IBM (Finally) Serves Up On-Demand Offering
Pretty heady stuff, to be sure. But beyond the positive publicity play, IBM's U.S. Open demo also gave the folks at home one of the first tangible on-demand products, the absence of which has been one of the criticisms levied against Big Blue since the on-demand marketing juggernaut began
The product, Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator, is expected to be the first offering in a broader family of IBM automation software and services, code-named Project Symphony, due out later this year. How does it work? Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator combines autonomic capabilities and orchestration technology gained from IBM's ThinkDynamics acquisition to take a first-step toward the IT nirvana of automatically shifting resources (servers, storage, bandwidth) based on changing business needs. During the demo, the software sensed shifts in demand based on preconfigured thresholds, and then allocated more resources to accommodate the needy application. The usopen.org Web site traffice peaked during the men's finals match, for example, but numbers-crunching for cancer research got more resources during tennis' downtimes.
One of the main goals of on-demand, in general, is to move away from an environment where IT resources are dedicated for each application, which is both expensive and inefficient, to instead maximize the use of existing systems by divvying up resources based on need. Big Blue executives say the new Tivoli product moves the company closer to that ideal.
"You get overall server utilization of at least double the typical 10 to 20 percent today, plus you use fewer servers and administrators to reduce costs even more," says Sandy Carter, vice president of marketing and strategy at IBM Tivoli group.
IBM is also hoping to grab customers with Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator's price tag, which starts at $20,000 for 10 server licenses. General availability is expected at the end of this month.
In terms of partner opportunity, Project Symphony offerings offer a chance to bring on-demand management and automation capabilities to customers without having to sell them a rip-and-replace scenario, Carter says. At least it will eventually. Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrate currently is able to manage heterogeneous environments, but for now it runs on IBM's eServer line and WebSphere. Down the road, it will run on HP, Wintel and Linux boxes, as well as other app servers.
The product is also highly customizable, and comes with workflow templates that partners can set up to orchestrate their customers IT resources based on predefined business goals.
Partners should certainly pay attention because this is going to be a place where they first intersect with on-demand -- all around getting customers' IT shops in order, tweaking, fine-tuning and standardizing infrastructure. It's got major revenue and services potential for partners, not just those who team with IBM, but other computing giants including Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle.
Are you starting to think about preparing your customers for on-demand? Write to me at [email protected].