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August 2010
Enable Secure Access for Cloud and SOA Environments
With today’s challenging economic conditions, organizations are looking for new ways to gain competitive advantage. In addition to effectively managing costs, organizations are also seeking innovative ways to deliver applications and services. This is resulting in many organizations using Web services, or service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations, to provide access to applications. At the same time, more and more organizations are evaluating and implementing cloud computing as their new delivery platform. |
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August 2010
IBM Tivoli Contest Spotlights Customer Experiences
Anyone who's a regular reader of Tivoli Beat is probably also a regular user of Tivoli solutions—so why not participate? All you have to do is create a short video in which you explain how those solutions have led to a better outcome for you, your team, your IT group or your organization as a whole. And based on your background and experience, or those of people you know, that should be a pretty trivial thing to do. |
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August 2010
Tivoli 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. |
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August 2010
IBM Tivoli Maximizes Uptime via Smart Automation
How can IT managers quickly identify which component(s) in the infrastructure havce failed, how to identify them and how to take swift and effective action to solve the problem and diminish its business impact? IBM's answer to that challenge is the IBM Tivoli System Automation family. This suite of leading solutions is designed to address such complexities through a proactive architecture that monitors the infrastructure, detects failures and then, based on smart policies, automatically addresses the issue—even in the most complex infrastructures, spanning the most heterogeneous platforms and resource dependencies. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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July 2010
Proactively Protect Your Infrastructure with IBM Security Network IPS
Last-millennium, point-based solutions like firewalls are no longer enough. Today's more complex and sophisticated security threats, both internal and external, demand a more holistic and proactive response—one capable of addressing the complete infrastructure, from end to end, as well as threats both known and unknown. IBM Security solutions can be combined to work in concert, handling the complete range of security threat while also leveraging smart design and simplified ease-of-use to minimize configuration and ongoing oversight. |
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July 2010
Defend Your Data with IBM Access Management
IBM Tivoli access management portfolio solutions are modular, and can be combined to create a customized security architecture designed to fulfill an organization's specific needs. The result? Organizations can secure their data more comprehensively and proactively than ever before, substantially diminishing the risks that it will be accessed by unauthorized individuals, copied or modified inappropriately or illegally. And that means, instead, that data can safely be utilized to create value in new ways—ultimately strengthening the business bottom line. |
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July 2010
IBM Simplifies and Accelerates Data Archiving
The IBM Information Archive is a robust, policy-driven disk-based retention system that stores, manages and protects information archived to it. Although it is a cost-effective disk based system, it provides automated data management and migration of retained data to a lower cost storage tier such as tape. In this way, less mission-critical forms of data—what might be called “just in case” data—can automatically be shifted to lower-cost tiers such as tape or optical media. As an appliance, it is relatively easy to install, configure and maintain over time. Yet it's also powerful and secure enough to keep the organization in compliance with any necessary regulations while also minimizing the costs and complexity of that compliance. |
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July 2010
IBM Tivoli 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 (link resides outside of ibm.com). If that sounds too good to be true, think again. Since May 18th and running through August 16th, the Global Tivoli User Community (link resides outside of ibm.com) is running a contest (link resides outside of ibm.com) in which exactly that can happen. Just discuss the difference Tivoli solutions have made at your workplace in a short online video, and you could receive one of several attractive prizes. |
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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. |
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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. |
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June 2010
IBM Fulfills the Promise of Long Term Evolution
This family of service assurance solutions, currently in use by more than 1,000 of today's CSPs worldwide, can deliver end-to-end management for the new LTE architectures—no surprise, really, when you consider that IBM is the leading provider of service assurance solutions in the telecommunications space. |
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June 2010
Innovate 2010: Jump-Start Service Design and Delivery
Innovation is the royal road to business success. Organizations focused on innovation, however, commonly find they need a new approach to design and delivery – specifically, one designed to reduce costs and increase operational efficiencies. New links between IT operations and IT development are clearly needed to transform today’s separate silos into a more cohesive, integrated, cost-efficient engine of business services. |
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June 2010
Provide Secure Access for Web Applications and Portals with IBM
Web portals and Web applications are, for many organizations, a mixed blessing. While they deliver services in new ways, to internal users or external clients or customers, they also often introduce unwanted security complexities. Consider the case of a bank that delivers financial services online to its external customers over the Web. These services are in growing demand, but to create true business value, they must also be secured as comprehensively as possible. Customer satisfaction will certainly plummet if the bank's online accounts are breached. Such end-to-end security is no easy feat to accomplish. |
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June 2010
IBM Delivers Smarter Security for a Smarter Planet
What do we mean by "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. |
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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. |
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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 |
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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. |
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May 2010
IBM Empowers Service Providers with Customer-Aware Service Desks
By providing an optimized service response via two different mechanisms—a traditional trouble-ticket system and a catalog of services from which users can choose—TSRM helps organizations solve technical problems more quickly, more accurately, and in ways that correspond more precisely to the needs of internal users. |
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May 2010
Lock Down Mainframe Services with IBM Security
Systems z’s design supports exceptionally secure logical partitions, in which hundreds of Linux-based virtual servers run in isolation from each other. This separation significantly limits the opportunity for a security breach to escalate. The z/OS operating system comes with Resource Access Control Facility (RACF), which can help secure both business processes and IT assets, proactively and comprehensively. |
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May 2010
Provision Your Way to Better Service Management with IBM
IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for Images, part of the best-in-class IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager family, is a new, powerful superset of IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment. This earlier product supported a library of images and tailored image modification to help reduce image sprawl; instead of dozens or hundreds of different system images, organizations could rely on only a few, modifying them on the fly during the provisioning process with any special drivers or configuration files that might be required to address a particular need. |
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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. |
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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. |
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April 2010
IBM Wins Award for Best Security Company
On Tuesday March 2, IBM Corporation was named Best Security Company for 2010 by SC Magazine in recognition of IBM’s outstanding achievement in risk management and its comprehensive family of security solutions. This is particularly impressive given that SC Magazine is the single most influential periodical for security professionals today. Published since 1989, the magazine is the longest-running, best-established monthly publication in the IT security space—and the one with the largest readership. |
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April 2010
IBM Centralizes ERP Workload Management
Service management theory tells us that an improved outcome will generally come from shifting the focus from technology to business. TWS for Applications fulfills that theory by managing ERP workloads based on business goals—not technical details—thanks to its focus on business-centric policies. When changes occur in the infrastructure, these predefined policies will then automatically take action to improve the odds that business goals are met, no matter how complex or distributed the infrastructure may be. |
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April 2010
IBM Secures Identity Management in the Cloud
Cloud architectures can be leveraged as an exceptionally efficient, agile and cost-effective platform to offer external services to clients or customers, and in this way generate a significant competitive distinction (and, ideally, a significant revenue stream). For true business value to be created in this way, however, it’s mission-critical that those services be restricted to the right people, with the right access privileges. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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March 2010
Track and Eliminate Threats with IBM Tivoli
What organizations require today, in order to mitigate the growing threat of internal abuse and to simplify and accelerate audit and compliance, is a comprehensive way to track security threats across domains and solutions. The goal should be to develop and implement an efficient, cost-effective, holistic security strategy that corresponds to business priorities and diminishes the impact of security breaches as much as possible—even in the case of privileged insiders. |
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March 2010
Integrated Service Management: The Operating System for a Smarter Planet
To succeed in today’s ‘smarter’ planet, organizations must address these complex opportunities and challenges—yet few have the expertise needed to respond fully to either. Integrated Service Management from IBM provides the visibility, control and automation across business and IT infrastructures, resources and processes needed to deliver new, innovative services in a more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent planet. |
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March 2010
IBM Delivers Unified, Enhanced Data Recovery Management
IBM recently announced IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 6.2 (TSM). This family of data backup solutions has delivered best-in-class performance for more than 16 years, thanks to powerful policy-driven features, intelligent automation and the ability to work with virtually any form of data repository, from laptops to computational clusters to enterprise mainframes. Now, in its latest version, TSM has been enriched with many powerful new features that not only increase performance and add much-needed new functionality, but also position TSM as an excellent platform of unified recovery management. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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February 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. |
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February 2010
IBM Tivoli Security Solutions Generate Higher ROI from IT
Security threats both within and outside company walls have rapidly escalated in number and sophistication; limiting access solely to the right people, with the right privileges, is both more difficult and more mission-critical than ever. Government regulations also increasingly specify how sensitive customer information should be managed ... And as the economy has become more turbulent and unpredictable, ensuring that security is not just effective but cost-effective has become more important in proportion. |
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February 2010
Tivoli Live Monitoring Services: Customized Monitoring as an Online Service
These new services capitalize on the emerging paradigm of software-as-a-service (SaaS) to deliver enterprise-class monitoring over the Internet. This approach gives midsized organizations an option to improve infrastructural availability, drive their service levels up, and generate more business value from the infrastructure, with lower up-front investments in an easy to use service. |
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February 2010
IBM Updates Key Maximo Offerings
The central challenge of asset management is easy to describe—generating the highest possible business value from all assets throughout the organization—but it’s very difficult to achieve. This often comes as a consequence of a silo-centric approach; when assets are managed solely in the context of specific domains, instead of the total business context of the organization, the result will often be shorter asset lifetime, diminished asset flexibility, a faster replacement cycle and added costs of many kinds. IBM Maximo represents a fundamentally different approach. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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January 2010
Simplify and Secure Application Access with IBM
This offering delivers a single sign-on access experience for a remarkably diverse range of application groups: Windows, Web, Java, mainframe and teletype. Furthermore, it supports a similarly diverse range of access points: desktops/laptops, Citrix application servers, public kiosks/terminals, Microsoft Terminal servers and Web portals. This means that no matter which application users need to access, or how they're trying to access it, they are only required to sign on once. |
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January 2010
IBM Support Portal Delivers Fast, Targeted Info
The portal is a centralized, aggregated interface to the complete range of online technical support information available from IBM for all IBM offerings: systems, software and services. Furthermore, the portal can be customized (once the user logs in with an IBM ID) in order to tailor the content for specific needs or interests and generate an even faster and simpler path to the necessary information. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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December 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. |
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December 2009
Manufacture More Business Value with IBM Maximo
IBM Maximo solutions work by way of a centralized data repository that spans all assets and services, regardless of how they may be deployed or managed in an organization at present. Asset management functions are then fulfilled via a unified business process engine, addressing such diverse areas as asset discovery, inventory, health/status tracking, procurement, contracts, service level agreements and others. |
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December 2009
IBM Tivoli: Keeping Applications Alive and Well
TADDM simplifies the management of composite applications that span multiple systems, data repositories, networks and subnetworks and other IT elements, this challenge tremendously, thanks to powerful autodiscovery and visualization functions that can identify the actual state of each element in such a chain of dependencies, then reflect the information via an easy-to-read topology map and reports. |
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December 2009
IBM Tivoli zSecure: Leverage IBM System z as a Security Hub
Besides improving security per se, a compelling additional advantage of Tivoli security solutions is their ability to reduce overall costs and increase infrastructural ROI. IBM Tivoli Security Management for z/OS is exceptionally impressive when viewed through the cost-control lens—a logical consequence of the way it gives IT better security with efficient controls and automation, while at the same time requiring fewer resources. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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November 2009
IBM Solution Tracks and Enhances Network Performance
As enterprise networks become more solution-rich and complex, and the enterprise becomes more dependent on IT services for even the most basic productivity, these networks, too, will require a new, more sophisticated, more centralized approach to performance management. This is particularly true for enterprises in the financial sector, such as banks, for whom the highest levels of service availability and network performance are more than targets—they're de facto requirements. |
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November 2009
Retain Data, Reduce Costs: The IBM Information Archive
