Tivoli To Go Express

One strategic goal for IBM's Tivoli Group in 2005 is to leverage the channel to expand its midmarket footprint. To that end, Tivoli plans to roll out new Express products this year. Tivoli General Manager Al Zollar outlined the group's midmarket game plan and the evolution of IBM's management product portfolio in an interview with Editor In Chief Michael Vizard.

CRN: Overall, how is Tivoli doing in the channel?

ZOLLAR: What we find we've got to do is to focus on where to take our portfolio into the midmarket and through our channel partners. If you look at our storage management portfolio, it's very focused on channel partners. Almost 60 percent of our revenue goes through channel partners with that product line. If you look at the Tivoli security portfolio, or the Tivoli systems management and automation products, we haven't gone as far in making those products channel-ready. That will begin to change in 2005.

CRN: How will that manifest itself?

ZOLLAR: It means there will be Express products. Tivoli doesn't have any Express products to date. We will release our first Express products in 2005. It also means that we'll begin to recruit the partners who have the capability to reach the markets that we need. You need partners with skill and capability. It's really a matter of focus. That's really why we're going to expand the Express product line in the channel beyond storage. For example, we expect to have a Tivoli Identity Manager Express capability later this year.

If you look at the work we're actually doing, we're not dumbing down the product. What we're doing is making some assumptions and building wizards that help the deployment of this capability. We're packaging the capability in a way that is much more consumable by both our channel partners and the midmarket customers.

CRN: What's your biggest challenge in terms of bringing out a full set of Tivoli Express products?

ZOLLAR: There has been conventional thinking within Tivoli that because our value scales with complexity, we don't have much value to offer the midmarket. But when you survey the customers, the issues associated with virus attacks and the availability of their systems, backup of their data and secure access to capabilities all require management solutions. It just takes a different focus, and we've begun that focus now.

CRN: As you target the midmarket, will managed service providers be a big part of your go-to-market strategy?

ZOLLAR: If you look at the customers we target, many of them are service providers. There are multiple routes to market.

CRN: With WebSphere now embedded in Tivoli, some of your competitors argue that the inclusion of the application server drives up costs unnecessarily.

ZOLLAR: That's normal, competitive trash-talking. Our technologies are based on the open middleware technologies of the IBM Software Group. Here's the bottom line: You can build out a unique infrastructure with 100 systems management developers and maybe have a 100 testers testing that infrastructure, or you could base it on a platform that has literally hundreds of thousands of developers pounding at it and building that plumbing so that your customers can have a higher-quality experience. That's in essence what we're doing.

In some cases, we'll bundle these things, and the customer won't even know the infrastructures are there. And they can have other Web application infrastructures. They can have Microsoft infrastructures side by side with these things. Competitors that make statements like that are just making stupid statements.

CRN: Your competitors also say Tivoli is based on an older agent-technology model that was originally developed for client/server systems. How does Tivoli play in Web application environments?

ZOLLAR: There's a combination of technologies that our customers need. There are some environments where you need software on the end point that you're trying to manage. People call them agents. It's software that needs to be able to talk to a management server. But we also designed an agent architecture around Web services that now will allow us to do this in a very flexible way. We're taking advantage of the fact that you can pretty much assume these days that any modern end point that goes out is going to have basic Web services technologies incorporated into it.

So that's going to dramatically change the need to have the traditional agents that we've seen in systems management. Many of the people talking about agentless systems are really creating a proxy for an agent on a server someplace by simply having a bunch of programmers in India capture a set of templates about what you're managing on the end point. It's just another way to design the management information that you need.

CRN: Speaking of competitors, John Swainson, the new CEO of Computer Associates, is a former IBMer who knows your playbook. What's your take on CA as a competitor?

ZOLLAR: They've got a big challenge in terms of the assets. John may understand some of the things that IBM has done, but they've got a challenge in terms of how they execute it. CA has had a lot of problems, and we think that with our end-to-end capability, they are not as strong as we are in all those areas.

