom line from almost any kind of cloud or cloud-hosted service. March 2011 Drive Up Data Center IQ with Integrated Service Management Change is the only constant in business. Today, business leaders are discovering that they can actually use change—rather than merely adapt to it—to achieve better business outcomes. An excellent place to focus is in the pursuit of a smarter data center. Smarter data centers are simpler, faster, more flexible, more agile and more scalable. They can respond in a fluid, automatic fashion to changing business workloads and demand levels. They achieve higher utilization from assets and they converge business management and technological management to more quickly and easily achieve business goals. In the pursuit of the smarter data center, no IT leader is as well positioned as IBM. December 2010 Drive Up Data Center IQ with Integrated Service Management Change is the only constant in business. Today, business leaders are discovering that they can actually use change—rather than merely adapt to it—to achieve better business outcomes. An excellent place to focus is in the pursuit of a smarter data center. Smarter data centers are simpler, faster, more flexible, more agile and more scalable. They can respond in a fluid, automatic fashion to changing business workloads and demand levels. They achieve higher utilization from assets and they converge business management and technological management to more quickly and easily achieve business goals. In the pursuit of the smarter data center, no IT leader is as well positioned as IBM. December 2010 Quantify Cloud Costs and Maximize ROI via IBM Tivoli Cloud computing has brought with it an impressive suite of new business possibilities. Via clouds, organizations can create and deliver services faster, and at a generally lower cost, than ever before. While service delivery costs will typically fall, however, the complexity of tracking those costs can increase. Quantified cost insight is essential for the cloud to realize its full potential. Toward that end, IBM suggests organizations think of cloud cost management in lifecycle stages and provides a number of compelling, best-in-class offerings organizations can use to implement these stages and thus get an improved business bottom line from almost any kind of cloud or cloud-hosted service. December 2010 Maximize App Performance: POWER7 and IBM Software Organizations today seek the highest possible return on IT investment. And IBM's POWER7 systems, especially when paired with IBM software solutions, lead the pack for flexibility, performance, availability, and total business value. IBM's POWER7xx hosts allow organizations to both host, and manage, the infrastructure via an optimized, centralized platform. Compared to a more conventional infrastructure, based on hundreds of single-application servers and a suite of diverse, standalone management tools, POWER7 is clearly the superior choice. November 2010 Experience Pulse 2011: IBM’s Blockbuster Service Management Event Pulse 2011 will be a blockbuster event no service management professional should miss—a spectacular showcase at which the expected 6,000 attendees will have access to a wealth of technical demos, peer events, guru interaction, hands-on labs, educational seminars, emerging industry best practices and even certification opportunities. November 2010 Pulse 2011: A Wealth of Service Management Insights Pulse 2010 was the most successful service management event in IBM's history. And Pulse 2011, to be held from February 27- March 2 once again in Las Vegas, promises to be bigger, better and more informative yet. It's hard to think of any way information-hungry service management professionals could spend four days and learn more, in more ways likely to create business value for their organizations, than at Pulse. Steeped in the latest insights and solutions, show attendees can return to their organizations well positioned to achieve a better outcome for all—their organizations, their business partners and their clients and customers. November 2010 IBM CloudBurst 2.1: Cloud Computing with More Power IBM's CloudBurst initiative, launched in 2009, represented a groundbreaking new set of cloud offerings that provided everything an organization needed to get a private cloud up and running in very short order. Now, IBM has taken the next step in expanding platform options for CloudBurst 2.1. This new version is available on the IBM Power Systems platform—built on the POWER7 processor. POWER7 systems redefine performance, delivering unique workload optimization, superior virtualization, resiliency without downtime, and proven security—and therefore superior cloud computing. October 2010 Integrated Service Management: Smarter Enterprise Architecture for a Smarter Planet Consider how, on the largest possible scale, digital information is increasingly created, connected, and analyzed. As more and more of the world's infrastructure is tracked and monitored digitally, new information pools emerge as a result. And by cross-connecting these information pools, striking new possibilities will often emerge. What began as raw data becomes something much more compelling: actionable intelligence that can be leveraged for a superior outcome. October 2010 Get into the Spotlight at Pulse 2011 Pulse 2011 will be a blockbuster event no service management professional should miss—a spectacular showcase at which the expected six thousand attendees will have access to a wealth of technical demos, peer events, guru interaction, hands-on labs, educational seminars, emerging industry best practices and even certification opportunities. October 2010 Integrated Service Management Spurs Utilization, Availablity of POWER7 Hosts IBM's new POWER7 systems, introduced in the spring, set new standards for performance, resiliency, scalability and flexibility. But more than that, they can also be an exceptional platform of service management—of achieving the visibility, control and automation required to align business operations as closely as possible with customer interests and needs. September 2010 IBM Mainframe Delivers Simplified Service Management IBM’s new zEnterprise supports a diverse range of operating systems, processor architectures and application libraries, all of which can share key resources such as storage, memory and processing power. These resources can be managed by Tivoli from a single point of control. September 2010 Integrated Service Management Demos: Watch IBM Solutions Create Business Value Any IT manager or executive interested in learning more about service management in an IT context should take a close look at the Service Management Resource Center—especially now that it has a broad range of impressive demos. This site, open to anyone with a free IBM ID, is an impressive stockpile of valuable information targeting four different operational roles: Security Management, Operations and Storage Management, Production, Delivery and Facilities Management, and Communication Service Providers. September 2010 IBM Acquires Intelliden: Smart Automation Made Smarter Intelliden’s tools are built around this basic principle: the more deeply organizations can leverage automation to manage their network assets in a consistent, swift, and cost-effective fashion, the better the business outcome they are likely to achieve. And, of course, that’s particularly true for CSPs, where the infrastructure is incredibly large and complex and user expectations for service levels are incredibly high. September 2010 Integrated Service Management Spurs Utilization, Availability of POWER7 Hosts IBM's new POWER7 systems, introduced in the spring, set new standards for performance, resiliency, scalability and flexibility. But more than that, they can also be an exceptional platform of service management—of achieving the visibility, control and automation required to align business operations as closely as possible with customer interests and needs. July 2010 IBM Unveils ISM Library: Smart Accelerators, High ROI By leveraging ISM Library accelerators in different ways to address different needs, organizations can obtain more business value with incredible speed. For instance, suppose an organization is interested in implementing a service management architecture, to achieve improved visibility, control and automation over its revenue-generating external services. ISML accelerators can do just that—accelerate rollout—by linking infrastructural point A to infrastructural point B in a proven, effective manner that takes best practices into account. July 2010 IBM Video Contest Spotlights Customer Experiences Picture this: You spend a few minutes talking about something really familiar—something that's made a positive difference in your life. Then, in return, somebody gives you an Apple iPad. If that sounds too good to be true, think again. Since May 18th and running through August 16th, the Global Tivoli User Community is running a contest in which exactly that can happen. Just discuss the difference Tivoli service management solutions have made at your workplace in a short online video, and you could receive one of several attractive prizes. July 2010 POWER7 and Integrated Service Management: An IT/Ops Dream Team Getting best results from POWER7 systems means understanding what's happening with them in real time—and at any necessary level of abstraction: hypervisors, logical partitions, hardware