The IBM Information Archive delivers on every point. This easy-to-use, complete solution integrates the full range of hardware and software needed to ensure that data can be retained and managed in a cost-optimized, centralized manner that corresponds to both internal goals and policies and external regulations. |
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November 2009
IOD Offers Information about Information
The annual IBM Information On Demand 2009 global conference is designed to help organizations today solve their most pressing information challenges, obtain leading insight and best practices and, in short, get the best possible return on investment from both their information and their information infrastructures. To be held at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Convention Center in Las Vegas, from October 25-29, this year’s show promises to deliver more value, in more ways, than ever before. |
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November 2009
Pulse 2010: Building a Dynamic Infrastructure through Integrated Service Management
IBM's vision of the Dynamic Infrastructure, to be explored in depth at Pulse, represents a fairly deep conceptual shift for many organizations. Rather than the infrastructure being divided into largely independent technology silos, each with its own assets, each managed separately and each tuned well for its own purposes, it should be integrated. The infrastructure should also be managed in an integrated way, as determined by business priorities, to create more business value for the entire organization. |
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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. |
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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. |
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October 2009
Dynamically Manage Workloads with IBM Solutions
Developed directly in response to IBM Tivoli customer needs and requests, this powerful offering consolidates and enhances workload management even for exceptionally distributed infrastructures, allowing workloads to be managed not on the basis of technical details, but, more abstractly, on the basis of business policies designed to lead to an optimized outcome. And in the latest version, IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler for z/OS 8.5, many new features translate into an even more intelligent, powerful, cost-effective and efficient outcome for organizations today. |
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October 2009
Step Up to the Microphone at Pulse 2010
Invited client speakers will receive free attendance to the event—a full conference pass currently valued at more than two thousand dollars. Presenting at Pulse, in other words, is an investment that will pay off instantly; in return for their contribution of time, speakers will be able to attend as many other talks as their schedules will accommodate without charge. Admission to the IBM VIP client lounge will also be granted to all speakers, representing still another learning opportunity. |
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October 2009
IBM Access Management: Celebrating Ten Years of Leadership
Every day, hundreds of millions of users leverage the power of IBM's offerings to obtain secure access to thousands of applications and services, at thousands of organizations in different industries and business sectors around the world. IBM Tivoli access management family interoperates with over 100 different leading technology solutions from both IBM and third parties. These include such immediately recognizable names as Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Citrix, Siebel, Red Hat, Siemens, Novell, Apache, Sun, and many others. |
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October 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. |
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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. |
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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 |
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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. |
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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. |
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September 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. |
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September 2009
Holistically Manage Software Assets with IBM Tivoli
IBM offers best-in-class asset management for all the assets an organization may have—whether they fall on or off the IP infrastructure—at every stage in their lifecycles, all conveniently delivered via a shared platform under a single pane of glass. And among IBM's asset management offerings, one likely to appeal to IT in particular is IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT. |
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September 2009
Green Energy Management Leads to a Better Business Outcome—and a Better World
Globally, data centers generate only about two percent of energy consumption; the remaining ninety-eight 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 mobilie infrastructure like trucking fleets. When you consider these issues, a central truth becomes apparent: the energy management story is much larger than simply the enterprise-class data center. |
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September 2009
IBM Service Management Revitalizes Healthcare
IBM has recently released a compelling new offering—IBM Service Management for Healthcare —intended to help hospital providers to accomplish these many goals. This modular offering, 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). |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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August 2009
Reducing IT Costs is now Mission-Critical
Achieving substantial cost reductions without compromising service levels will require more than merely adjusting business strategies or processes. It will also require new IT solutions designed to fulfill those strategies and drive those processes. This is particularly true in the case of the enterprise-class data center, commonly the heart of IT operations, where optimized solutions can be leveraged to obtain exceptional improvements in cost-efficiency. |
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August 2009
Maximize Your Return on Assets
In the transportation sector, two unique asset management complexities are on-time delivery (delivering freight and passengers within target deadlines) and capacity planning (ensuring assets have sufficient capacity to meet unpredictable demand levels, while also maximizing the utilization of existing capacity wherever possible). Stir in the increased globalization of trade, volatile fuel costs and an increasing number of government regulations that require compliance, and the overall picture becomes clear. |
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August 2009
Special Expertise May Be Required to Optimize IT
The Tivoli Deployment Accreditation program, launched in 2008, is designed to make it as easy as possible for organizations to find the business partners they need to achieve target business goals via IBM Tivoli solutions. It accomplishes this goal by classifying those business partners in accordance with their demonstrated expertise, and giving them incentives to develop new skill sets known to be in demand. |
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August 2009
Data Protection is No Place for Half Measures
Data typically becomes more and more dispersed—across end user desktops, mobile offerings, systems, tape backups, virtual tape libraries, in-production databases, and endless other sources. As organizations grow in market share and revenue, they also typically grow in geographical locations; branch locations represent a new wrinkle for data protection strategies to address. And data volumes, too, have rapidly expanded in recent years. Developing a comprehensive and effective data protection strategy, for all these reasons, is both necessary and difficult. |
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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. |
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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. |
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July 2009
Command Storage From End-to-End with IBM Tivoli
Applications, systems, and IT services all rely directly on storage as a vital resource; this means managing storage effectively can and will translate into tremendous business value by benefiting virtually every aspect of organizational operations. Conversely, when storage is inadequately managed, the consequences can be staggering—all the way from lost data to problematic service management to diminished revenues to brand damage. |
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July 2009
IBM Tivoli: Better Asset Management, Lower Costs
As organizational assets have become both more diverse and more complex, on and off the IP infrastructure, they have also become harder to manage for ideal business value. Why should this be so? Asset conditions and asset utilization change; asset status and performance levels change in parallel; business strategies designed to leverage assets also fluctuate. Over time, as a result, it's easy for asset management to fall out of close alignment with big-picture business goals. What organizations today require is a new approach, through which they can holistically monitor and manage the entire array of assets, from end to end across the organization, not just with respect to what class of asset they represent, but how they contribute to target service levels. |
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July 2009
IBM Tivoli: Centralized Control and Maximum ROI
The IBM Tivoli service management portfolio of offerings, developed on open standards for easy interoperability and a modular value proposition, are designed to generate maximum business value for virtually any organization with a complex IT infrastructure. This becomes possible through improved visibility, control and automation. When information is orchestrated across silos, and the focus shifts from the technology to the services they support, the business outcome is enhanced—and Tivoli solutions help to make that possible. |
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July 2009
Cross-Domain Management Propels CSP Growth
IBM Tivoli Netcool Performance Manager facilitates cross-infrastructure problem detection and resolution though a best-in-class feature set designed to help CSPs not only reduce the business impact of network performance issues, but also, in some cases, preclude it—solving technical problems before customers even have a chance to notice they exist. Thanks to network-wide analysis, infrastructure visualization and trend prediction, for example, it becomes possible for CSPs not only to optimize their domain specific infrastructures, but also prepare effectively for future needs. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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June 2009
IBM Solutions Propel 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. |
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June 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. |
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June 2009
Cut Costs and Grow Service Levels with IBM Tivoli
IBM can help organizations to minimize the effects of economic uncertainty by maximizing the total business value generated by their infrastructures. IBM Service Management, as supported by IBM Tivoli offerings, delivers powerful optimizations in three cost-reduction categories of central interest today: management software consolidation, data center automation and asset management. |
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June 2009
Foster Retail Growth with IBM Service Management
Organizations must rethink and reimplement how service management is achieved—bringing customer expectations and experiences back into alignment. Different industries, however, require different implementations of that idea, as considered from both business and technological perspectives. The technical infrastructure that supports and enables optimal service management in one industry might not address the key challenges in another industry nearly so well. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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May 2009
Evaluate your energy management with the IBM Software Energy & Environment Self-Assessment
At a time of economic uncertainty, focusing on cost reductions makes excellent business sense—and this is particularly true for IT operations. By reducing the resources necessary to keep the lights on (in both a literal and figurative way), organizations can redirect funds to other more strategic options, such as innovative new services designed to build the customer base and increase revenues. Cost reductions can thus improve business resilience at a time when it’s needed most. |
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May 2009
IBM delivers pick-and-choose backup of SharePoint sites
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Microsoft SharePoint. This targeted solution is specifically designed to address the SharePoint backup challenge by delivering swift, effortless backup and restoration of all SharePoint data with full granularity—from individual content items to complete SharePoint sites and sub-sites, and every point in between. Even live data currently in use can be protected, minimizing the business impact of the backup process and increasing operational flexibility. |
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May 2009
Get high asset ROI via IBM industry service management
The relationship between asset management and service management is a natural, logical one. Effective, holistic asset management can, by helping the organization monitor and orchestrate the elements responsible for its key services, empower and drive superior service management. When assets are best tuned for performance and uptime, the services they support will more precisely meet customer needs. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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April 2009
IBM Unveils Smarter Service Management to Enable Business Transformation for Your Industry
Service management can be perceived as a logical response to a challenging environment by serving as a royal road to customer satisfaction. When organizations align the services they deliver to the services customers actually require, the likely outcome is improved market share, improved revenues and strengthened brand value. All of these elements will combine to enhance the business bottom line, and thereby make the organization more resilient, even in today's difficult climate. |
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April 2009
The IBM Dynamic Infrastructure: Built and Managed by IBM Service Management
What does IBM mean by a “dynamic infrastructure?” A dynamic infrastructure takes advantage of the intelligence gained across the network and the business to help organizations compete more effectively and capitalize on the new digital, interconnected world. A secure, resilient and dynamic infrastructure helps to align business and IT assets, improve infrastructure management, drive costs down, reduce risk and improve service quality. |
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April 2009
IBM Drives Data Security via Centralized Key Management
TKLM can be seen as an example of IBM’s general strategy of holistic, proactive security throughout the infrastructure. Rather than apply a key function such as encryption key management as a superficial layer, IBM is embedding it at a deep level, as a scalable resource designed to grow with the demand—helping to lower costs, raise service levels and enhance security. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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March 2009
Share the Informational Wealth with IBM Tivoli Wikis
These informal sites, leveraging the proven Wiki model which invites collaborative content generation by everyone involved in an informational ecosystem, deliver extremely up-to-date technical information to IBM clients, customers and business partners, yet also provide an effective editing mechanism for rapid and effective content improvement over time. As a pilot project, IBM first created the IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) Wiki in order to provide a collaborative platform designed to showcase proven best practices, technical data and scenario information to help IBM Tivoli clients get the highest possible business value from TBSM—especially when it’s used in conjunction with other solutions. |
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March 2009
IBM delivers a federated data and application entitlement management tool
Enter IBM Tivoli Security Policy Manager (TSPM). This powerful data and application entitlement management tool empowers organizations with federated security policy management of exactly this type—effectively making it a service in its own right, SOA-style, that can be invoked and re-invoked in different ways to suit changing business needs swiftly and comprehensively. And because TSPM allows access control policy to reflect different perspectives based on different organizational roles, policies are not just simplified—they are optimized. Overall security is not only rendered less expensive, but also more effective. |
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March 2009
New backup solutions from IBM shatter the hourglass
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) is a best-of-breed family of storage management solutions with a broad range of powerful features which work in concert to deliver complete backup/restoration/archiving functions capable of meeting virtually any organization’s needs. For instance, its centralized, policy-based, fully-scriptable design allows administrators to pull data from almost any source on the IT infrastructure, ranging from laptops to mainframes, swiftly and automatically. And thanks to its intelligent data migration functions, TSM can also reduce the required network bandwidth, minimizing the business impact of backup and archive functions on the host organization. |
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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. |
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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.
