Tivoli Wares On The Way

Many of the updates focus on automating infrastructure management,part of a concept IBM has dubbed autonomic computing, in which systems can modify themselves in response to their computing environments.

Tivoli also added automation to the configuration of its products to make them easier to implement, enabling solution providers to spend more time solving customers' business problems, said Michael Roy, president of Blue World Information Technology, a solution provider in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Leading Tivoli's charge are new integrated identity management tools.

Incorporating technology gained through IBM's acquisition of Access360, IBM Tivoli Identity Manager 4.3 automates the deployment of user access rights to applications and resources. Identity Manager includes a new feature that automatically detects changes in user attributes and ensures compliance with established business policies.

IBM Tivoli Privacy Manager automates the enforcement of privacy policies throughout an enterprise, said Arvind Krishna, vice president of security products at Tivoli.

"If you ask for a customer's address on your Web site and promise only to use it to ship goods, marketing and customer care representatives might still have access to it. Our software allows you to set up [back-end systems so the address is not revealed to them," Krishna said.

Brian Tretick, a principal at Ernst and Young, said privacy management technology is critical. "Where companies today are relying on written polices to control the use of information, this starts to provide automation," he said.

On the storage front, Tivoli is introducing Storage Resource Manager, which gathers data across direct-attached storage, NAS and SANs, regardless of vendor.

Tivoli also is introducing upgrades to several network management tools, including Service Level Advisor, Business Systems Manager and Configuration Manager.