components, energy utilization, applications, services and so forth. Integrated Service Management solutions deliver. Only IBM supports end-to-end application and resource management for POWER7 workloads—a single, integrated platform of visibility, control and automation that can address systems and all of their elements. July 2010 How IBM Solutions Drive Clouds As a leader in cloud computing today, IBM naturally has leading answers to such questions. In fact, IBM boasts the broadest and deepest portfolio of smart storage solutions on the market today. This means, obviously, that whatever storage challenges organizations may be facing, for whatever type of clouds they intend to deploy, IBM can help solve those challenges in a scalable, flexible, cost-efficient fashion. But it also implies that IBM is uniquely suited to serve as the single-source provider of all the storage solutions a cloud may need. June 2010 IBM Delivers Smarter Security for a Smarter Planet Imagine a world in which data is leveraged not just for best business value within specific organizations, but in a larger sense—for the best holistic outcome for organizations, individuals and host environments. Imagine, for example, traffic systems designed to keep traffic flowing and minimize snarls, by evaluating and anticipating changing conditions and orchestrating assets such as public transit vehicles, traffic lights and emergency response teams. June 2010 Virtualize Storage with IBM for an Enhanced Infrastructure Consider that IT managers today are asked to accomplish more, using less, than ever before. IT services have become more and more integral to business strategies with every passing year. Finding new ways to keep those services up and running, by ensuring critical resources are always available, has become more important in proportion. And on the list of critical resources, storage is very close to the top. June 2010 Energizing Service Management for Utilities: The IBM Safe Framework IBM’s Integrated Service Management (ISM) approach helps by giving organizations the visibility, control and automation over their infrastructures necessary to achieve not just better service management, but a better business outcome. May 2010 Get the Latest Security Info: IBM X-Force Trend Reports Organizations determined to minimize the odds of a breach will need to take steps to address emerging weaknesses and attack patterns as comprehensively as they can. The more they address, and the more skillfully they address them, the harder it will become for an attacker to capitalize on any one, let alone combine them effectively in a converged way. Fortunately, the IBM X-Force 2009 Trend and Risk Report provides exceptionally recent and comprehensive information on just these topics in three common areas: Vulnerabilities, the Malicious Web and Spam/Phishing. May 2010 Make Your Buildings Smarter with IBM Asset Management Modern asset management solutions, such as the IBM Maximo family, deliver on that compelling idea by helping organizations effectively monitor, maintain and update the full range of assets—traditional assets, IT assets and emerging smart asset classes. Furthermore, they apply across the complete asset lifecycle, giving organizations a holistic perspective of asset performance that extends not just to the complete infrastructure, but forward and backward in time as well May 2010 Innovate 2010: Jump-Start Service Design and Delivery Toward that end, a fantastic educational resource is IBM Innovate 2010—the Rational software conference, to be held this year in Orlando from June 6-10. And one particularly compelling track for innovation-focused software architects will be Integrated Service Management. This track will explore new ways to link IT development and IT operations – driving down costs and driving up efficiency in exactly the ways organizations need most, to innovate best. May 2010 IBM Security Solutions: Unmatched Software, Services and Expertise IBM's security leadership is unmatched by any other technology vendor, extending back more than half a century and demonstrated by many thousands of successful customer engagements around the world. IBM security solutions can help organizations in any technological context they require, from applications to data to identity and access management to networks to encryption to virtualization to cloud computing. May 2010 Data Center 2.0: IBM-Driven Service Management These solutions capitalize on the central strength of the IBM service management platform: improved visibility (seeing the business), control (implementing necessary changes) and automation (increasing agility and decreasing costs by eliminating the need for human oversight). By integrating systems management, service management and energy management on a shared, common platform, IBM can help organizations transform the data center in the ways they need the most, making it leaner, greener and far more responsive to changing business conditions and strategies. May 2010 Don't miss Integrated Service Management at Innovate 2010 A dedicated Integrated Service Management for Design & Delivery track: Learn how these solutions can help manage and optimize investments, address risk and compliance challenges and accelerate business growth. April 2010 IBM Social Networking: Share the Informational Wealth Service management, at a basic level, means delivering services that align well with customer needs and interests, and then improving them over time. Accomplishing this goal, however, means establishing what customer needs and interests are—a moving target, since business and technical conditions are in a constant state of change, but well worth the effort. The more informed an organization is, the more straightforward will be its experience of rendering best-in-class service management. April 2010 Integrated Service Management for Chemicals and Petroleum Fires on All Cylinders Chemical and petroleum organizations stand on the threshold of opportunity. By optimizing their infrastructures, and rendering superior service management, they can distinguish themselves from competitors, improve customer satisfaction and position themselves better for growth as the economy improves. Capitalizing on these possibilities, however, will require new strategies and solutions designed to address their problems. April 2010 IBM Integrates Service Management for Smart Cities and Smart Buildings Clearly, to deliver best results for this population some 6.4 billion human beings —cities and buildings must be managed better than they are today. Citywide assets and processes must be governed more holistically, integrating such currently distinct areas as public safety, education, telecommunications, transportation, energy and utilities and healthcare via a shared, secure, efficient and cost-efficient platform of management. February 2010 Invest in Integrated Service Management for Banking to Improve Operational Visibility, Control and Automation This modular suite of best-in-class IBM solutions empowers banks to enhance their service management by improving operational visibility (tracking changes in real-time), control (making adjustments to suit and achieving regulation compliance) and automation (accelerating everyday tasks and processes across silos by automating them). And as part of the IBM Banking Framework launch on September 15th of last year, Integrated Service Management for Banking was significantly updated, increasing its value proposition even more via powerful new features and functions. February 2010 Pulse Industry Solution Demos: See Problem, Solve Problem For service management professionals today, attending Pulse—the premier service management event of the year—is arguably the best investment they can make. The hundreds of sessions, client presentations, technology and solution demos and other learning opportunities will collectively translate into an unequaled opportunity to get exactly the information they need in exactly the context they need it. February 2010 IBM Locks Down IT Security at RSA 2010 Getting the most accurate and targeted information, from the most proven and insightful sources, is an investment that will pay impressive dividends—fast. Toward that end, the annual RSA Conference (link resides outside of ibm.com) at the Moscone Center in San Francisco is an outstanding learning opportunity. And this year’s show, to be held from March 1 to March 5, will deliver key information on more topics, in more ways and from more perspectives, than ever before. January 2010 Pulse 2010: A Service Management Smorgasbord For service management professionals, the argument for attending Pulse—the premiere service management of the year—has always been very strong. At Pulse, in just a few short days, they can bring themselves up to speed on the latest and greatest technological solutions, get early information on emerging challenges, watch technical demos, interact with professional contacts and peers, obtain lab-based certifications and much, much more. January 2010 IBM Greens the Data Center via Centralized Monitoring As energy costs fall, funds can instead be redirected toward strategic development designed to fulfill customer needs and interests. Business resilience, too, will typically climb, because a greener infrastructure is also an infrastructure that responds better to unpredictable workload spikes, and maintains target service levels even at times of high