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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. |
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February 2009
Optimize energy management for a smarter planet and a better bottom line
IT is estimated to generate at present two percent of all global carbon dioxide emissions, and that figure is expected to climb to three percent by 2020. By managing energy in a smarter, more optimized and more granular way, organizations can reduce these emissions and still maintain high IT service levels, thus helping to mitigate the looming threat of global warming and to preserve a greener world for us all. |
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February 2009
Gain a single point of control over heterogeneous storage infrastructures
Storage is, as the repository of all business data, one of the most critical of all IT resources. It’s no exaggeration to say that the more efficiently and cost-effectively organizations manage storage, the better they will be able to leverage their data for business value. The business case for best-in-class storage management solutions is, therefore, an exceptionally strong one. Unfortunately, many challenges combine in today’s enterprise-class IT environments to make such optimized storage management an exceptionally difficult proposition. The need for an end-to-end solution that delivers key features spans all storage technologies and is driven by automation when possible is indeed greater than ever. |
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February 2009
Achieve optimized change and release management with IBM expertise
Change is the only constant in business today - so goes the new-millennium proverb. Organizations that orchestrate such change skillfully, from the biggest picture to the finest detail, will be best positioned to capitalize on opportunities and avoid risks, gaining the most from existing resources and introducing new services smoothly and successfully. All of these concepts come into play in Larry Klosterboer’s book, Implementing ITIL Change and Release Management, which provides a deep and detailed examination of the many issues involved in thousands of change and release projects completed over decades. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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January 2009
IBM and Business Partners deliver next-generation energy monitoring
Tivoli Monitoring essentially works by continually tracking different elements of the infrastructure, polling IT solutions and facilities assets to establish their performance as pertaining to energy management, and then reflecting that performance in a centralized reporting portal. As performance bottlenecks occur and potential problems become apparent, they will be reported in real time through the portal via customizable workspaces. |
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January 2009
How can organizations avoid an identity crisis? Centralize identity management and stop reinventing the IT wheel
A key problem confronting many organizations today is IT service duplication. When IT services are created in specific ways, to meet specific needs, they often involve underlying features or functionalities that could conceivably be utilized for alternate purposes as well. But unless these services are specifically designed with that possibility in mind, such cross-contextual utilization cannot take place. Organizational resources must, therefore, be dedicated to recreating them over and over again. For this reason, service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become an attractive alternative to domain-specific solutions. |
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January 2009
Experience Service Management for a smarter planet
Held at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, from February 8-12, Pulse 2009 will expand and enhance IBM’s service management vision in a variety of new dimensions. With more than 200 targeted client presentations and an expected attendance of over 6000 service management professionals drawn from fields such as telecommunications, enterprise IT and plant/facilities management, the show will be a blockbuster of truly epic proportions. Those attending Pulse 2009—a population 40 percent larger than 2008’s record-breaking attendance—will benefit from a diverse range of opportunities. |
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December 2008
New Rational-Tivoli integration delivers faster, better software builds
Increasingly, as technical infrastructures become optimized to fulfill business strategies, it's growing obvious that integration across operations and development can play an important role. By linking these two domains so that they function in close tandem, overall costs can be minimized while other business benefits, such as speed and efficiency, often accrue simultaneously. |
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December 2008
Sophisticated energy management minimizes energy consumption without compromising service levels
Today’s operational cost realities have changed dramatically from those of ten years ago. One factor driving this change is the use of blade servers, which have increasingly been deployed in enterprise-class data centers. Blade systems have generated more computational power per square foot of real estate than ever before. Yet, at the same time, they have also radically altered the energy consumption story for the worse. More servers means higher electrical consumption; furthermore, because servers must be maintained at a cool temperature for ideal performance, the heat they generate must be dissipated as well. |
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December 2008
Service management entry point for safeguarding assets and business resilience
In challenging economies such as ours today, organizational success will often come through maximizing customer satisfaction. When customers receive best-in-class service, their motive to continue or even to extend the business relationship increases, their motive to switch to competing offerings diminishes and over time, this will translate into higher revenues and market share for the organization. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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November 2008
The pursuit of optimal service management goals and strategies
Pulse 2008, the premiere service management event of the year, demonstrated IBM's comprehensive vision in this area—a vision spanning many different industries, IT and business best practices, technological solutions in both hardware and software and the measurement and fulfillment of customer interests and goals via the optimization of infrastructures in both business and technological dimensions. |
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November 2008
Lock down data through key-based encryption with IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager
The business wins for TKLM as a result of its unique design and many powerful features are numerous. Consider, for instance, that because the solution was built to support open standards, its cross-vendor compatibility is exceptionally high; it can be deployed in a remarkably wide variety of IT infrastructures and will interoperate with an extraordinary number of storage devices. |
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November 2008
In a difficult business climate, companies can unity their response in two closely-related domains
As organizations move to make their operations generally more efficient—and cost-efficient—IT is certainly a logical place to start. Because IT is the central nervous system for the flow of business information, optimizations in IT will generate business value not just in IT per se, but also within the entire organization. For example, when problems occur involving the IT infrastructure, a rapid and effective response to them will deliver substantial business wins both in and out of IT. If IT service levels are consistently high, then the organization will generally be more productive—ultimately leading to higher customer satisfaction and revenues, as well as lower downtime and operational costs. |
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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. |
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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 |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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October 2008
Discover entry point: One powerful way to begin service management implementations
For many organizations, the Discover entry point might be a logical place to start with improving service levels. 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. Achieving high service levels means understanding, in detail, how IT services work and which assets are involved; the Discover entry point is specifically designed to help organizations establish exactly that. |
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October 2008
Accelerate OS provisioning to virtual servers
With IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for Operating System Deployment (TPMfOSD), software images can be created just once and stored in a library, then deployed many times over the network to any target system the business need demands; the system can then be automatically modified and customized with whatever special resources (such as drivers) may be required. Furthermore, for even more automated efficiency, the solution is fully scriptable. |
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October 2008
Maximize composite application business value
For technical information to generate best business results it must be presented in a business context—it must be migrated automatically into a second tool which is focused on business service management. In this way, IT managers get not only the technology side of the story, but also the business side—and are thus empowered to make changes in a prioritized manner that corresponds well to business strategies and helps to fulfill business goals. |
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October 2008
IBM TUAM drives energy management strategies through granular cost-tracking
How can organizations create and optimize effective energy management strategies? One obvious solution suggests itself: they must deploy energy-aware financial management tools. Only in this way can companies make the connections between business services and energy costs visible—ideally in a granular way, to create accountability, and yet also in a consolidated way, to track power usage across different technologies, groups and services. Both facilities usage and data center usage must be incorporated to deliver a holistic energy management solution, capable of maximizing the business value of deployed assets while minimizing the energy costs associated with them as much as possible. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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September 2008
Seamlessly link service desks, IT asset management and change management
For organizations looking to achieve cross-domain integration, IBM offers many IT operations solutions. Three in particular are IBM Tivoli Service Request Manager, IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT and IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database. These three solutions are not only designed for best-in-class performance within their specific operational domains, they’re also designed to drive overall business value by seamlessly moving information across these domains. Together, they comprise a powerful opportunity for organizations to break down the walls between operational silos, and thus connect people, processes and technology to facilitate information flow, lower costs and raise service levels. |
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September 2008
Controlling the information explosion: IBM Information Infrastructure Initiative
In the past, escalating data volumes have often been addressed through the purchase and deployment of more storage. Such a simple response, however, is intrinsically reactive, rather than proactive, and does not address the full scope of the information challenge. What organizations need is not merely more storage, but smarter storage and information management, designed to fulfill business initiatives and mitigate business risks in many different dimensions, always with a view toward cost controls and exceptional efficiency. |
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September 2008
Pulse 2008: Blockbuster event spotlights innovation and service management vision
For service management professionals in fields like enterprise IT, plant operations and telecommunications, IBM’s recent service management event, Pulse 2008, was a tremendous success. This blockbuster event—the unification of Tivoli Technical User Conferences, MaximoWorld and Netcool User Symposium—gave the more than 4,500 attendees a chance to interact with technical gurus, obtain certification, get a glimpse of forthcoming developments and solutions, and build and extend business relationships with peers. IBM's global leadership in service management was reflected in the fact that 69 different countries were represented at the show, as well as 500 different IBM Business Partners. |
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September 2008
Flash demo: Watch the IBM TotalStorage Productivity Suite in action!
