Tivoli takes holistic view of the enterprise

General Manager Robert LeBlanc talks about the evolution of systems management

LeBlanc: From a technology perspective, we are going to leverage WebSphere and Web services underneath the covers for the next generation of Tivoli products. That gives us a couple of advantages over our competitors. It enables us to get to a Web-based infrastructure from what has been a traditional client/server architecture that has made up the Tivoli framework in the past. We have access, obviously, to WebSphere and the talent and the skill that WebSphere has to move to a Web services structure faster than a CA or BMC could, given that they don't have access to the technology nor do they have access to the skill. We are also going to integrate the next generation of Tivoli products with the open Eclipse development platform, and that'll help customers build applications that can take advantage of this open set of systems management services that are going to become available over time.

InfoWorld: How will the use of WebSphere and related technologies help scale Tivoli up to meet the challenges of the Internet, given the fact that we can't run agents everywhere on the Internet?

LeBlanc: It's not just only WebSphere application server but also MQSeries. That'll help us with some of that scalability that we probably don't have as much of today with the agent kind of technology that we're based on today. Part of our problem is that we're based on proprietary technology based on CORBA that had some inherent design flaws in it and is really not conducive to a Web environment. I want to use standards-based architectures like WebSphere and Web services to provide that capability.

InfoWorld: How is the process of backup and recovery getting more sophisticated?

LeBlanc: We're getting now to a granular set of products that enable you to back up particular pieces of an IT infrastructure. Obviously, if it's a catastrophic event [such as] Sept. 11, then it's the ability to recover the whole environment. [What] you need to do is make sure you've got a backup and restore set of capabilities that enable you to do the restore part. Most of the vendors in the market have focused on backup and they always talk about how quickly they can back up your system. That's great when you're in normal operations. The real value of backup and restore software is when you're trying to restore, and that's where speed and ease of use and everything really comes into play.

InfoWorld: What new challenges will the advent of wireless computing present?

LeBlanc: The challenges come in several areas. When you talk configuration operations, how do I distribute software and manage the inventory on wireless devices? How do I provision a device? We think provisioning and changing how you provision depending on the type of device is important. We look at wireless as just an extension of the natural progression of what access mechanisms that you need to be able to manage. That's actually what's driving customer interest in having a single view of access, rather than all of these point products used and all of these different IDs and everything else. Customers want one holistic view because they're combining these technologies in with other technologies to build business applications, and they want their systems management provider to provide a total end-to-end view.

InfoWorld: How does all this strategy relate to the self-healing systems goals that IBM has put forward under to aegis of Project Eliza?