demand. In both cases, customer satisfaction climbs, and that will likely translate into higher revenues, higher market share and an enhanced business bottom line in general. January 2010 Get a Spectacular ROI from Pulse 2010 Consider these numbers: Five session streams, turning a lens on five different mission-critical aspects of service management. Three hundred client speakers to discuss real-world complexities and the solutions needed to address them. More than a hundred IBM Business Partners, their core solutions and their unique insights. Add it up and it's a priceless chance to get exactly the information you need, at whatever level of abstraction you need it. January 2010 Get Stunning ROI from Cloud Computing Technology executives today are understandably gun-shy of significant expenditures or platform shifts, and cloud computing does imply a modest initial investment in service management and virtualization software. However, according to a 2009 Cloud Computing ROI study conducted by IBM Research, the many benefits of cloud computing amply and quickly justify that investment. January 2010 IBM Solution Receives Highest Possible ITIL Certification Before awarding TSRM this certification level, the OGC's experts rigorously and thoroughly assessed the tool and confirmed that three different TSRM customers were in production and satisfied with its operation. The result: in three operational areas central to IT service management—Incident Management, Change Management, and Request Fulfillment Management—TSRM was shown to provide the highest levels of business value through a straightforward and logical implementation of ITIL guidelines. January 2010 Pulse 2010: Drive Business Value via Cross-Domain Integration Pulse 2010, the premiere service management event of the year, is right around the corner. And for service management professionals looking to obtain key information they can use to drive service levels up, costs down, and mitigate many forms of business risk, no better learning opportunity is available. November 2009 The Dynamic Infrastructure Just Got More Dynamic IBM's Dynamic Infrastructure strategy is designed to help clients integrate their growing intelligent business infrastructure with the necessary underlying design of a flexible, secure and seamlessly managed IT infrastructure. Our modular solutions help organizations reduce their operational costs, improve their service levels and proactively address a wide range of different types of business risks. Furthermore, our solutions are tailored to fit the unique needs and goals of any particular organization. November 2009 The X-Force Trend Report is a Superior Source of Security News This team of security specialists creates a trend report twice every year which provides statistical information about all aspects of threats that affect Internet security, including software vulnerabilities and public exploitation, malware, spam, phishing, web-based threats and general cyber criminal activity. They are intended to help customers, researchers and the public at large understand the changing nature of the threat landscape and what might be done to mitigate it. November 2009 Get Stunning ROI from Cloud Computing Because the cloud infrastructure is more and more automated to be flexible, scalable and resource-aware, it can create enormous business value while requiring minimal attention from IT. That, in turn, implies not just that mission-critical IT services perform better; it also implies that IT professionals, funds and resources are freed to attend to other, higher-priority tasks like innovative new services to increase customer satisfaction, market share and revenues. October 2009 IBM Links Service Desks for Rapid Response One powerful example of how IT operations can be optimized to reduce costs, increase service levels and spur productivity lies in the integration of two service desk products: IBM Tivoli Service Request Manager (TSRM) and SAP Solution Manager. Designed for different functions, used by different teams and yet similar in the larger context of IT problem reporting and resolution, they are often both deployed in large, enterprise-class organizations. October 2009 Unify Business and IT Asset Management through IBM IBM Service Management is ideally suited to organizations looking to achieve converged management of all assets, at every stage in their lifecycles, from end to end of the infrastructure. IBM Service Management helps by transforming business and IT assets into high-quality services and products, substantially improving return on investment and maximizing the organization's ability to capitalize on emerging business opportunities. By unifying the management of all assets, overall costs and complexity are reduced, a faster response to problems can be achieved and new services can be created more quickly and more securely. September 2009 Empowering Growth in Mid-Sized Companies IBM Tivoli Foundations are service management solutions designed and priced to meet the needs of mid-sized organizations. Built on the Lotus Foundations core platform, Tivoli Foundations provide advanced disaster recovery, hands-off protection and automated disk back-up. Pre-installed and integrated management components make Tivoli Foundations Solutions easy to install and configure for improved time to value and return on investment. September 2009 Establish Trust and Enhance Identity and Authentication with IBM Because of the digital infrastructure, information is now more accessible, in more ways, than at any prior point in human history. Increasingly, the goal is for everyone to have constant access to any data or services they may require—wherever they are, on whatever platform they happen to be using. Such a dramatic escalation in information transfer suggests a compelling possibility: a smarter planet, in which information and services are leveraged to solve problems and pursue opportunities far more effectively. And in the pursuit of these goals, many organizations will require a more dynamic infrastructure September 2009 Enhance Data Center Energy Management via IBM Solutions IBM Service Management incorporates energy management as a key element, helping IBM clients to discover how much energy their infrastructure assets are consuming and then correlating usage with the IT and business services that the infrastructure supports. Once armed with this insight, organizations can create and implement a plan to improve energy efficiency—reducing energy consumption and costs without impacting service levels or business requirements. September 2009 Come Speak at Pulse 2010 Pulse returns to the MGM Grand Las Vegas February 21-24, 2010. This year's conference will have an increased focus on education, featuring more client speakers than 2009 and offering networking opportunities and deep-dive technical education in service management. The key to an outstanding conference for IBM Pulse 2010 will be your participation. We welcome you to present how you implemented service management expertise for successful business results. We are now accepting proposals for presentation and publication. August 2009 IBM Delivers Centralized IT Service Management The advent of the System z10 series offers affordable pricing, higher capacity and performance and improved energy efficiency—all of which help to drive down costs while driving up service levels. This service management and best practices model designed for System z represents an optimized approach to consolidated, centralized IT management end to end. If IT is the central nervous system of an organization, System z is well suited to be the strategic hub through which that central nervous system is managed, by seamlessly integrating service management and business delivery processes to yield the best business utilization of IT resources. August 2009 IBM Service Management Revitalizes Healthcare IBM Service Management for Healthcare, driven by key IBM Tivoli tools and technologies, can lead to key improvements in Visibility (tracking service performance and enhancing patient focus), Control (rendering more effective service governance, and diminishing operational risk) and Automation (delivering faster, more consistent services). Healthcare service management will be enhanced in many dimensions—all of them favorable to both providers and patients. Services rendered will be higher in quality and lower in cost, yet targeted to suit the specific issues of individual patients, thus delivering exactly the kind of customized, efficient and cost-effective service virtually all patients want, and all providers want to deliver. August 2009 Avoid an Identity Crisis via IBM Security Solutions IBM offers solutions designed to help organizations address identity and access management governance challenges. One such product is IBM Tivoli Identity Manager 5.1—role management and user provisioning software that provides a secure, automated and policy-based solution for managing user roles, identities and access rights across heterogeneous IT resources. By addressing the complete user lifecycle, from creation to termination, and embedding users and entitlement policies into the business context at a deep level, Tivoli Identity Manager delivers not just enhanced security, but enhanced overall governance of it, leading to reduced costs, mitigated risks and simplified regulation compliance over time. August 2009 Pulse Comes to You! Pulse returns