For IT managers interested in finding out more about the IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center, there’s a great way to go about it. IBM is now hosting a compelling, comprehensive look at this offering via a Flash demo that can be either downloaded or streamed over the Web. This demo turns the spotlight on the many strengths, technical features and business advantages that come with the solution, and the straightforward voiceover is accompanied with illustrations and graphic walkthroughs to underscore the points. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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August 2008
Lock down unstructured data with IBM
The IBM Unstructured Data Security Solution is specifically designed to enhance security for mission-critical yet unstructured data present on UNIX and Linux file servers. It accomplishes this goal through bundling three integrated products, each addressing a different aspect of the challenge: IBM Classification Module, IBM Tivoli Access Manager for Operating Systems and IBM Tivoli Compliance Insight Manager. Together, they help organizations ensure that the right people get the right access to the right information, locking down unstructured data to minimize the possibility of a breach, as well as the business consequences should one occur. |
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August 2008
Catalog approach can enhance IT service management while reducing costs
In recent years, however, a new approach to IT service request fulfillment has emerged: the service catalog. A service catalog addresses service management in a different way. Instead of reporting specific problems, users can request specific services drawn from a service catalog. Catalog-driven solutions of this type result in many advantages for an organization. For instance, from an IT standpoint, services are carried out in a more linear and consistent manner, and in a manner that more closely aligns with proven best practices frameworks, such as ITIL v3 (Information Technology Infrastructure Library Version 3.0), which focuses on service management. |
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August 2008
Unified, interoperable storage management with Aperi Storage Resource Manager
The Aperi Storage Management Project represents IBM's joint, open-source initiative with other industry players, including Cisco Systems, Brocade Communications, Fujitsu, LSI Logic, Novell, NetApp, and others, to deliver a shared, interoperable framework for common storage management features. By leveraging industry standards and working cooperatively via open source collaboration, the Aperi Storage Management Project delivers major business advantages for everyone involved: simplified and consolidated storage management, lower storage management costs, faster response time and higher uptime for services that depend on storage resources (that is to say, virtually all of them), and overall improved IT service levels for their organizations. |
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August 2008
Get swift, comprehensive data protection with IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack
Extending the best-in-class IBM Tivoli Storage Manager family, a forthcoming portfolio of data protection solutions is specifically designed to back up any class of Windows data with extraordinary speed, store and manage it so that it can be retrieved from any prior point in time and restore it on demand—efficiently and comprehensively. The portfolio, known as IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack, is comprised of three different tools, targeting different aspects of data protection. Together, these solutions can help organizations to achieve superior performance in two metrics very near and dear to any system administrator’s heart: Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), which specify the maximum acceptable amount of data that should be lost in any given case, and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), which specify how much time should be required to recover data. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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July 2008
Propel IT operations efficiency with IBM Tivoli Service Request Manager 7.1
IBM Tivoli Service Request Manager 7.1 delivers an elegant and powerful response to end user problems via both traditional service desk and service catalog features. What’s more, this solution is one of several in the Tivoli system management suite which leverages the Tivoli Process Automation Platform—a shared codebase specifically designed to fulfill service management goals and strategies in different business and technological contexts. As a result, these tools collectively interoperate to help organizations improve service delivery, lower costs and streamline operations. |
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July 2008
How to achieve comprehensive, accelerated data protection and recovery
On April 21, 2008, IBM completed its acquisition of FilesX, a privately held company offering a comprehensive set of new, targeted solutions designed to recover all data—everywhere in the organization it may exist, in both headquarters and branch offices—as rapidly as possible, shrinking the threat to business resilience implied by tape solutions and restoring core data and services with maximum efficiency. Through the FilesX portfolio, IBM gives its customers the power to restore any amount or any type of Microsoft Windows data, however large its volume and however distributed it may be throughout the IT infrastructure. Furthermore, data can be recovered not just from the most recent backup, but from any previous point in time—regardless of the root cause of system failure. |
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July 2008
Web Replay delivers next-generation automation for TPM customers
IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager (TPM) delivers accelerated, automated provisioning. TPM allows administrators to create disk images in advance, then deploy them over the network, either manually or via scripts, to target systems—even when those systems have blank hard drives. And a powerful new feature called Web Replay included with TPM 5.1.1, the latest version, enhances the solution's value proposition even more by making it easier and faster than ever to automate its functions. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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June 2008
Accelerated and secure OS provisioning
As enterprise-class IT strives to become more efficient, flexible, cost-effective, and resilient, one fundamental area of potential improvement lies in software provisioning. As new services are required, and systems require new software as a result, enterprise-class provisioning tools can install that software quickly, consistently, and, from the standpoint of the operational budget, inexpensively. This is particularly true in the case of operating system (OS) provisioning. Modern operating systems are exceptionally large, complex software packages which, if installed manually, require many hours of staff time. Software provisioning tools deliver exceptional business value in this context by drastically reducing errors, improving IT service availability and driving end user productivity. Thus, many potential threats to service uptime can be mitigated. |
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June 2008
IBM delivers big with mid-market solutions, resources, accreditation
For many growing, mid-market organizations, new pressures have led to IT complexities. 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. In every case, the big-picture goal is the same: IBM strives to help growing mid-market customers get the best, most tailored outcome from the IBM Tivoli solutions portfolio. |
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June 2008
Shift client-side problem resolution into high gear
For many organizations, user-side technical issues comprise a serious challenge to efficient IT operations. Part of the problem lies in asset management; management of IT assets is simplified when those assets are centralized. User solutions, on the other hand, are extraordinarily distributed. Managing the complexity implied by such a distributed architecture, from a troubleshooting standpoint, is no simple task. IBM Tivoli Remote Control (TRC) 5.1 is the solution, empowering IT through the remote resolution of almost any client-side problem through a broad array of optimized features. |
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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 |
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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. |
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May 2008
Achieve Service Management Liftoff with IBM: Five Entry Points to Success
Organizations interested in implementing the discipline of service management face a common challenge: Where is it best to begin? Fortunately for them, IBM has identified five different entry points which map to common organizational needs, each broken down into projects. By working with IBM, organizations can select entry points and projects which map well to their specific contexts, achieving a tailored fit designed to deliver real-world improvements in short order. In fact, IBM estimates that for many organizations, significant, measurable value should be possible in one business quarter or less, from initial assessment to final implementation. |
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May 2008
IBM Tivoli Access Manager 6.1 Delivers Faster, Safer, and More Resilient Application Security
Access solutions must be able to scale in accordance with growing demand, delivering high performance and high reliability at the same time. And in the pursuit of end-to-end holistic security, it’s important that access management solutions also integrate easily and effectively with other elements of the IT infrastructure, ranging from other security solutions to enterprise applications to applications developed internally by the development team. Via IBM Tivoli Access Manager, organizations can realize all these benefits and more, helping to ensure that access is granted only to the right people, and with the right privileges, across an exceptionally broad range of business and technological contexts. And new features included in the latest iteration of the solution, version 6.1, extend the value premise even further through key enhancements in performance, reliability, and cross-domain integration. |
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May 2008
Breaking the Speed Limit: How IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager Accelerates Application Deployment
As enterprise-class IT evolves—becoming a more efficient, integrated, and versatile instrument of business strategy—one key element of its evolution is software provisioning. Virtually all IT services rely on an underlying infrastructure of servers, which in turn require appropriate software configurations; through software provisioning, these servers can be quickly and accurately configured with a complete software stack, including one or more operating systems, middleware, applications, data, and drivers. Software provisioning solutions are thus often associated primarily with IT operations. However, getting the highest business value from such solutions means integrating them with IT development as well. Together, Tivoli and Rational products can help organizations create new software builds more easily than ever, then leverage all the power and utility of software provisioning to deploy them, yielding a more unified, accurate, and accelerated overall process. |
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May 2008
Train a microscope on IT costs with IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager
With IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager (TUAM), today's organizations can track and resolve IT costs with far greater granularity than ever before—across organizational, technological, and project domains. Furthermore, because it supports an exceptionally broad range of host environments, including many leading operating systems as well as VMware's popular virtualization solution, TUAM will prove suitable for almost any infrastructure, giving the organization the key information required to create itemized chargebacks, improve costs visibility, and reduce overhead by generating accurate projections. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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? |
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April 2008
Seeding the Clouds
Competing effectively in today's extraordinarily challenging market means more than simply maintaining the status quo—it also means developing new revenue-generating services and solutions as efficiently as possible. While organizations strive to reduce operational overhead and enhance IT efficiency, they must simultaneously seek to uncover, refine, and bring to market new ideas by spurring internal innovation wherever possible. |
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April 2008
IBM\'s Security Roadshow
For enterprise-class IT, security has become a primary focus. Change is the only constant in today's complex business environment, and in the case of IT security, change has brought with it a host of new concerns that must be acknowledged and addressed. |
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April 2008
Global Tivoli User Community Connects
How can enterprises best stay in touch with their customers? That's a crucial question, and answering it delivers a double benefit—a classic win/win scenario for both the enterprise and its customer base. |
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April 2008
IBM at RSA 2008
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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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March 2008
IBM 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. |
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March 2008
Enhance and Extend Application Security
As today's organizations strive to maximize the business value they obtain from IT, security is a key area in which leading solutions, deployed and managed through industry best practices, can yield significant returns. Complexities such as compliance regulations, the growing threat from insider abuse, and the potential business consequences of corruption or destruction of core business data all strongly encourage organizations to pursue a new, more effective approach to security. |
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March 2008
IBM’s Unified Asset Management Solution
As enterprise-class IT evolves, one core area in which it must achieve increasing success is asset management. Maximizing business value from the broad array of IT technologies typically in place requires comprehensive tracking and monitoring; only in this way can the enterprise ensure that it is delivering satisfactory levels of performance throughout every stage of the lifecycle, and that assets are utilized suitably in the pursuit of business goals. |
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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. |
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March 2008
A Change in the Paradigm: The Rise of the New Enterprise Data Center
The paradigm for the modern enterprise data center, which has served businesses admirably for many years, is looking increasingly brittle. The strains posed by disruptive technological innovations and ever-changing service demands required by business units, coupled with budgetary pressures as well as increasing requirements for security, resiliency, and performance have pushed the data center quite literally to the breaking point. The journey to the New Enterprise Data Center begins with establishing a new economic foundation in the current environment and then working with the business toward a business goal-driven environment. In so doing, the entire organization is able to transcend today's operational issues and envision a more dynamic infrastructure that extends beyond IT to all points in the IT supply chain. |
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March 2008
IBM's Vision For The New Enterprise Data Center
IBM’s vision for the new enterprise data center is an evolutionary model that helps reset the economics of IT and can dramatically improve operational efficiency. It also can help reduce and control rising costs and improve provisioning speed and data center security and resiliency—at any scale. It will allow you to be highly responsive to any user need. And it aligns technology and business—giving you the freedom and the tools you need to innovate—and stay ahead of the competition. |
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March 2008
The Data Center ‘Implosion Explosion’... and the Need to Move to a New Enterprise Data Center Model
In recent years, there has been an explosion of imploding data centers. Crushed by demands for increased services, and flattened by greatly increasing operational costs, data centers are collapsing under their own weight. Information systems labor costs can now represent up to 70% of an information technology (IT) operations budget; power and cooling costs are now 8X greater than a dozen years ago; and pressing security and compliance demands have drained resources and the funding needed for new projects. Innovation is at a stand-still. The remainder of this Commentary examines the “whys” and “hows” of data center transformation. |
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February 2008
Get Paid for Going Green
Not only can virtualization on servers such as the IBM System x3950 M2 reduce complexity in your data center, consolidate servers, and enable you to save on power and cooling requirements, but the Energy Efficiency Certificate program documents and verifies the energy savings a client achieves through implementing energy efficiency projects. The certificates earned—based on energy use reduction verified by a third-party—provide a way for businesses to attain a certified measurement of their energy use reduction, a key emerging business metric. The certificates can be traded for cash on the growing Energy Efficiency Certificate market, or otherwise retained to demonstrate reductions in energy use and associated CO2 emissions. |
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February 2008
Neuwing Energy Ventures
Energy Efficiency Certificates are a way to document steps that companies, government agencies, and other organizations have taken to reduce their energy consumption in a measurable way. The certificates keep track of the measurement and verification of the actual reduction in energy usage. Click here to read an informative Q&A with Matt Rosenblum the President and C.E.O. of Neuwing Energy Ventures. Learn how Neuwing is assisting companies by administering Energy Efficiency Certificates to document and track their energy reductions. |
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February 2008
PowerVM: Making Virtualization Easier
Clearly, small- and medium-sized businesses are increasingly thinking about virtualization. To encourage their adaptation, IBM has introduced a new virtualization offering designed to help small- and medium-sized businesses consolidate server capacity, save energy, and manage IT cost more effectively. The offering is PowerVM Express and it joins the other PowerVM editions, Standard and Enterprise, which were designed to address the data processing needs of larger organizations. IBM is so certain that small- and medium-sized business will quickly see the benefits of PowerVM Express that it is offering it at $40 per processor core. The pricing is meant to tell businesses, in effect, "Try it. You'll like it." |
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February 2008
IBM Service Management: Driving Innovation Through Visibility, Control and Automation
IBM Service Management represents an evolutionary leap forward in service management. IBM Service Management is about having the visibility, control, and automation across the service lifecycle that is needed to innovate and achieve business objectives. Visibility enables organizations to see their business, Control helps organizations to govern their business, and Automation enables organizations to optimize their business. Read this article for a more in-depth look at how IBM service management solutions help organizations innovate and achieve their business objectives through increased Visibility, Control, and Automation. |
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February 2008
Customer Experience Management: The Next Frontier in Telecom Service Assurance
In the extraordinarily competitive telecom sector, customer satisfaction is the ultimate metric of success. The surest path to a strong business bottom line is assuring that customers receive the highest appropriate Quality of Service (QoS) across multiple applications and delivery mechanisms. Understanding how services perform is not enough. Driving business through assurance requires customer-centric monitoring of multiple aspects of the total customer engagement. The answer? Customer Experience Management (CEM), which might be characterized as the next logical generation of SQM. CEM truly connects the monitoring and assurance functions of the OSS to business objectives, ultimately leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and a stronger business bottom line. |
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February 2008
OPAL Translates Solution Integration into IT Service Management Business Value
Over the last three years, OPAL has evolved from its original definition as a catalog of integrations for IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager into a far more comprehensive archive of many types of solution integration modules, spanning many members of the IBM Tivoli service management family, as well as many third-party products commonly used in enterprise-class IT divisions worldwide. As a result, IT professionals have increasingly come to rely on OPAL, leveraging its technical tips, adapters, probes, agents, automation packages, and other forms of key information to obtain more business value from their solution portfolios than ever before. |
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February 2008
IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager 5.1.1 Delivers Improved Power and Ease of Use for Data Center Automation
In a complex infrastructure, any means of ensuring that that software can be efficiently and accurately distributed to the proper servers is a tremendous business win. For this reason, IBM has delivered enhancements to IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager (TPM), an enterprise-class provisioning tool for Data Center Automation. TPM includes sophisticated features to automate common Data Center processes to optimize the usage of skills and resources and support the distribution of virtually any form of software to virtually any IT resource. TPM delivers in a second compelling area as well: energy efficiency. Today's data centers, typically densely packed with blade servers, deliver more computing power per square foot than ever before—but also require more power, leading to cost-control complications and environmental consequences. TPM includes features that are used in IBM’s energy management offerings. |
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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.