CRN: What's your take on Hewlett-Packard as well as Symantec's pending merger with Veritas Software?

ZOLLAR: Whether you look at HP or Symantec-Veritas as you go down the list, these moves wind up looking like steps to create the kind of portfolio that we offer today from Tivoli. Part of our challenge now is to take it to another value level. This whole process-integration strategy is one that would be very hard for our competitors to deliver that kind of value.

CRN: IBM also talks a lot about autonomic computing in the context of systems and network management. What exactly is IBM trying to accomplish?

ZOLLAR: What we've been doing with the autonomic initiative is trying to focus on the management technologies and standards that can make environments more self-managing and self-healing. We want generalize that beyond Tivoli into a set of frameworks that we can open up and make available to the industry at large. One of the best examples of what we've been doing is in our orchestration and provisioning automation library. This is a set of workflows in a standardized library that customers, business partners or our own people contribute to. We've now created over 700 workflows that can be used in a higher-level business process to provision capabilities.

CRN: As you go forward, will we see more convergence between systems, network, application and business-process management?

ZOLLAR: This market really did start with the notion of resource management. That resource might be a network device. It might be a database. It might be a router. When we created consoles that you could forward events to, that's how systems management was born. Basically, an integrated console allows you to see different types of resources in a single way. Where we think this is going is to this notion of service management.

What you're really concerned about is whether the order processing system is working or if the fulfillment system is working. That's the next stage of this. You've got to begin to focus on how to deliver a true business service. If you think about what we've been doing with On Demand, we've been talking about things like service-oriented architectures and business-process integration. Applying this same idea to the data center has yet to happen. That's really the next turn of the crank for Tivoli. It will have the net result of simplifying our capabilities and, probably more significantly to the channel, start identifying partners who can begin to work with us on building out the processes and workflows associated with these specific IT service-delivery processes.

CRN: Speaking of competitors, John Swainson, the new CEO of Computer Associates, is a former IBMer who knows your playbook. What's your take on CA as a competitor?

ZOLLAR: They've got a big challenge in terms of the assets. John may understand some of the things that IBM has done, but they've got a challenge in terms of how they execute it. CA has had a lot of problems, and we think that with our end-to-end capability, they are not as strong as we are in all those areas.

CRN: What your take on Hewlett-Packard as well as Symantec's pending merger with Veritas?

ZOLLAR: Whether you look at HP or Symantec-Veritas as you go down the list, these moves wind up looking like steps to create the kind of portfolio that we offer today from Tivoli. Part of our challenge now is to take it to another value level. This whole process-integration strategy is one that would be very hard for our competitors to deliver that kind of value.

CRN: IBM also talks a lot about autonomic computing in the context of systems and network management. What exactly is IBM trying to accomplish?

ZOLLAR: What we've been doing with the autonomic initiative is trying to focus on the management technologies and standards that can make environments more self-managing and self-healing. We want generalize that beyond Tivoli into a set of frameworks that we can open up and make available to the industry at large. One of the best examples of what we've been doing is in our orchestration and provisioning automation library. This is a set of workflows in a standardized library that customers, business partners or our own people contribute to. We've now created over 700 workflows that can be used in a higher-level business process to provision capabilities.

CRN: As you go forward, will we see more convergence between systems, network, application and business-process management?

ZOLLAR: This market really did start with the notion of resource management. That resource might be a network device. It might be a database. It might be a router. When we created consoles that you could forward events to, that's how systems management was born. Basically, an integrated console allows you to see different types of resources in a single way. Where we think this is going is to this notion of service management.

What you're really concerned about is whether the order processing system is working or if the fulfillment system is working. That's the next stage of this. You've got to begin to focus on how to deliver a true business service. If you think about what we've been doing with On Demand, we've been talking about things like service-oriented architectures and business-process integration. Applying this same idea to the data center has yet to happen. That's really the next turn of the crank for Tivoli. It will have the net result of simplifying our capabilities and, probably more significantly to the channel, start identifying partners who can begin to work with us on building out the processes and workflows associated with these specific IT service-delivery processes.