to the MGM Grand Las Vegas February 21-24, 2010. This year's conference will have an increased focus on education, featuring over 300 client speakers presenting the latest in service management expertise. Find out how a smarter planet requires a dynamic infrastructure based on IBM Service Management capabilities. July 2009 IBM Cloudburst: Making Rain in an Economic Dry Spell Today's distributed computing assets typically sit idle 85 percent of the time, generating electrical costs and heat instead of business value. Storage requirements climb an estimated 54 percent per year. Security is both more difficult to achieve and more mission-critical than ever; up to 33 percent of consumers will terminate a business relationship with a security provider, if notified of a serious security breach. And, as much as 70 percent of the overall IT budget is typically dedicated to maintenance of the IT operations status quo, rather than the creation of innovative services likely to generate revenue and expand market share. Cloud computing, by contrast, represents an exceptionally efficient platform that organizations can leverage to create and manage IT services cost-effectively from end to end, and at every stage in their lifecycles. July 2009 Green and Beyond: More than Just the Data Center Globally, data centers generate only about two percent of energy consumption; the remaining 98 percent must be addressed as well to achieve an optimized total outcome. Within the business sector, that implies energy management pertaining to completely different elements, such as manufacturing and distribution centers, office facilities, retail space and even mobile infrastructure like trucking fleets. Also relevant in this context is the full supply chain, including business partners, suppliers and vendors, as well as related issues such as water conservation, waste reduction and the use of potentially hazardous chemicals. When you consider these issues collectively, a central truth becomes apparent: the energy management story is much larger than simply the enterprise-class data center. June 2009 Fuel the Business Engine with IBM Service Management for Chemicals and Petroleum A dynamic infrastructure can help chemicals and petroleum firms to resolve today's problems more easily, and also position themselves better to resolve tomorrow's. In this industry, for instance, that means they can more easily maintain safe operations; integrate those operations holistically and cohesively, for more business value; capture and retain organizational knowledge, while also empowering decisions based on that knowledge through real-time processes; and optimize production and asset performance. June 2009 Greening the Infrastructure via IBM Service Management IT energy expense is expected to climb 35 percent in the next five years. Digital information is expected to increase tenfold between 2006 and 2011. Buildings account for 40 percent of worldwide energy consumption. Unfortunately, IT and business structures are often far from energy-efficient. Some 85 percent of computing capacity is typically wasted in idle time by distributed systems, generating energy costs but not business value. Meanwhile, for every 100 units of energy piped into a data center, only three are used for actual processing. June 2009 IBM-Optimized Clouds: Maximizing the Silver Lining What has put cloud computing on the IT radar? Simply put, cloud-based services allow organizations to create, deploy and manage services faster, more easily and more cost-effectively than ever before—translating abstract service ideas into working realities, fostering cross-team collaboration and spurring overall performance and return on investment. June 2009 IBM Service Management: Fulfilling the SOA Vision SOA provides organizations with a dynamic infrastructure that allows them to break down large applications and business processes into smaller, loosely-coupled “services”. These “services” can be reused to create new applications and respond quickly to customer needs. The result is a simplified, more powerful infrastructure in which services can dynamically scale to meet changing organizational needs or workloads, while reducing cost and management complexity. May 2009 Foster Retail Growth with IBM Service Management Consumers today spend less than a year ago; they are also more informed about competitive offerings and are more likely to be skeptical of cash outlays due to job insecurity. Retailers must therefore respond with a smarter shopping experience for them—one characterized by a demand-driven merchandising and supply chain, for instance, to ensure that offerings map well with changing customer interest levels and purchasing trends, to drive operational excellence and superior service management. IBM offers the Service Management for Retail solution, which can help retailers create just such a dynamic infrastructure to spur retail growth even in a doubtful economy like today’s. May 2009 IBM Service Management for Banks Pays High Dividends Contemplate the many challenges currently confronting the banking industry. As financial institutions merge—an increasingly common scenario in the last six months—their operations merge as well; the IT infrastructure must be reworked correspondingly, to eliminate duplicate services and technologies, yet satisfy all new requirements. Security in banking is mission-critical; as threats such as cybercrime and malware become more sophisticated, banks must strive to respond with a more holistic, proactive security architecture. To minimize their costs and maximize their service levels, banks today require a more dynamic IT infrastructure—one flexible, scalable and cost-efficient enough to solve their problems, fulfill their strategies and thus render superior service management. May 2009 IBM Hosts the Service Management Resource Center: Compelling Content for Four Roles The IBM-sponsored Service Management Resource Center, an online resource of compelling service management content, is specifically designed for professionals in all four roles: security, communications service, production/facilities and operations/storage. Each role has its own subsection of the site, populated by its own content, and there are many content types, including webcasts, podcasts, solution sheets, white papers, analyst reports, forums, blogs, case studies, related videos and more. May 2009 Get High Asset ROI via IBM Industry Service Management In the pursuit of a smarter planet one empowered by organizations that make optimized use of resources for the benefit of themselves, their customers, their business partners and the world as a whole—asset management is a natural focus. Asset management can help render infrastructures more dynamic, more responsive, more effective and more cost-effective—all primary goals going forward. April 2009 Utilities get best-in-class service management from IBM Through IBM Service Management for Utilities, utilities are empowered to create a more dynamic infrastructure, in which business and technological management converges to yield faster, more flexible, more efficient and more cost-efficient business services. In particular, asset utilization, availability and general business value will all climb through the use of IBM Maximo Asset Management, designed to help organizations achieve the highest return on investment from all deployed assets—ranging from smart meters to electrical grids—at all stages in their lifecycles. April 2009 The IBM Dynamic Infrastructure: Built and managed by IBM Service Management Today’s infrastructures are commonly strained by the explosion of data, transactions and digitally-aware devices that must be managed and controlled. In addition, the rapid growth in the number of communications subscribers and services is exposing bandwidth limitations. Energy and utility systems are being taxed by supply inefficiencies and unpredictable demand spikes. As energy and operational costs increase, the funds available for building out new infrastructure investment are being scaled down. In short, organizations must now accomplish more, faster than ever before—and with fewer resources. April 2009 IBM Solution Package propels service management for Communication Service Providers Few industries are as challenging at the present time as the telecommunications market. Communications service providers (CSPs) must minimize customer churn and operational overhead, distinguishing themselves in a demanding market full of competitors by enhancing current service levels as much as possible, yet also delivering new services swiftly and flexibly in order to align with changing needs and conditions. April 2009 IBM helps to decrypt the security conundrum? As they strive to achieve forward-looking, proactive, end-to-end security, organizations today must turn to the most recent, informed counsel from leading vendors, thought leaders and the security community generally. For this reason, the RSA Conference has acquired considerable momentum in recent years. To be held this year at the Moscone Center in San Francisco from April 20-24, this conference provides a plethora of useful information and a short path to acquiring it. Security professionals in attendance will have a chance to learn from technical gurus, interact with peers, develop and extend business relationships and more. March 2009 IBM delivers smarter, cross-domain energy management Best business results