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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January 2008
IBM System p: The Power of POWER6
Want to know more about the System p line of servers and the stunning new POWER6 microprocessor? Click here to read an informative PDF and to register for and exclusive e-kit, which includes white papers from leading analyst firms International Technology Corporation and Illuminata. You’ll learn about the benefits of System p virtualization, the power of the POWER6 processor, and how IBM can help you migrate your old servers to a consolidated, efficient new infrastructure. |
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January 2008
Be Heard! Enhances the Global Tivoli User Community Site through User Content Generation
New developments for the Global Tivoli User Community Web site are underway—and Tivoli users will be the direct beneficiaries. Through this engaging new feature, users can dynamically contribute their own content to supported sections of the site. In cases where they wish to discuss the subject matter in more detail, TUG users can simply add their own comments, supporting or opposing published ideas, extending them in more detail, or perhaps demonstrating the details in specific business scenarios. Such dynamic content generation, over time, promises to empower Tivoli users more than ever before. In theory, in fact, it’s possible that user-generated content of this type may lead to entirely new directions for the TUG site, TUG members, and even IBM itself. . |
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January 2008
Improve Your Information Risk Management with IBM Tivoli Solutions
Today, unfortunately, the business risks to data are more complex than ever before. In addition to traditional security threats such as external malicious hackers and malware, for instance, today's organizations face the increasing possibility of internal threats, such as abuse by privileged users, or even inadvertent access, corruption, or deletion of data by users who have inappropriate access privileges. Compliance is a second dimension of added complexity, as new government regulations specify how organizations should shield sensitive data. It’s not enough to achieve compliance; IT must be able to demonstrate that compliance in the event of an audit. Enter the IBM Tivoli system management portfolio. |
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December 2007
Automate Linux Rollouts with IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment
Achieving best business results from enterprise IT means automating standard tasks wherever that makes good business sense. A manual solution, though it confers the benefit of human oversight, also often involves hidden shortcomings and inconsistencies that diminish the overall business value. One good example, for instance, would be the case of operating system (OS) provisioning. Such a process, if handled manually, is exceptionally time-intensive for IT staff. This is particularly true in the case of Linux provisioning. While Linux installation has generally become easier in the course of the last decade, it is still typically far from the one-click process associated with some mainstream operating systems. |
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December 2007
Optimize Data Center Energy Management with IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager
For many of today’s organizations, optimized energy management has become more mission-critical than ever. IT analysts have charted the growing energy requirements of IT infrastructures, and future expectations for this expense item appear daunting. IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager is a versatile tool which can be applied in many different IT contexts to optimize operations and reduce costs. This best-in-class provisioning tool includes many powerful features which can help almost any organization implement a dramatically improved energy management strategy. Because it integrates elegantly with other IBM solutions, IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager’s total value to the customer can be multiplied and enhanced in many powerful ways, facilitating a tailored design which can easily be modified to suit the specific business need. |
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December 2007
Infrastructure Availability: For Reliable Business Continuity
Escalating IT costs. Underutilized servers. Energy-consuming data centers. Stretched IT resources. Service-level agreement demands. Your IT infrastructure should be there to help you meet your business objectives, but managing increasingly complex IT infrastructures-and getting the best bang for your IT buck-is a primary challenge IT organizations face today. So companies are looking for ways to do more with their IT environments, and sometimes, even do more with less. They're looking for ways to optimize IT. By creating a highly efficient and dynamic IT infrastructure, you can attain maximum business value from your IT investment. With the right combination of hardware, software, and services, you can enable and enhance your IT infrastructure for greater availability. |
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December 2007
Taking the Risk Out of Data Migration
Data migration has become a mandatory and regular activity for most data centers. Today, companies need to migrate data not only when a technology replacement is due, but also for other purposes such as consolidation, load balancing, and disaster recovery. That’s why IBM Softek Transparent Data Migration Facility (TDMF) is the time-tested antidote for data migration anxiety. IBM Softek TDMF is a host-based unified data migration solution for both open systems and mainframe environments. Consistent with IBM's commitment to simplicity, consolidation, and flexibility, IBM Softek TDMF is an important tool in storage virtualization because it provides you with a unique vehicle to migrate data seamlessly from a non virtualized environment to a virtualized environment or between virtualized environments. |
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November 2007
Migrate to a Simpler, Cheaper, More Productive IT Infrastructure
It's time to examine the benefits of migration—do it right and you'll get the advantages of newer architectures, but still leverage the understanding and familiarity of your current applications. Your IT staff will feel right at home managing the new gear, business processes will not be disrupted, and there will be minimal end-user training. Additionally, by sizing servers right and consolidating smartly, you'll save on software licenses, both today and for years to come. IBM is a name you can trust when choosing your strategic server platform, and through IBM migration services, is a partner you can trust to help with the actual migration. Click here to read more about how IBM can help you in their informative PDF. |
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November 2007
IBM BladeCenter® Servers: the Sharpest Tool in the IT Shed
By integrating servers, storage, and networking, IBM BladeCenter is helping companies in every industry sweep complexity aside. The blades contain all the necessities to run an application—processors, memory, I/O, and storage. The chassis contains shared redundant power, shared hot-swap cooling, DVD, integrated Ethernet, storage, switching, and consolidated powerful management. Its innovative, open design offers a true alternative to today's sprawling racks and overheated server rooms. So toss your cables. You have nothing to lose but complexity. Click here to read more information in our informative PDF. |
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November 2007
Optimize Virtual Servers Dynamically With IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager
Server virtualization has transformed enterprise-class datacenters. By deploying multiple virtual servers on a single physical server, enterprises have dramatically improved server resource utilization while reducing operational costs such as energy consumption, thus leaving the datacenter a more flexible instrument of business strategy than ever before. However, there are some added complexities which come with such technology. Organizations looking for a way to simplify those complexities, and extract the maximum possible business value from virtualized servers, should consider IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager (TPM). |
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November 2007
IBM Tivoli Solutions Enhance Security by Tracking Privileged User Activities
The IBM Tivoli system management suite includes a number of solutions specifically designed to increase the visibility of trusted user behavior, enhance compliance with internal security policies and external government regulations, and enhance business resilience and overall data integrity. IBM Tivoli solutions make it possible to manage system/application access, track trusted user activity in real time, and detect and resolve emerging threats as quickly as possible—and with minimum business consequence. |
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October 2007
Creating an agile storage infrastructure with TotalStorage Productivity Center v3.3
IBM's promise to virtualization customers has always been simple: We can help you consolidate, simplify, and economize your data center. That promise rings as true as ever with the latest version of IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center (TPC). The IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center is an open storage infrastructure management solution designed to help simplify management of complex storage infrastructure, automate manual storage tasks to improve administrative efficiency, and optimize storage capacity utilization through virtualization and other means. It is designed to create an agile storage infrastructure that can grow with a business and respond to on-demand storage needs. |
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October 2007
Where is the Data Center Going? Top Trends Today
Data is evolving into the true universal currency, with organizations of every stripe increasingly reliant on the data center as the linchpin of operations. Regardless of the nature of the endeavor, success more and more frequently depends on reliable, timely access to data and applications and getting the right information to the right people at the right time. An offshoot of this trend has been tremendous growth in the amount of information and applications data center professionals are being asked to manage. More than a third of data center managers reported databases exceeding a terabyte in size at the end of 2006, and nine of ten expected their operations to grow over the coming year. And while growth in 2007 IT budgets has been stronger than expected, data center managers are still being asked to do more with less. |
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October 2007
Ultimate Synergy: Optimized IT
Enterprises worldwide have invested heavily in IT in order to transform the way they do business. The net result has been a tremendous growth in the size of data centers. Today, the typical data center for a large enterprise represents a nine-digit capital investment in server farms, mainframes, storage devices, and networking equipment. That investment is consuming an ever-growing portion of operating capital through energy consumption for power and cooling, as well as increased labor costs for an expanding staff of highly skilled IT technologists needed for management and administration. IT Optimization is all about getting the full picture of how best to apply technology and methods to improve IT cost, flexibility, and service level. |
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October 2007
Operational Management: Driving IT Efficiency and Performance
Organizational innovation, in and of itself, isn't enough to allow companies to utilize their IT environments to bring their business objectives to fruition. With typical budget restrictions, how can organizations deliver reliable IT services and capabilities without draining their resources? What's called for is organizational evolution, or taking what you have in your IT environment and strategically optimizing it. Operational management, enabled with the right integration of hardware, software and services, allows you to take what's in your IT environment and make it run more quickly, easily and cost effectively. |
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October 2007
Tracking Security Breaches: IBM Tivoli Security and Compliance Offering Delivers a Complete Solution
Achieving a complete security strategy in enterprise IT is more complex than ever. Both the technology side and the business policy side of that strategy must be fully addressed. Enter the IBM Tivoli Security and Compliance Offering. This solution integrates two complementary products (IBM Tivoli Security Operations Manager and IBM Tivoli Compliance Insight Manager) into a functionally unified whole which provides end-to-end security log assessment in conjunction with security policy visualization, enabling the enterprise to maximize data integrity and comply with governmental regulations at the same time. |
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October 2007
Project Big Green: IBM's Commitment to Data Center Power Reduction
What is your company’s power management strategy? For many enterprise-class IT divisions today, that question may draw a blank look. As IT services have become ever more complex and budget-challenged, IT teams have worked to improve service levels through optimizing their technology, and their focus has naturally fallen on those services and that technology. But today's operational cost reality requires a shift in focus. The simple truth is that for organizations with modern data centers, each of which involve hundreds of servers that draw tremendous amounts of power and generate tremendous amounts of heat, energy consumption is already a major issue demanding serious attention - and serious solutions. |
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October 2007
IBM Continues to Blaze the Trail on Energy and Environmental Issues
Today, less as in less energy consumption in the data center — is definitely more — as in more protective of the environment. The global business dialog is shifting, and topics such as global warming, energy security, carbon footprint, and energy efficiency have crept into IT and C-level discussions with greater frequency. As readers of Virtualization View are aware, IBM has long evangelized about virtualization's inherent ability to increase efficient utilization of servers and storage in the data center, conserve power and cooling, and reduce costs. Read here to learn more about IBM’s own journey to becoming more efficient and how you can do the same. |
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October 2007
IBM's New i5/OS Version 6: Virtualization Just Got Simpler
Virtualization is about to get even simpler with the major new release of IBM's flagship integrated operating system, i5/OS, expected in 2008. As previewed recently, i5/OS Version 6 will offer a host of new features: enhanced security, Web services, and virtualization capabilities that enable businesses to reap the greatest value from their investment in IT. It should come as no surprise that simplicity is the cornerstone of the enhanced virtualization features in i5/OS Version 6 Release 1. After all, simplification has become a hallmark, as well as a differentiator, in the marketplace for IBM's approach to virtualization. Business is challenging enough without an IT infrastructure that increases the pressures. By providing an uncomplicated approach to IT that cuts costs while maximizing system flexibility, i5/OS V6R1 allows businesses to focus on their customers. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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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September 2007
