IBM Tivoli User Community

Laura Sanders
Vice President IBM Tivoli Development

Acquiring the technology you need – even
quicker – to better manage the business of IT

You may have noticed the recent flourish of acquisitions by IBM Tivoli. In fact, we finalized nine such deals in just over two years.

The rush of activity remains a key aspect of the IBM strategy to bring you value more quickly. Acquisitions help us improve our portfolio as well as address adjacent areas where our customers are seeking answers to problems, either in existing or new environments, such as those that are SOA-based.

The recent initiatives are fundamental in our delivery of IBM Service Management, with solutions that automate and integrate the IT and non-IT processes you rely on to provide business services. The results can save you money, reduce complexity and help you address government and vendor compliance.

Of course, the value chain begins with the people who know their industry-leading products best. Following an acquisition, we warmly welcome these development teams and thought leaders into the fold, placing key members in leadership roles. Working as one team, we can quickly provide value by speeding existing product roadmaps as well as building converged roadmaps to meet and beat customer commitments.

How can these acquired technologies benefit your organization? Here are a few examples of our acquisitions, beginning with the most recent.

MRO Software - Helps organizations manage all their important assets – from software and computers to vehicles and buildings – with greater control to better align those assets with business goals and reduce complexity. In fact, we see the management of IT and non-IT assets converging, and as a leader in enterprise asset management, we’re excited about what MRO does today and how we can support and enhance that technology. By allowing companies to use a single infrastructure and common set of asset and service management best practices, the software helps eliminate wasteful redundancy, while improving service management across all asset categories.

Rembo Technology - Allows companies to automatically install or upgrade operating systems on thousands of servers, notebook and desktop computers simultaneously. The technology eliminates the need for IT specialists to spend days or weeks installing that software manually on each machine, and saves organizations on related labor costs. It also dovetails well with our Tivoli Provisioning and Orchestration Management products.

Micromuse – Offers some of the most expansive network monitoring, management and security solutions available. Combined with our Tivoli Monitoring and Application Business Management Products, these products, such as Netcool RAD and OMNIBus, provide deep technical analysis of network layers 1 through 7 to help ensure maximum performance and availability. These products also address the needs of today’s telecommunications and converged IP environments. Together they provide an end-to-end view of your IT environment. Look for further integration that will show the impact of situations within your environment and related actions to be taken.

CIMS Lab  – Lets you accurately measure which users or departments use IT assets, and charge them for resource use. The technology, now included with the IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager product, also solves a long-standing industry problem. Until recently, running more than one application per server created an IT accounting nightmare because it was near impossible to measure departmental use of those applications. So organizations often sidestepped the cost-saving benefits of consolidating or virtualizing their servers. CIMS Lab technology gives you the confidence to move ahead with those initiatives. IBM will soon integrate the technology into the Tivoli Decision Support products to provide similar aggregation and reporting.

Collation – Provides a key part of the recently released IBM Change and Configuration Manager Database, which serves as a central element of the IBM Service Management platform. The technology also lets IT organizations visualize and understand complex business applications by mapping how various parts of an application work together. This mapping provides a jump start to understand the environment. The ability to track and manage changes as part of our IBM Service Management capabilities provides a repeatable set of processes for operations such as change, release and storage management.

Isogon – When used with previously existing Tivoli products, this technology creates an end-to-end software asset management solution. Products automatically discover software running within your mainframe and distributed computing environments, then tell you which users, departments or machines use applications, and by how much. The results help you eliminate unneeded software and make other insightful cost-saving decisions. In terms of compliance, the ability to link those assets to the details of related software agreements helps you avoid unforeseen overages and fines and better address government and vendor agreements.

Cyanea – Allows you to observe composite applications spanning numerous platforms and systems from an applications view. This is part of our natural progression to monitor and manage all types of applications so that you can assess performance of composite and traditional applications side by side.

Candle  – Provides unparalleled monitoring and management for performance and availability within the System z environment. Candle technology also provides the basis for Tivoli Monitoring 6.1, which lets you manage all your mainframe and distributed systems from a single monitor via the Tivoli Enterprise Portal.

Whether working on organic development in-house or adding to the IBM Tivoli portfolio via acquisitions, we’ll continue to focus on providing you a service management environment with products that integrate into your existing environment – and with each other.

For more information:
IBM Service Management 

Laura Sanders, Vice President Development, Tivoli IBM

Before taking the helm as Vice President for Tivoli Development, Laura Sanders served as Vice President of System Storage Products and Solutions. In this role she managed the System Storage portfolio, overseeing strategy, product management and business development. Previously, Laura served as Vice President for the integration of Informix following the acquisition by IBM. She led the transition of this business as it became an integral part of the IBM Data Management business. Other executive positions have included overseeing aspects of the IBM e-learning business and working as director of European Marketing within the Finance Sector. Laura also served as Executive Assistant to the Senior Vice President and Group Executive at the creation of the IBM Software Group. Sanders holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA in Finance from Tulane University in New Orleans.