will stem from optimized energy management, to keep energy costs under control, track emerging energy issues as they develop, suggest strategies and improvements based on quantified data and its analysis, while also preserving or even improving service levels. Furthermore, this optimization should ideally span both IT and facilities infrastructures—linking these two closely-related domains to ensure that they are best tuned for a superior overall outcome. March 2009 End-to-end security is critical even in a difficult business climate Cloud computing, Web 2.0, RFID (radio frequency identification), mobile computing, real-time data streaming – what do these developments have in common? All serve to connect people, services, systems, organizations and indeed entire business ecosystems more comprehensively than ever before. These connections, and the information generated through them, are gradually leading to a compelling new reality—in essence, a smarter planet, one which offers forward-thinking organizations the chance to deliver new services to the markets most in need of them. Such innovation can be a powerful differentiator in a difficult business climate. March 2009 Service management means different things for different industries For many organizations, it's not enough to speak of service management in the abstract; they will require specific implementations of service management that acknowledge the unique conditions and contexts that may apply within their industries, so that technological solutions, business processes and best practices can all be integrated appropriately within those industries to arrive at an optimal outcome. Fortunately, IBM has delivered. At Pulse 2009, IBM gave the world a look at its new concept of industry-specific service management. March 2009 How secure is your security? The ISS X-Force Trend Reports give organizations the information they need to take effective, prioritized action in securing their data, applications, networks, systems and services—today and tomorrow. The observations provided are backed up by ISS's deep statistical analyses—among the most comprehensive and best-informed in the world—to deliver a portrait of enterprise-class security topics that conveys both the big picture and the fine detail. February 2009 Skillfully manage your information investment with IBM In this challenging economy, it is more important than ever to leverage available resources for the best possible result. And among organizational assets, few are as critical as information. It’s no exaggeration to say that business success will come as a direct result of how well organizations can capitalize on information to develop and enhance their strategies, quantify market dynamics and guide day-to-day decision-making. Ensuring that the right people have the right access to the right information, therefore, will rank high on any CIO’s list of priorities. The more people are empowered with key information, the higher the odds that information will translate into a superior outcome. February 2009 Keep your pulse going with post-conference discounts on some of Tivoli’s most-popular courses and certification testing The learning doesn't end at Pulse. Continue to build Tivoli skills and certify them after you’ve left Las Vegas. Conference attendees can take 20 percent off the tuition of select instructor-led online courses and 50 percent off Tivoli certification exams. These instructor-led online courses can be taken right from your office, and Tivoli certification testing can be taken at any of the 6,000 Thompson Prometric sites worldwide. Choose from over twenty of our most popular courses across the Tivoli curriculum and select from our entire Tivoli certification exam portfolio. February 2009 New Service Management Resource Center and Service Management Simulator sites go live! Visit the new Service Management Resource Center sites, sponsored by IBM and designed for those who work in the areas of service management, security management or asset management. You'll find topics of interest, industry information, solutions from IBM, news feeds, blogs, education, current events and more. The Service Management Resource Center offers a suite of role-based sites designed as web destinations for customers and prospects who work in the areas of service management, security and asset management. And the Service Management Virtual Simulator is a challenging and engaging game to operational maturity, customer satisfaction and business success that’s free to play. January 2009 Extending IT services requires nailing down account privileges In a challenging business climate like the one we face today, IT services must generate as much business value as possible. For this reason, many organizations have begun extending those services in new directions—across silos within the organization, certainly, but also outside the organization, to business partners, customers and clients. When current IT services can be leveraged to strengthen or develop business relationships, increase internal productivity or both, the return on investment they generate will certainly increase and accelerate. This is particularly true when those services can be driven entirely or in part by cost-effective approaches such as automation to minimize the resources of money and time required to create and support them. January 2009 Streamline workflows, processes for repeatable, scalable and consistent results In today's economic climate, it's often critical to meet and exceed—customer expectations. And toward this end, service management represents a logical path to achieve that goal, through which the services you provide can be closely aligned with the services customers want. Complicating the premise of success through service management, however, is the fact that the only constant in business today is change. Organizations that respond in fast, flexible ways to such change through effective service management will experience the most success—transforming change from a threat to an opportunity through competitive innovation. January 2009 IBM delivers centralized, optimized security policy management Security policies should be considered as a means of aligning business and IT goals. Different members of the organization will perceive policies in different ways, as an expression of their job duties; to get best business value from policies it should be possible to manage security policies using a common tool that can nevertheless reflect these different perspectives. For instance, while a business manager may see policy abstractly as a way to secure information access, IT operations groups may see policy more concretely, in terms of configuration settings within different technological solutions deployed in the infrastructure. November 2008 IBM Service Management Jams: Bringing you the best in service management thought leadership Today, organizations are faced with many challenging questions. How can they achieve and maintain significant distinction in an ultra-competitive marketplace characterized by increasingly sophisticated offerings? How can they attract new customers, measure and increase the satisfaction level of customers they have and create and deploy new services designed to meet customer needs and pair well with customer interests? How can they ensure that their assets are managed optimally, in a way that reflects business goals and strategies—keeping the emphasis on business value as a driver of change, rather than technological implementation or organizational silos? In the new millennium, service management has quickly come to be seen as a powerful response to such questions, and the application of service management principles to technological infrastructures is a natural fit. November 2008 Enhance service management through superior visibility and tracking As organizations move to address customer and client needs more effectively, one powerful approach available to them is service management. By shifting their focus specifically to services, and refining those services to map as closely as possible to what customers need (and in many cases, specifically request), a superior business outcome can be achieved. November 2008 Implementation model helps organizations improve service levels by addressing core IT concerns Security has, in recent years, become an exceptionally complex topic for IT professionals, who must now deal with a broader range of sophisticated threats than ever before. Exterior threats, such as malware, can now, in some cases, adapt to evade detection, and hackers formerly motivated by curiosity may now be employed by organized crime. Internal threats may also manifest in the form of trusted insiders who abuse their privileges to acquire or modify data in violation of organizational security policies. November 2008 Delivering a full range of Internet services on airplanes Delivered within the target deadline and launched in August of 2008, the Aircell in-flight Internet service—now known as Gogo —allowed American Airlines to be the first airline to offer full, in-flight Internet access to its customers throughout the continental United States on its entire fleet of Boeing 767-200 aircrafts. Passengers on these American flights can stay connected to business associates, family and friends via any Wi-Fi-capable device, such as a laptop computer, PDA or smartphone (supported Wi-Fi protocols include 