Automating IT Problem Response with IBM Tivoli Solutions
If the IT infrastructure can recognize technical problems as they develop, automatically notify IT staff of the problems, and, in some cases, even solve those problems without requiring manual intervention, the business win for the enterprise can be enormous. Not only are technical problems addressed more comprehensively and more quickly, but IT staff are freed to address more complex issues that truly require human resources. The overall business outcome? IT becomes measurably more efficient and the business receives superior IT service. Toward that end, IBM delivers the Tivoli portfolio, an integrated suite of industry-leading system management solutions which work in concert to reduce complexity, minimize time-to-solution, and optimize overall IT responsiveness whenever possible. |
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September 2007
IBM Business Continuity Service Level Protection Delivers Comprehensive, Flexible Data Protection
Business success stems directly from business data. Protecting that data is therefore an absolutely mission-critical task for enterprise-class IT. It comes as no surprise, then, that a recent IBM study ranked protecting data and reducing data loss as the number one and number two IT concerns. The IBM Business Continuity Service Level Protection solution connects business requirements to technologies and processes to deliver best-in-class protection for data, even in today's demanding business climate. Business Continuity Service Level Protection is a modular solution that applies the concept of service-level management to data and storage management through the use of IBM Tivoli software offerings and IBM Global Technology Services. |
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September 2007
SmarTone-Vodafone Monitors Ten Million Calls Daily with IBM Tivoli Netcool
SmarTone-Vodafone settled on IBM Tivoli Netcool, an industry-leading, holistic monitoring platform capable of allowing the company to comprehensively manage its complex network, proactively determine problems occurring in real time, prioritize them by business impact, and isolate them for immediate resolution. Tivoli Netcool is a highly sophisticated network monitoring product designed to support even the most complex networks in the most demanding real-time situations, such as SmarTone-Vodafone's typical ten million calls routed daily. Its visualization technology is particularly applicable in this context; Tivoli Netcool includes real-time, active dashboards that elegantly present technical status at a user-controllable level of detail, from the broadest, big-picture perspective of the entire network to the finest detail of an individual node in a particular building. |
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September 2007
Tivoli Provisioning Manager: The Ideal Provisioning Product for Software Testing Labs
IBM Tivoli Provisioning Managaer (TPM) provides automatic, scripted software provisioning, from single files to entire "from-scratch" installations, including operating systems, applications, middleware, and data files. TPM allows managers to create images of software in a fixed state and then install them over the network onto any logical group of machines—ideal for software testing. And because this process is easily scripted, it can be easily repeated, even at night when the testing team is away. By automating the test machine provisioning process, the testing team can therefore cut provisioning costs, maximize the amount of time the team dedicates to actual testing, and reduce user error during provisioning. |
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September 2007
Virtualization Enables Data Centers to Pull the Plug on Skyrocketing Power and Cooling Costs
The specter of a power crisis is stalking data centers from North America, to Western Europe, to the Far East. Once an after-thought to the cost of running a state-of-the-art data center, electricity costs today represent the fastest rising cost category in data centers. While capital spending on servers in data centers has slowed, businesses are watching their operating costs soar. At the top of the list of rising operating costs sits electricity. For each dollar businesses spend today on additional servers, they are spending another 57 cents to power and cool them, according to IDC consulting firm (PDF, 141KB). That spending on power and cooling is more than double the comparable level of spending just five years ago, says IDC. One of the easiest first steps to take is to implement more energy-efficient technologies that are available right now like virtualization. Virtualization allows you to aggressively and actively manage the power consumption within data centers. |
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September 2007
IBM’s New i5/OS Version 6: Virtualization Just Got Simpler
Virtualization is about to get even simpler with the major new release of IBM's flagship integrated operating system, i5/OS, expected in 2008. As previewed recently, i5/OS Version 6 will offer a host of new features: enhanced security, Web services, and virtualization capabilities that enable businesses to reap the greatest value from their investment in IT. It should come as no surprise that simplicity is the cornerstone of the enhanced virtualization features in i5/OS Version 6 Release 1. After all, simplification has become a hallmark, as well as a differentiator, in the marketplace for IBM's approach to virtualization. Business is challenging enough without an IT infrastructure that increases the pressures. By providing an uncomplicated approach to IT that cuts costs while maximizing system flexibility, i5/OS V6R1 allows businesses to focus on their customers. |
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August 2007
Rome 2007: IBM’s Most Successful EMEA Tivoli Technical Conference Yet
The most recent Tivoli Technical User Conference was held in the second week of June in Rome and focused on IBM Service Management. The keynote address of the event was on IBM's unique service management theory, goals, and solutions, and it was delivered by Alan Ganek, chief technical officer of IBM Tivoli. Additionally, Bill Sawyer, vice president of Tivoli Maximo Operations, discussed the recent Maximo acquisition and the integration opportunities it represents for IBM Tivoli customers. Laura Sanders, vice president of Tivoli Development, covered the near-future Tivoli solution roadmap and IBM Service Management strategy. |
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August 2007
IBM Tivoli Helps the United Space Alliance Achieve Operational Liftoff
Getting the best return on your IT investment means pairing IT assets as closely as possible with business goals. It also means streamlining business processes to minimize redundancy, both in terms of technical resources and human resources. Best practices are required to achieve such goals. Fortunately, the IBM Tivoli platform has been designed specifically to help today's enterprises implement ITIL guidelines, and among many other benefits, these address service and problem prioritization. TSD and TAM, working in conjunction, thus help USA's technical team classify and prioritize problems according to projected SLA impact and respond to them faster and more effectively than ever. |
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August 2007
It's Easy Being Green when IBM Is Your Virtualization Partner
One reason that IBM can deliver the lowest total cost of ownership for virtualization customers is Global Asset Recovery Services, part of IBM Global Financing. For more than 20 years, Global Asset Recovery Services has been disposing of its own internal computer equipment in an environmentally compliant manner and refurbishing and reselling those components that are marketable. In 2003, Global Asset Recovery Services began disposing of computer equipment on behalf of customers under an offering called Asset Recovery Solutions. |
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August 2007
Virtualization Enables Data Centers to Pull the Plug on Skyrocketing Power and Cooling Costs
The specter of a power crisis is stalking data centers from North America, to Western Europe, to the Far East. Once an after-thought to the cost of running a state-of-the-art data center, electricity costs today represent the fastest rising cost category in data centers. While capital spending on servers in data centers has slowed, businesses are watching their operating costs soar. At the top of the list of rising operating costs sits electricity. Not surprisingly, pressure is mounting on IT managers to come up with quick fixes to the challenge of demands for greater computing and storage capacity, rising costs, and limited supply of additional power. One of the easiest first steps to take is to implement more energy-efficient technologies that are available right now like virtualization. Virtualization allows you to aggressively and actively manage the power consumption within data centers. |
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August 2007
The GTUG Council and IBM: A Face-to-Face Meeting and Exchange of Ideas
Any successful enterprise relies on strong customer communications. Start with the idea that business success comes in proportion to customer satisfaction, and it follows that tracking the level of that satisfaction is crucial to the business. While the Web has certainly made it easier than ever for IBM to interact with its customer base, there's still no substitute for personal interaction. For this reason, the Global Tivoli User Group Council has been created. The Council is composed of appointed leaders from 20 User Groups spanning the globe, and it represents the overall GTUG population in monthly conference calls to IBM, in which new topics and concerns are presented directly to IBM staffers for consideration and response. |
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August 2007
BAE Systems: Achieving Modern Asset Tracking
Imagine you are the CTO of an enterprise-class company. Fundamentally, your task is to oversee IT at your company, solving today's technology problems with a continual eye on tomorrow's needs. That's a challenge of enormous complexity, and solving it requires both enterprise-class tools and enterprise-class best practices. Such was the situation at BAE Systems, a $10 billion aerospace and defense company. BAE has a global headcount of 30,000 employees who make use of more than 50,000 different IT assets managed by an IT team of 800. Maximo solutions had been in use at BAE since 1997 in enterprise asset management and integration services for BAE's Department of Defense customers. Impressed with the Maximo solution, BAE decided to migrate to it more aggressively when they aquired several companies and increased their size. The results? BAE has experienced dramatic improvement of asset visualization and management, translating directly into business value and cost savings. |
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August 2007
Virtualization: Why it's hot and how to get started
Through the Virtualization View you have been able to keep abreast of the latest developments in virtualization and learn about the numerous ways that virtualization can reduce complexity in the data center, consolidate hardware and software, and deliver improved service levels. With this installment, Virtualization View marks its debut as a podcast so you can follow IBM Virtualization when you're on the go. Download the MP3 file to your digital music player or other device. In this podcast, IBM's Tom Ready, vice president of worldwide server services, discusses why the subject of virtualization, a technology that IBM pioneered more than 40 years ago, has caught fire in today's IT marketplace. |
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August 2007
Project Big Green: Big Blue Goes Green
The concept of the "green" data center is in vogue today, and not just because of the soaring costs of power and cooling. More than an economic pain point or a social responsibility, bringing sound environmental principles to bear in operating a data center can become a competitive advantage and source of operational stability. The same concepts behind virtualization that have enabled companies to create new efficiencies in their data centers can be applied to make data centers energy-sippers instead of energy-gulpers. The same intellectual property that enables data centers to achieve greater levels of server utilization, a reduction in server numbers and maintenance, and a shrinkage in data centers' space demands can monitor energy consumption for maximum efficiency, creating, in effect, a virtual power |
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July 2007
Delivering Service Excellence with IBM Service Management
Service management begins with a simple premise: paying customers should receive good service. In the traditional sense, this translates into the relationship between businesses and their external customers. Conceive of enterprise IT divisions as a service. In this sense, the customer is the enterprise as a whole, because it's the enterprise which is paying for the service. Governance, or the lack of it, is a basic challenge in this scenario. Governance provides the perspective that IT divisions of this type sometimes lack. A strong service management solution will enable better governance, and with improved governance will come a far better alignment with business goals, business process, and business technology. |
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July 2007
BAE Systems: Achieving Modern Asset Tracking
Imagine you are the CTO of an enterprise-class company. Fundamentally, your task is to oversee IT at your company, solving today's technology problems with a continual eye on tomorrow's needs. That's a challenge of enormous complexity, and solving it requires both enterprise-class tools and enterprise-class best practices. Such was the situation at BAE Systems, a $10 billion aerospace and defense company. BAE has a global headcount of 30,000 employees who make use of more than 50,000 different IT assets managed by an IT team of 800. Maximo solutions had been in use at BAE since 1997 in enterprise asset management and integration services for BAE's Department of Defense customers. Impressed with the Maximo solution, BAE decided to migrate to it more aggressively when they aquired several companies and increased their size. The results? BAE has experienced dramatic improvement of asset visualization and management, translating directly into business value and cost savings. |
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July 2007
IBM Tivoli Federated Identity Manager Leverages SOA Design to Maximize Business Value
Identity management is a central challenge in today's increasingly competitive business environment. As the enterprise works to become more responsive to emerging opportunities, and more resilient to emerging threats, establishing secure transactions through validated authentication becomes more important than ever.
