Storage Management's Runaway Success

Tivoli's overall weighted score of 74 in the 2004 Annual Report Card (ARC) was a convincing 10 points ahead of its nearest competitor, Veritas. HP and EMC tied for third with scores of 63, and Computer Associates brought up the rear with an overall weighted average of 62. The win is the second in a row for Tivoli, but last year it beat HP by only a single point, with Veritas, EMC and CA close behind.

Perhaps even more significant than its overwhelming overall victory is that Tivoli won top scores for every single criteria, from product quality/reliability to ease of doing business. The only criteria in which competitors even came close were managing channel conflict, where Tivoli beat CA by three points, and revenue/profit potential, where Tivoli's score of 69 topped HP by four points. For every other criterion, Tivoli's scores were spread out six to 11 points ahead of the competition.

Tivoli is "extremely easy to do business with and very responsive to our needs as a partner," says David Stone, vice president for business development at Solutions II, a Littleton, Colo.-based solution provider specializing in advanced storage and server solutions.

One reason Stone likes working with Tivoli is that he has a single point of contact at the vendor, simplifying the relationship and helping Solutions II bring all of IBM's resources to solve customer problems.

In addition to IBM's business relationships with its partners, Stone has nothing but praise for the Tivoli product suite itself. "The overall Tivoli/IBM stack of storage products is as strong or stronger than any other products, so we can get best-of-breed products from a single vendor," Stone says. That suite became even stronger this year when Tivoli purchased Think Dynamics, a Toronto-based provisioning company, rebranding the Toronto company's ThinkControl product as IBM Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator.

As Tivoli expands its product offerings, it's working hard to integrate the whole suite, "making it all consistent, so we don't have to invest as much on relearning," Stone says.

But if IBM has a weakness in its Tivoli suite, it's marketing rather than technology, says Mike Karp, a senior analyst for Enterprise Management Associates, a Boulder, Colo.-based research firm specializing in management software and services. "IBM is, at best, mediocre in marketing," Karp says.

Historically, Tivoli has sold direct to bigger companies, Karp adds. "VARs are good in situations where a lot of hand-holding is needed," he says. "Tivoli in the past year or two has learned the value of that, but they have yet to turn around their enormous success at the high end to really support their VAR program and take advantage of the midtier."