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g). Gogo transforms the airplane into a Wi-Fi hotspot, just like any other within coffee shops or airport lounges. Gogo customers can pay via a per-flight, daily, monthly or yearly subscription. October 2008 Discover entry point: One powerful way to begin service management implementations Service management has become increasingly successful as a business philosophy. As organizations strive to bring the services they provide into the closest possible alignment with the services their customers, clients and business partners require, service management becomes an ideal mechanism of change, helping them to obtain the best return on existing assets, integrate acquired assets, gain and maintain customers and, in short, grow the business bottom line. For many organizations, the Discover entry point might be a logical place to start. Discover is designed to help companies determine and assess the resources they have by establishing how they're deployed, whom they serve, how they interrelate, how secure they are and how they fulfill (or do not fulfill) business goals in an optimal manner October 2008 Service life cycles play a critical role in modern service management In recent years, service management strategies have become increasingly popular by changing the way businesses perceive IT and orchestrate the way IT works. This is a natural consequence of the fact that effective service management makes it possible to increase IT business value through the synergistic alignment of the services IT provides with the services end users and customers require. At a time when many organizations seek to simplify and consolidate IT operations, reduce costs, focus more resources on innovation and thus increase customer satisfaction and market share, the new service management paradigm can be remarkably helpful. October 2008 Optimize IT performance through optimized decision-making Without good practices for IT governance, businesses risk problematic decision-making and behavior that is not aligned with the desired business outcomes. Good practices for effective IT governance mitigate these significant and pervasive business risks. As IT becomes the de facto ‘central nervous system’ for most enterprise-class organizations and the underlying mechanism by which business activity is conducted, effective IT governance grows increasingly relevant—and critical—to obtaining the highest possible business value from IT. The 2008 IBM Global CEO Study illustrated that organizations which anticipate and manage change in a superior fashion also outperform the market. October 2008 Pulse 2009: Experience service management as IBM leads the way Pulse 2009 will offer compelling presentations and interactive sessions in three different streams—each designed to turn a different lens on service management, and each of which maps closely to emerging business interests. Pulse 2009 will, in short, illustrate how IBM can work with today’s organizations to optimally manage the world’s infrastructure. September 2008 ITIL Configuration Management book is wisdom from IT trenches The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has become increasingly well-regarded and useful to enterprise IT professionals. ITIL is a best-practices framework which represents, in the abstract, a means by which organizations can optimize both their technology and their processes; the latest iteration, version three, focuses specifically on service management and the complete IT service lifecycle (as opposed to specific points). Implementing ITIL Configuration Management, a book by IBM Certified IT Architect Larry Klosterboer and published by IBM Press, constitutes a pragmatic, start-to-finish guide to ITIL configuration management, written in clear and informal language. September 2008 IBM webcast pinpoints disaster recovery challenges, myths and pitfalls IBM offers a methodical approach to reduce downtime and increase overall resiliency. This approach can help you address risk wherever it occurs in the organization—lines of business, processes, systems—and even outside the organization, in cases such as complex supply chains and partners. The five-step IBM business impact analysis will utilize an assessment framework to clearly and comprehensively determine economic threats and areas of vulnerability, then suggest appropriate strategies. Click here to read more or watch their informative webcast. September 2008 On demand protection offers data security peace of mind IBM recommends that organizations get started with their security improvements by developing a security strategy that manages and mitigates risks in a continuous cycle. The idea here is to achieve results which are traceable, measurable and repeatable, continually integrating feedback from one stage into the next. In this way, the strategy becomes more and more effective over time, because security solutions, security policies and business processes become increasingly well tuned to the specific business needs and goals in any given case. September 2008 Bring order to chaos with IBM compliance management solutions and services Compliance is a complex area with many different aspects to consider—and over time, it is likely to become more complex still, as new regulations are introduced and old ones are modified. Unfortunately, most organizations, focused as they are on core competencies, will lack the time required to arrive at an effective, holistic compliance strategy. For them, it will be essential to work with a trusted partner—one well versed in both the business and technological dimensions of compliance, as well as a proven mastery of best practices frameworks and their implementation. August 2008 Maximize service and composite application uptime with system automation policies IBM has recently introduced new releases for two core solutions specifically designed to improve IT service continuity even in today's most demanding environments: IBM Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms 3.1, which enables high availability and policy-based automation for applications running on AIX, Windows and Linux—including Linux on System z—and IBM Tivoli System Automation Application Manager 3.1, which focuses on coordinating the stopping and starting of tiered composite applications with enterprise-wide dependencies that span heterogeneous and virtual IT environments. August 2008 IBM Service Management World Tour: See the vision for driving innovation IBM has organized a Service Management World Tour, during which IBM experts will be delivering one-day presentations on key areas that target both the technical and business sides of service management—and show you how they can be combined to deliver a powerful, holistic solution. This tour will visit more than a dozen U.S. cities, as well as other locations in Canada, Europe, and Asia, exploring the IBM vision of service management and how today’s organizations can go about implementing it to achieve better results. August 2008 Quantified improvements with IBM Service Management Implementation Services In the category of services, IBM’s Service Management Implementation Services are specifically designed to help today’s organizations move from problematic to optimized IT service management. How is this possible? IBM provides an initial analysis and subsequent demonstrable roadmap with a quantified breakdown of the expected value, benefits and savings customers can expect to obtain from each recommended action. Furthermore, IBM’s expertise in translating the theory of ITIL into pragmatic operational reality is demonstrated via IBM’s creation of Value Drivers—tangible, customizable measures of value which map to each ITIL sub-implementation and help to illustrate exactly how changes in the technical infrastructure and new business processes will improve matters from the customer’s perspective. July 2008 Pulse 2008: Blockbuster event spotlights innovation for IBM clients, BPs, analysts Billed in advance as the premiere service management event of the year, Pulse 2008 was a tremendous success if the attendance statistics are any indication: more than 4,500 total attendees; 69 countries represented; 500 IBM Business Partners; and 700 labs and 745 SWG exams completed. What led to this success? Pulse 2008 was truly a blockbuster event, unifying Tivoli Technical User Conference, MaximoWorld and Netcool User Symposium, into a more comprehensive service management showcase than ever before. July 2008 IBM delivers big with mid-market solutions, resources, accreditation For many growing, mid-market organizations, new pressures have led to IT complexities. Budget constraints, for instance, commonly impose spending limits on new solutions; in this situation, it becomes more important than ever to maximize the business value generated by solutions already in place. Consulting services may sometimes be required to reconfigure solutions to pair with changing business needs, or evaluate whether new solutions would be a better fit. In recent months, IBM Tivoli has demonstrated its ongoing commitment to its mid-market customers in a variety of ways. These include new solutions, evaluative tools and case studies, and a new accreditation initiative designed to help customers find IBM Business Partners with the expertise they require. July 2008 New IBM automation offerings drive service continuity Together, IBM Tivoli System Automation for Multiplatforms 