IBM announces new service management offerings

IBM Corp. is introducing a range of new products and services, many based on technologies coming from recently acquired companies, aimed at helping businesses better manage and take advantage of their various software and hardware systems.

The new offerings stem from IBM acquisitions including MRO Software Inc., Micromuse Inc., Rembo Technology SARL, Isogon Corp., Collation Inc. and CIMS Lab Inc. and aim to offer businesses simple and central ways to manage their technology assets.

IBM plans to release this month a new version of Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database software that will include technology from application resource mapping software developer Collation, a company IBM acquired late last year. The new software integrates IT information spread across the enterprise, including information about servers, storage devices, networks, middleware and applications. The software could help businesses notice, for example, that an IT problem stems from a change in an application such as a security update, rather than from hardware or software failure, and help pinpoint and fix the problem quickly.

Another new release, IBM Tivoli Capacity Process Manager, which will become available in the fourth quarter, predicts computing capacity and performance, thus helping users reduce network slowdowns and outages. The software is part of IBM's process manager family of products that automate workflows.

Two additional new products are available immediately. One is the IBM Service Management Self-Assessment Toolkit, a free online service that helps users focus on priorities when designing a service management strategy by rating the importance of internal processes.

The IBM Tivoli Unified Process Composer, also available now, aims to help new customers begin employing service management.

In addition to the new products, IBM also launched the IBM Service Management Partner Ecosystem with a dozen other companies including Avnet Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. and Nortel Networks Corp. The companies say they'll work together to build and promote products based on IBM's platforms and industry standards.