One of the forces driving the need for new identity management solutions is the success of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Through SOA, the enterprise can focus not on the specific technology providing a service, but the abstract service itself, then leverage that service across technical domains, business processes, and even inter-enterprise collaboration. |
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July 2007
IBM Delivers Simple, Flexible, and Reliable Solutions for Storage Virtualization
For most companies, virtualization starts with the server. Typically, when data centers are dealing with issues of complexity, under-utilization, and high demands for maintenance, servers are often where these management challenges are most acute. Clever managers, however, quickly realize that the benefits of virtualization are equally relevant to their data storage capabilities. With the exponential growth in storage, stricter data retention requirements, and evolution of data lifecycle standards, businesses come to expect information on demand. The IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center provides reporting capabilities, identification of your data usage and location, and provisioning. It also provides a central point of control to move the data based on business needs to more appropriate online or offline storage, and centralizes the management of storage infrastructure capacity, performance, and availability. |
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July 2007
IBM Director: A Better Way to Enhance IT Efficiency
In June, IBM introduced its latest release, Virtualization Manager 1.2, which features two important new extensions that dramatically reduce complexity – and therefore costs – of data center administration in environments running virtualization software. In fact, Virtualization Manager 1.2 is ideally suited to those IT managers who recognize the compelling advantages of virtualization but have yet to take the plunge and implement it. You don't have to be a "newbie" to virtualization to appreciate the new capabilities of Virtualization Manager 1.2. Businesses that face the constant struggle to keep IT systems synchronized to businesses' needs and costs low will also appreciate the unprecedented flexibility that Virtualization Manager 1.2 heralds. |
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July 2007
Tivoli Storage Manager for SharePoint: Modern Backup for Collaborative Documents
One of the foremost links in any disaster recovery chain is backup and archiving. It's no exaggeration to say that an enterprise is only as competitive as its data management, and catastrophic, unrecoverable data loss would be a crippling blow to almost any business. Maintaining data integrity through a formidable backup and recovery solution, which is designed to safeguard data across its entire lifecycle, is central to today's enterprise IT services. Consider Microsoft SharePoint. SharePoint's data architecture represents a unique challenge for data backup solutions. Responding to that challenge is a company called AvePoint. AvePoint's flagship product, DocAve, focuses strictly on SharePoint data backup, and AvePoint has emerged as the industry leader in its field as a result. |
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July 2007
Tivoli Customer Reference: Transforming T-Mobile
Business success for the wireless service provider lies in the minds of its subscribers, often numbered in the millions. These subscribers expect to be offered a continuous stream of new services that span wireless radio and IP-based technologies. They expect to experience the highest quality of service at competitively low rates. Most importantly, the quality of service they experience is quantified in stringent service level agreements – agreements that stipulate credit be applied to customer accounts for any service parameters that fall short of agreed levels. To deliver on these demands, the wireless provider requires impeccable network management of thousands of multi-vendor, multi-technology applications, devices, systems and services, all consolidated into a single view of the network, end-to-end and in real time. |
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June 2007
Consul's Security Solution Battens Down the Digital Hatches
It's widely accepted that enterprise IT security is more important than ever before. As IT solutions have become more complex and sophisticated, so have the threats confronting them. While network attacks, such as viruses and external hackers, have drawn the majority of media attention, of arguably more relevance today is a completely different threat to IT workflow and security: internal security breaches by privileged users. Such problems require an extra layer of IT governance, since they suggest that even IT professionals themselves can't always be trusted. In response, IBM has acquired Consul, a security vendor with a portfolio of products designed exactly for this space. The Consul Insight Security Manager (InSight) is a modular solution that helps the enterprise stay on top of emerging security threats. |
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June 2007
IBM's PC Lifecycle Solution: Desktop Management from Cradle to Grave
Desktop support ranks among the most challenging tasks handled by enterprise IT today. One reason for this is the sheer size of the installed base of desktop computers. Many enterprises have thousands of employees, yet the IT staff supporting them is several orders of magnitude smaller. IBM offers a collaborative, integrated suite of desktop management products with a comprehensive range of features which address every stage in the PC lifecycle. In many cases, IBM technologies can be used to completely automate tasks which previously required extensive, time-consuming manual attention. The software, once configured, frees IT staff to solve more complex problems themselves. Thus, IT service to the enterprise as a whole is improved. |
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May 2007
Tivoli Security Operations Manager: The Solution to Evolving Security Threats
In the new millennium, security has emerged as a major challenge for enterprise IT. While the enterprise has a greater need than ever for network and resource access and availability—in which the right information gets to the right people at the right time—many forms of security problems threaten that goal. The IBM Tivoli Security Operations Manager (TSOM) is specifically designed to address all of these issues, thus giving the enterprise a sense of security about its security technology. Through TSOM, businesses can centralize security operations, align them better with business goals and priorities, achieve improved compliance with regulation laws, and minimize both response time and down time in the event of a problem. |
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May 2007
Managing the complexity of data driven applications
Given the great synergies between the unstoppable advances in IT technology and the need for businesses to find and leverage any opportunity to create a competitive advantage, it is easy to forget that business processes and not the march of technology drive the direction of IT departments. As a result, whether we are talking about a monolithic legacy application, a modern composite client/server application, or a cutting-edge Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) module, integration of a back-end database is most likely the primary bottleneck for performance. To help IT deal with the complexity of managing today’s multi-tier applications, the IBM® Tivoli® Composite Application Manager (ITCAM) family of solutions is being updated to version 6.1 and expanded to include ITCAM for J2EE™ (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition). |
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May 2007
IBM: Leading the Way in Virtualization for Almost 40 Years
People have adopted virtualization for many different reasons, but one clear fact remains: the implementation of virtualization is as important as the benefits it provides. A clear-eyed guide is at hand. As a virtualization partner, IBM is unrivaled in its experience and expertise. IBM pioneered virtualization with VM/370 on the 370 mainframe computers nearly 40 years ago. Since virtualization became an opportunity for server farms in recent years, IBM has been in the vanguard of the trend. In the past five years, IBM has been performing server consolidation studies for their customers using tools like our Server Consolidation toolkit. The data and insight gained from these studies was used to produce the IBM Virtualization Sizing Guide. The sizing guide is derived from real world usage, and therefore provides a guide that can be used to help implement virtualization in real situations. |
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May 2007
With IBM, Upgrading Processing Capacity Is a Snap
Sooner or later, every successful organization hits the point where it has maximized the output of its infrastructure resources. At this point, any effort to accommodate growth with the existing resources risks degraded system performance, outages, major maintenance issues, and lost sleep. IBM has made it easy to quickly and easily expand your data center’s capacity. IBM calls it Capacity on Demand (CoD) and has been offering it since 2000. In fact, owners of IBM’s System i and System p may not realize it, but some of those systems already have that extra processing power built in and are ready to be activated on command. |
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April 2007
Migration: HP OpenView vs. IBM Tivoli
If there is a dominant lesson from the IT history of the last 20 years, it's that proprietary solutions tend to lose when confronted by open standards. Most businesses, wary of putting all their technological eggs in a single basket, would rather invest in technology designed for true, cross-vendor interoperability. Such an approach is an acknowledgement that with an unpredictable future will come changing needs, quite often meaning new technology from new vendors. And when that new technology is bought, it had better interoperate with the rest of the infrastructure. Such optimized alignment of business goals with technological features is typical of the Tivoli suite, which has been designed from the ground up to make the most of any complex IT infrastructure in the pursuit of maximum business value. |
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April 2007
iSCSI with IBM System i Opens Virtualization to Multiple Blades
System i is a chameleon that gives the customer a choice of application environments for workloads through its multiple OS support capability. This choice has been enhanced through the iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) attachment of IBM BladeCenter. The additional management of the multiple OS environments that System i supports is taken on by the corresponding chameleon-like management tool, IBM Director. With the iSCSI solution for IBM’s System i, a data and storage network can be created requiring only one set of infrastructure and administrative tools, unlike a Fiber Channel network. The System i iSCSI solution provides a worry-free, flexible solution that scales up as a business grows and won’t become a choke point in the IT ecosystem. |
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April 2007
Reduce Data Security Risks and Costs with IBM Virtualization Infrastructure Access Service
Today’s IT environment has brought new meaning to the word complexity. Workers expect, and are expected, to be able to access the networks, databases, and multiple applications necessary to do their jobs anytime, anywhere. Despite the conflicting pressures, there is a solution to problems of cost, complexity, and security resulting from the demands placed on today’s IT systems. That solution is the IBM Virtual Infrastructure Access Service. Introduced in the fall of 2006, Virtual Infrastructure Access is a service product that helps businesses utilize virtualization technologies to simplify computing in the workplace and to provide end users with reliable, secure access to the applications and data they need anytime, anywhere. |
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April 2007
Tivoli Provisioning Manager and Microsoft Windows Vista
Remote management is central to modern IT processes. Enterprise IT staffs often deal with heavy demand; the more they can accomplish remotely, the better. One historically demanding chore for IT departments is the "rollout"—the process by which complex technology is deployed en masse to a large number of end users and client machines. With the increasing sophistication of remote management technology, today's network managers can usually achieve hands-on control of clients from across the network. IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment (TPMfOSD) is designed specifically for the case in which new operating systems need to be installed and configured on client computers, and it is equipped to meet the demand with an impressive array of cutting-edge features. |
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April 2007
Consolidate Your Authenication Management and Integrate Your Business Data Easily
One of the core challenges facing modern enterprises is centralized authentication management. Employees need straightforward access to services and information, yet IT managers must reduce security threats and system complexity. These two business goals are often in conflict. IBM Tivoli Directory Server (TDS) provides just such an authentication system. Through TDS, businesses get centralized, powerful, configurable authentication with the features they want—and without the security holes and management complexity they don't. |
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April 2007
Using Virtualization and IBM BladeCenter® to Create Business Value
IDC projects a better than 35% compound annual growth rate for blade servers over the next four years. At that growth rate, one out of every four servers sold will be a blade server by 2010. From the beginning, IBM has viewed blades as an enterprise class solution. This puts IBM in the unique position to create infrastructure savings by combining the physical integration of blades with the utilization increases of virtualization. Virtualization can be used to create multiple virtual machines on a blade or to consolidate multiple blades as a single server, giving customers the flexibility to support a wide range of critical business services. The need to deploy and manage resources in a heterogeneous system environment has become non-negotiable. It must be done consistently so that business critical applications meet Service Level Agreements on performance and availability. Together, IBM BladeCenter and virtualization can make this a readily obtainable reality for IT. |
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April 2007
iSCSI with IBM System i Opens Virtualization to Multiple Blades