3.1 and IBM Tivoli System Automation Application Manager 3.1.help organizations achieve maximum continuity for both traditional IT services and composite business applications, thus delivering an end-to-end solution to this mission-critical business need. They empower organizations to detect failing components proactively (in some cases, before business consequences occur as a result of failure), manage planned outages more optimally, decrease costs, increase efficiency and simplify management via a single point of control. July 2008 IBM webcasts turn a spotlight on business resilience This six-part series discusses business resilience in all three groups of risks—data-driven, business-driven, and event-driven—and also provides key information on the perspective, solutions and services needed to develop a tailored strategy capable of optimizing business resilience for your organization. The webcast series also provide specific direction on the connection between the business and technological sides of the resilience story, linking them to show how changes to the one may influence, improve or extend the other in tandem. Both traditional IT resilience topics such as disaster recovery technology and business topics such as regulation compliance are spotlighted. All webcasts are provided free of charge for any interested parties, requiring only registration for viewing. June 2008 Safeguarding the business: IBM Virtual Workplace Continuity Service IBM provides a suite of tools, technologies, processes, consulting, and facilities specifically designed to get organizations up and running again when disaster strikes. Via a closed loop scheme involving successive stages of planning, implementing, managing and assessing the strategy, IBM can help today's enterprise achieve significant improvements in overall continuity, even in adverse conditions. One service of particular relevance in the event of physical workplace loss, for instance, is Virtual Workplace Continuity. This managed service is designed to bring core services back as quickly and comprehensively as possible by connecting employees over the Internet via a virtual infrastructure. June 2008 Business continuity is a primary mandate of enterprise-class IT IBM Tivoli Business Continuity Process Manager (BCPM) is designed to provide centralized service continuity planning, management, and testing across the IT infrastructure, spanning applications, servers, networks, and storage, as well as people and processes deemed relevant to continuity. This is accomplished, in part, through BCPM's seamless integration with other IBM tools and solutions, thus coordinating IT processes such as change and release management. Furthermore, BCPM also facilitates simulations and fire drills, to serve as a rehearsal of the strategy, and generates reports on overall solution efficacy which establishes and quantifies performance in different scenarios. Thus, BCPM empowers IT with the crucial information needed to refine the strategy as needed in any particular area before disaster has a chance to strike. June 2008 IBM's Pulse Community Links and Empowers Event Attendees The newly-launched Pulse community, extends and documents the Pulse experience online—directly benefiting those who attended as well as their peers, and fostering ongoing communication both with them and with IBM. Long after the show is over, the site can continue to serve service management professionals interested in topics brought up during it. Even when attendees are separated post-show by tremendous physical distance, they can still stay in close touch through the convenience of the community for the indefinite future—thus extending the Pulse value proposition across not just space, but also through time. June 2008 Get Intelligent, Real-Time Physical Security with IBM Smart Surveillance Solution The IBM Smart Surveillance Solution is specifically designed to leverage the power of technology to analyze incoming video information, pinpoint potential threats, and escalate information via the established IP infrastructure to appropriate personnel or systems—thus integrating video information into the security architecture and accelerating the overall response. It empowers IT to more effectively safeguard facilities at a physical level by integrating streamed video data, searching it for logical elements, prioritizing the results through analysis, and utilizing those results. Based on an open framework of event integration and correlation, it facilitates not only a real-time response to physical security threats but also post-event analysis. May 2008 IBM Service Management: Six steps to enhance service performance Conceive of the IT service lifecycle not as a straight line, but as a circle; within this circle, IT services are continually being refined and enhanced to deliver higher and higher service levels over time. Intelligence arising from improved service visibility is delivered to managers, where it leads to change via control; finally, through automation, that change becomes possible to implement as quickly and effectively as possible, while at the same time, the organization can track the impact on the customer experience. Finally, this information is, in turn, fed back to visibility, where the cycle begins again. Naturally, creating a closed-loop system of this type will require significant evaluation of existing processes and technology and, very probably, significant tailoring, to achieve effective implementation within the organization in order to best achieve results. However, IBM suggests a six-step approach, guided by its history with thousands of customer engagements and industry May 2008 Transforming Chaos into Order: How to Optimize IT Service Management For many organizations today, then, IT service management represents an attractive guiding philosophy as they strive to make IT more efficient, cost-effective, and integrated—a more flexible, powerful instrument of business strategy, and one which can foster innovation to enhance the organization's competitive edge. One recent global CEO study conducted by IBM found that organizations which have extensively integrated business and technology are able to grow revenue five percent faster than competitors—a compelling figure. Yet achieving it, in the case of many organizations, will require more than a casual implementation. Where to begin such a comprehensive process of revision? Fortunately, in recent years a number of best practices solutions have focused specifically on IT service management in the attempt to help the enterprise make the transition as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. April 2008 Get In Touch, In Tune, In Sync at Pulse 2008 Staying on top of all the latest developments in service management is no simple challenge. Yet it's also a strategy that will inevitably pay ample dividends; getting the most pertinent and accurate information possible is key to business success. To help you stay In Touch, In Tune, and In Sync with the service management industry, IBM Pulse 2008 comes to the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida this May 18-22. More than 4,000 attendees from around the world—end users, business partners, visionary thinkers and top industry leaders—will get the chance to interact with their peers, learn from gurus, become familiar with new developments, achieve technical certification, and get a sneak peek at future roadmaps from both IBM and IBM business partners. April 2008 Slamming the door on unauthorized access with IBM Tivoli Access Manager 6.1 Tivoli Access Manager for e-business is specifically designed to facilitate elegant security policy design and implementation as an abstract, SOA-style service covering authentication, access, and auditing (compliance). As managers create and assign policies, they can be used by any new application which requires them in a centralized manner, speeding new service delivery and maximizing overall security; users benefit as well through the solution's single sign-on (SSO) functionality. Tivoli Access Manager for e-business also integrates with other leading IBM Tivoli solutions, as well as third-party enterprise applications, to maximize business value across a tremendous number of technological contexts. April 2008 IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager: Safeguarding the Enterprise Service Bus In today's demanding business environment, change is the only constant. As competition scales up and business services are extended to new partners and customers, enterprise-class IT must be more agile than ever—responding to a rapidly changing world more quickly and efficiently than ever before. Enterprise service buses (ESBs) are commonly used to implement SOA design goals. ESBs do not, however, typically support security and compliance initiatives by themselves; they merely facilitate information flow. Getting real-world business value from an ESB will often mean enhancing it with enterprise-class security via an identity management framework. Such a framework can then be utilized at every stage in the ESB information flow by verifying user identities, mediating between different pools of user identities, and determining their access rights across every application which utilizes the ESB. April 2008 IBM at RSA 2008: Defending IT in the Enterprise Securing the organization at every technological level spanning data, user identities, applications, and