IBM Tivoli User Community

Hershel Harris
Vice President of Development, Tivoli Storage and Security

Melding Tivoli storage and security development to solve some of your toughest IT and business problems

When I moved into my new role within IBM Tivoli in August 2005, we made an organizational change, combining development for storage and security products under one group for the first time. Why the shift?

We’ve learned from you, our customers, that taking advantage of synergies in these two areas can provide powerful solutions to solve some of your most significant IT and business problems.

To that end, we’re excited about the release of updated and new Tivoli storage and security products this year that will help reduce IT complexity. They will also help you meet stringent federal and industry compliance mandates. And, they can help ensure quicker response to IT and market changes while potentially reducing development and administration costs.

In 2006, look for major advances in security for composite, SOA-based applications and compliance. In addition, you’ll gain from improved “consumability,” which allows easier installation, configuration and maintenance of Tivoli products.

Taking on compliance
When it comes to data governance and compliance, your organization must now think about storing important information to comply with the spate of recent government mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

That means all companies must ponder a raft of related storage and security issues. Must you keep the data for a specific number of years? Eventually migrate the information to long-term storage using hierarchical storage management tools? Destroy documents when you no longer need to keep them? And who may access or retrieve stored data? Are you doing everything possible to secure those systems? Can you prove it to the auditors?

So we’re excited to release products this year that will help you administer and secure that information throughout its lifecycle. The products manage the underlying storage infrastructure where data is kept, and protect the applications that access that data. They can help you meet federal and industry mandates – and easily prove it when necessary.

Simplifying composite application management
Many of you manage complex, composite applications that span numerous platforms, systems – and organizations – to interact directly with customers and business partners. That’s why we’re also focusing on advances related to the development, management and security of those service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications.

SOA lets your key applications more easily interact with those of your business partners. This advanced technology, in turn, requires robust security to protect related access and transactions. Planned products can help you gain that security without spending the time and money developing your own solutions.

For example, if your company uses a third party to manage employee benefits, your SOA applications might allow employees to sign on to a local system. From there, they could be automatically transferred to the third-party site. Tivoli Federated Identity Manager can secure those transactions and streamline user sign-ons, while also dramatically reducing in-house development.

Boosting ease of use
We want to make your lives easier in other ways, as well, so look for an emphasis on consumability. New and updated Tivoli products will greatly simplify installation and administration.

For example, an Express version of Tivoli Identity Manager scheduled for release in late February will reduce the install to 12 keyboard clicks. You’ll also soon see an Express version of Tivoli Storage Manager which greatly eases data backup and recovery.

Likewise, we also just released TotalStorage Productivity Center 3.1., which integrates the interfaces of three separate products: TotalStorage for Disk, TotalStorage for Data and TotalStorage of Fabric. The combined interface simplifies your job by revealing all aspects of the storage infrastructure at once, based on a data store and data model. It includes a simple, but powerful topology viewer that shows you disk use, fabric and applications.

By reducing complexity, we can help you save time and gain value from your Tivoli investments quicker than ever.

And you can be sure that we’ll continue to listen to you, our valued customers, to create new Tivoli storage and security products that help resolve your biggest IT challenges, now and in the future.

Hershel Harris email: hdh@us.ibm.com.

Hershel Harris, VP Software Development Tivoli Storage and Security Products IBM Software Group

Hershel Harris is the Vice President of Development for Tivoli's Storage and Security products within the IBM Software Group. He is responsible for delivery and support of Tivoli Access Manager, Identity Manager, Storage Manager, the TotalStorage Productivity Center, and related products. He leads a worldwide team of product managers, developers, testers and service specialists.

Hershel joined IBM Canada in the Toronto Lab in 1978 as a software developer, working on internal IBM IT projects. In 1981, he left IBM and worked for two software product and services companies as a programmer and product architect. In 1987, Hershel rejoined the IBM Toronto Lab's database team, and held various development and marketing roles for IBM's database products, SQL/DS and DB2. He was named Director, Database Technology in 1998. In 2000, Hershel assumed new responsibilities as the Director of the IBM Toronto Laboratory and as Vice President of Development for the WebSphere Application Server. In 2004, Hershel was named VP of Strategy for the IBM Software Group, with responsibility for cross group technical and business strategies and alliance partnerships. He assumed his current role in September 2005.

Hershel sits on the University of Waterloo's Industry Advisory Council, and now works out of Software Group headquarters in Somers, NY.