System i is a chameleon that gives the customer a choice of application environments for workloads through its multiple OS support capability. This choice has been enhanced through the iSCSI (Internet Small Computer System Interface) attachment of IBM BladeCenter. The additional management of the multiple OS environments that System i supports is taken on by the corresponding chameleon-like management tool, IBM Director. With the iSCSI solution for IBM’s System i, a data and storage network can be created requiring only one set of infrastructure and administrative tools, unlike a Fiber Channel network. The System i iSCSI solution provides a worry-free, flexible solution that scales up as a business grows and won’t become a choke point in the IT ecosystem. |
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March 2007
The Tivoli Customer Reference Program Creates a Symbiotic Relationship
Public promotion is central to business success. In order to increase recognition, showcase their strengths, and thus build their brands, Tivoli customers should consider developing promotional content in association with IBM—thus benefiting directly from IBM's own exceptionally powerful brand. The Tivoli Customer Reference program, in particular, gives Tivoli customers the power to leverage IBM's reputation, thus putting the best possible face on their strengths and selling points. |
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March 2007
IBM Support Assistant: Personalized Product Support
Support is a perennial challenge to the technology sector. Vendors want their customers to be informed and satisfied, and customers want quick and thorough answers when they have technical questions. With IBM Support Assistant (ISA), IBM helps those who help themselves. The fundamental goal of the project is to increase customer satisfaction, and decrease time-to-problem-resolution by giving IBM customers direct local access to key technical information they need as quickly as possible. In ISA, IBM has created a new stage of problem resolution via a workbench with comprehensive technical data. Customers simply download, install, and configure ISA, and in the event of problems, they can turn to it as a first tier of support. |
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March 2007
Adding It Up: Virtualization Reduces IT Costs
IBM's virtualization of servers, storage, and applications delivers three results that every CEO or director can get his or her mind around quickly: simplicity, flexibility, and cost savings. Virtualization promotes efficient resource management and the ability to provision server, storage, and application resources dynamically in line with shifting demands and priorities. IT technicians have fewer machines to maintain, creating opportunities for more productive deployment of these resources to other projects or for direct savings through reduced headcount. In addition, the useful life of a data center is also lengthened considerably, since the center has newly freed-up server capacity to accommodate future growth. |
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March 2007
Don't Miss Out on the Potential of Application Virtualization
If you are under the impression that virtualization's potential for improving efficiency and reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) "stops at the box," it's time to think again. Software applications also represent major investments in up-front licensing fees, not to mention the time and expense required to maintain and upgrade them. With so much riding on the efficient coordination and management of software, can businesses afford to ignore the potential benefits that come from extending virtualization to the software application layer as well? WebSphere XD works at the business application layer in an array of heterogeneous servers or a server farm of homogeneous servers, and allows the user to view infrastructure resources as a single, consistent entity. |
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March 2007
IBM Tivoli Express and BladeCenter® are Bringing Small to Mid-sized Businesses to the Cutting Edge of IT
While IBM has traditionally targeted the enterprise market with the BladeCenter, that situation is changing. As the SMB (small- and mid-sized business) market achieves increasing computational sophistication and requirements, many businesses with under one thousand employees find they need blade server-class solutions in emerging areas such as e-commerce and web hosting, as well as more traditional IT niches such as systems management, inventory, and monitoring. Toward this end, IBM has prepackaged and preconfigured BladeCenter offerings with integrated Tivoli middleware modules in an optimized format designed to create, as much as possible, plug-and-play blade server computing. |
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March 2007
Gain Peace of Mind and Save Time with IBM xSeries and System x NAS Storage Servers and Tivoli CDP
In the new millennium, file service and archiving solutions have emerged as one of the hottest sectors in the IT field, and it's easy to see why. If a mission-critical server fails, entire corporate divisions may grind involuntarily to a halt. With its System x NAS servers, IBM delivers just such optimized performance in two key form factors designed to meet and exceed modern business needs. Available in both a higher-end 2U rack unit (the System x3650),and a tower (the System x206m), these servers marshal all the power of NAS to optimize both speed and robustness in ultra-affordable packages. |
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March 2007
Cost Effective IT: Virtualization, Service Management Converge
A top issue confronting CIOs and senior IT managers is how to demonstrate that IT is functioning as efficiently and cost effectively as the other lines of business within their company. Making this all the more imperative is the growing trend of funding IT capital growth out of savings garnered by making IT operations more efficient and cutting costs. Significant reductions in IT operating costs from process improvements will be needed to meet growing capital expenditures. Left with a mandate to do more with less, many CIOs are turning to two very different, but very complementary, notions on how to manage a rapidly changing environment: virtualization and service management. |
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March 2007
iSeries Virtualization Rises to the Challenge of Complexity
The concepts of simplicity, scalability, and efficiency resonate today across many small and medium-sized businesses deeply concerned about complexity in their IT systems. Unfortunately, simplification has proved to be the Holy Grail of IT management. That’s where Virtualization comes in. Virtualization promotes efficient resource management, and the ability to dynamically provision server, storage, and application resources according to users' changing demand and priorities. iSeries systems have always relied on virtualization architecture that separates users and applications from the underlying hardware technology. That leadership has continued to this day. Thanks to virtualization, a single iSeries system can run up to five different operating systems, including i5/OS, AIX 5L, Linux on Power, Linux on Intel, and Windows on a single server. |
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February 2007
Improving Customer Communications: The Tivoli User Group Site
Business success is a function of strong customer communications. If a business loses touch with its customer base, the consequences can range from the subtle to the catastrophic. Furthermore, customers get an improved product experience if they can communicate with each other also. Many times, a solution is available from technical peers faster than it is from conventional resources, such as the solutions vendor. For these reasons, improving customer communications is a mission-critical challenge for virtually any business. The Tivoli User Group Site (TUG), sponsored by IBM, is specifically designed to meet that challenge, leveraging the Internet’s ubiquity and convenience to the benefit of Tivoli customers worldwide. |
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February 2007
Storage Management: The Pay Off Is in the Process
At large datacenters, the growth rate of managed stored data has been rocketing up at 60% a year. Fear of compliance violations, especially with respect to Sarbanes-Oxley and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), has led IT at many datacenters to adopt a defensive strategy in which all information is stored and saved by default. With the introduction of IBM Tivoli® Storage Process Manager, IT is finally able to align storage process management processes with ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) defined process flows while automating best practices to improve important storage-related operations, including provisioning and backup incident prioritization. |
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February 2007
Virtual Security Gets Real
On the rare occasions when IT executives kick back and confide their darkest fears, almost invariably they cite a breach of their systems security as the one pain point that gives them sleepless nights. For the past three years, IBM researchers have been exploring new and stronger ways to guarantee data integrity, short of running separate mainframe systems. The result of this research is the first technology from IBM Research to significantly enhance the security and management capabilities in the virtualization layers of the popular x86 and BladeCenter servers used in data centers. Known as sHype or “secure hypervisor,” the new security architecture is designed to create a nearly impenetrable barrier, or Fort Knox-like wrapper, of security around distributed workloads in the data center. |
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February 2007
Real Linux, Real Mainframe, Real Virtual
Since the very early days of open source in 1998, IBM® and Linux® have had a close synergistic relationship, which has accelerated the introduction of new technologies for all Linux users and simplified Linux deployment for IBM customers. So it should come as no surprise that IBM has been a major contributor to the Xen open source project for virtualization of certain PowerPC and x86 architectures, developed at the University of Cambridge. Xen presents a virtual machine abstraction that is similar but not identical to the underlying hardware, which is dubbed "paravirtualization." Without solid virtualization, none of these advanced capabilities, whether fundamental features or simplified resource management, are possible. |
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February 2007
iVirtualization Vouchers: Jumpstart Power
The sole purpose of the technology-rich IBM System iTM line of servers—the “i” stands for “integrated”—is to provide a business computing platform that leverages the most advanced technology available, without burdening the business user with notions of technology complexity and IT infrastructure. New System i5 servers running i5/OS® all come fully configured for POWER5®-based virtualization. Nonetheless, such technical capabilities are easily overshadowed in an i5/OS environment, which is focused squarely on business value. Moving virtualization into the limelight requires an innovative twist in the fulfillment of System i: gratis vouchers for virtualization management startup services. In a short time, IT can get up to speed on what is necessary in order to manage and maintain a virtual environment. |
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February 2007
System Backup Without a Backup Window
Global operations and strict governmental requirements for extensive records retention have shattered the common notion of a backup window for IT. Few sites are now in a position to shutdown all data processing and backup their data and applications. Today, IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager (TSM) protects data integrity for more than two million systems worldwide. The new features of version 5.4 parallel key IT initiatives seeking to improve resource utilization, simplify infrastructure management, and work within an automated process environment driven by business priorities. |
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February 2007
OPAL Incorporates OMNIbus Rules
IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus network monitoring and management offerings are the leading solutions in the network operations center (NOC) for the world’s largest service providers, enterprises and government agencies. Features like the de-duplication of alarms, automated correlation and clearing of problem and solution events, and an informative and descriptive event presentation format are now being integrated into key Tivoli solutions, such as the Tivoli Enterprise Portal. In addition, the Open Process Automation Library (OPAL), which contains over 500 pre-defined validated product extensions, has been extended with a special Netcool/OMNIbus catalog to provide customers with downloads of completely customized and working configuration package for particular network devices.
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January 2007
IT Risk and Compliance Management
is fast becoming a major corporate issue that is having a dramatic impact on IT. Thanks to a growing number of regulations like Sarbanes Oxley, one of this year’s major IT trends has been the establishment of risk and compliance architectures. To help IT better understand this new phenomenon, IBM® has sponsored an online Webcast on Optimizing the Role of Compliance in IT Governance Efforts. |
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January 2007
On The Road to Better IT Management
Today’s businesses are under tremendous pressure to innovate and grow. To drive this growth and innovation, businesses must respond to change more quickly, without increasing risk or expense. They need to focus on internal operational efficiency. IBM® is hosting essential half-day Service Management seminars around the globe that include in-depth presentations and demonstrations that can help you and your organization achieve a competitive advantage. |
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January 2007
Virtualization Can Help Power Efficiency
Today’s businesses are beginning to face real challenges with regard to energy consumption and costs. If servers continue to consume electric power at their current rate, energy costs could soon represent more than half the cost of running a data center. Introducing virtualization and potentially garnering the power savings that may result in the consolidation of existing server and storage hardware can be a first step in helping to reduce power consumption. |
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January 2007
The Power of POWER Virtualization
Virtualization provides an easy way to extend the notion of dynamic reconfiguration of system hardware without the need to reboot systems. With resource virtualization, dynamic reconfiguration can be extended to include adding or removing processors. IBM plans to leverage the advanced RAS features of POWER Architecture, and leading edge virtualization technologies more deeply with respect to critical corporate initiatives, such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and thereby provide IT with a solid roadmap for success. |
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