network operations—is a core goal for enterprise-class IT. Meeting that goal requires more than last-millennium point solutions; to achieve real-time insight into the holistic state of IT security defenses, IT will require smart, integrated adaptive solutions to ensure that data, applications, and the overall IT infrastructure are used by the right people, at the right time, in the right way. Security professionals interested in bringing themselves up to speed on the latest developments in these and many other related areas will find the annual RSA Conference a key opportunity to learn. April 2008 Governance and Risk Management IBM IT governance solutions deliver value and enable better alignment of IT to business priorities and opportunities. It's an approach that spans the entire IT lifecycle. April 2008 Governance & Risk Management Roadshow Are you faced with the challenges of increased IT operations costs, constant infrastructure changes, managing a complex heterogeneous environment? Are you worried about about compliance and audits all within a rigorous service context? March 2008 Optimize Security Compliance and Audit Achieving comprehensive security is more important than ever. As IT has emerged as the central nervous system for many organizations, IT services and solutions have also become more complex; as that complexity grows, security strategies must become more sophisticated in proportion. March 2008 Improve Data Center Energy Management For almost any organization, operational downtime is not just costly, it is increasingly more costly. In fact, in some industries, estimated losses due to downtime can come to as much as 16% of total revenue. For almost a third of today's organizations, according to some reports, even four hours of downtime could generate unacceptable losses, both in terms of quantifiable areas, such as income, and more qualitative areas, such as brand strength, customer satisfaction, and competitive response. March 2008 The IBM Systems Journal Offers IBM’s... How, in today’s demanding business climate, can organizations compete more effectively? One answer comes from IBM Service Management, an initiative integrating IBM hardware, software, and consulting services. The IBM Service Management strategy is designed to help today’s organizations achieve best business results by optimizing the many complex elements in place—people, technologies, processes, information, and business assets generally - in order to deliver improved service levels to customers. March 2008 IBM’s Arsenal Acquisition How can organizations best safeguard critical business data? This is a question of central importance to IT professionals, particularly in the enterprise sector, and it's becoming more important every year. The round the clock availability of business data represents the central story of the success or failure of the enterprise, the concrete representation of its communications, and the basic source of operational strategies and business evaluations used to make fundamental decisions every day. At the heart of every enterprise IT operation is this mandate: to protect business data and by doing so, to protect the business. February 2008 Pulse 2008: Get In Touch, In Tune, In Sync In May of this year, IBM will be pulling out all the stops in the most spectacular event to hit the service management industry: Pulse 2008. This banner event in Florida, unprecedented in its comprehensiveness, combines Tivoli Technical User Conferences, MaximoWorld, and Netcool Symposium in a unified experience which promises to touch on all the latest and greatest developments in the worlds of enterprise asset management, IT system management, and service assurance. The more than four thousand expected attendees will hear from leading speakers about how IBM Service Management solutions can help them unlock innovation by providing the Visibility, Control and Automation™ needed to manage risk and compliance, optimize investments, and accelerate business growth. Attendees will have access to quality business and technical content in areas of key concern to their organizations, and even get the chance to obtain free certifications and hands-on instruction in IBM labs. February 2008 Get Optimized IMS Management with IBM Tivoli Netcool IP Multimedia Subsystem Manager IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) solutions represent a significant element of the shift to NGN. IMS-based technologies are designed to deliver complex multimedia services, such as Voice over IP (VoIP) and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), over NGN infrastructures to mobile customers with high-performance connections. Such services are widely in demand, and if deployed and managed skillfully, they can serve as a distinguishing factor in the extraordinarily competitive carrier market. At the same time, however, IMS is not without its risks, adding as it does complexity and management challenges to the NGN service management mix. Achieving best business results from IMS will require optimized IMS management solutions capable of improving visibility and monitoring, enhancing operational efficiency, accelerating troubleshooting and reducing time-to-market for new services. February 2008 Enhance Web Application Security with IBM Rational AppScan Web applications offer some of the most compelling possibilities in enterprise software development today, but they also introduce some of the most challenging security complexities. As the market-share leader in this space, the Watchfire AppScan solution, now re-branded as IBM Rational AppScan, has been deployed in more than 800 companies and government institutions—a proven, mature, robust portfolio now in its seventh generation, and with the feature set and performance to match. Furthermore, the solution is available in versions targeting different business contexts and requirements; in addition to the Enterprise edition, there are Standard and Tester versions, as well as a reporting console. And for clients who would prefer to outsource Web vulnerability scanning entirely, that service is available through IBM as well. February 2008 Minimizing Business Disruption: How IBM Works With the Enterprise to Maximize Continuity and Business Responsiveness Arriving at a comprehensive business resilience strategy is a much more challenging proposition than ever before. Many factors come into play which complicate that goal exponentially, and each must be considered if an overall solution is to be achieved. Any strategy that attempts to maximize resilience must acknowledge and prioritize the various threats faced by partners as well as those facing the company itself. Clearly, these complexities require a sophisticated solution—one comprehensive enough to address the many challenges to business resilience faced by different types of organizations in many different contexts. Fortunately, IBM has responded with both a resilience framework and a resilience transformational lifecycle, which, applied jointly, can be used to enhance business resilience tremendously. October 2007 Securing the Enterprise through IBM Governance and Risk Management Governance and risk management is on the minds of today's IT professionals more than ever before. While IT has emerged as the fundamental service for enterprise business, that service has also brought with it a host of new challenges and risks. To achieve best results, the enterprise must detect, anticipate, and preclude those risks through a comprehensive governance strategy designed to deliver optimum business value. In a global economy operating across a global Internet, security has become a global business concern. October 2007 Leverage the Full Benefits of Innovative Technologies with IBM Service Management IBM Service Management is not just an ideal means of optimizing traditional enterprise IT. In many cases, it's the key to implementing innovative new technologies as well. Deploying such new technologies into a complex, enterprise-class IT organization is often no simple matter. Through service management, today's siloed IT organizations can be integrated into a modern, unified whole that acts as a collaborative partner with the business enterprise in the pursuit of core business goals. And for businesses interested in deploying innovative new technologies, those technologies should be incorporated via modern service management methods to obtain the highest business value. October 2007 Defending Business Data: IBM's System z as the Encryption Hub of the Enterprise As enterprise IT delivers increasingly sophisticated services, IBM System z mainframes have acquired a powerful new role: They’ve become the centralized, optimized hub that makes those services secure. The old-millennium paradigm of IT security: a firewall as the front gate, intrusion detection software to sniff network packets for suspicious activity, and antivirus software to block malware, no longer suffices. Today, security must be redesigned and implemented from the ground up to apply to all IT services at every level. Toward that end, IBM has responded with a number of new security initiatives designed to leverage the proven System z solution in new, secure-rich ways, extending business services across the Web, shutting the doors on rogue code and unauthorized access to data, and providing end-to-end security at every stage in the data lifecycle.
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