Is Tivoli Finally Serious About the Channel?

Throughout the past few years, I and a few other brave souls from VARBusiness have made annual pilgrimages to the company's headquarters in Austin, Texas, to present relevant findings from our VARBusiness Annual Report Card (ARC) competition to the key executives who ran Tivoli's sales and marketing initiatives. Those were never the warmest of meetings, despite being held in one of the hottest,and supposedly friendliest,parts of the country. The people there looked at us askance and asked insightful questions like, "How do you define a VAR?" I think what they were really wondering was, "Why are you here, and what time does your plane leave?"

In one memorable meeting with a rogue group charged with establishing indirect channels for Tivoli, one person was reduced to tears by the poor reaction VARs had to the company. Such was the unusual world of Tivoli at the height of the systems-management software rush, where Tivoli TME, CA Unicenter and HP OpenView were duking it out for dominance. CA and IBM were bitter rivals back then, and Tivoli thought all it needed was a few large VARs,and I mean a few dozen at the most.

But all of that has changed. Today, Tivoli is an IBM operating division that sells software for security, storage management and systems monitoring. Although deciphering Tivoli's product road map is still challenging, it is no longer as hard as climbing Everest without an oxygen tank. In fact, Tivoli is quickly becoming home to some of the most channel-savvy, partner-centric people in the business today.

Still, you can have all the channel smarts in the world, but if you don't have channel-ready products and a mission that is communicated to solution providers, you're destined to fail. The greatest challenge is Tivoli's ability to execute, and that job falls to Michael Twomey, vice president of business development and channels, who is charged with making Tivoli a serious channel player. He is quickly and quietly surrounding himself with a cadre of individuals who understand what it takes to build and manage a partner network that is deeper and wider than the one Tivoli has today. That includes Michael Gerentine, a longtime IBM software exec who, after joining Vignette, is now Tivoli's director of channel strategy and development, and Laura Sanders, vice president of Tivoli storage software.

If the trend continues, Tivoli will be home to one of the most accomplished set of channel executives inside IBM, a team intent on leveraging the company's core Unix-based, storage-management offerings that are appealing to what appears to be the hottest sector of the industry,midsize companies. VARs looking to extend their storage practices or get into the midmarket storage arena should give Tivoli a long, hard look. Granted, it may be too early to partner with it in the security space, but once Tivoli figures out how to package its security offerings for the channel, it could be the sleeper of the category.

Just recently, I returned from Austin, where members of this magazine met with a large group of Tivoli managers who not only spoke fluent channel lingo, but also expressed the desire to continue growing the company's storage-management software sales through partners. They were undaunted by the results of this year's ARC, which clearly showed that VARs are troubled by the company's support programs and do not clearly understand the Tivoli product line. Many of its rivals will admit that Tivoli has some of the best technology in the market, but its VARs gave the company lower scores than Veritas or EMC for quality/reliability, features and innovation.

Tivoli is intensely focused on taking share from Vertitas, whose products sell for considerably less than Tivoli's. It also seems intent on leaving its puzzling, mysterious past behind it to become the jewel of IBM's $12 billion software group. Let's hope the company is serious about committing to the channel. What do you think? Let me know at [email protected].