Tivoli Systems Inc. has repackaged several of its products into six suites aimed at mid-sized businesses.
The Tivoli Management Suites are designed with cost and ease of deployment in mind, said Franklin Amzallag, general manager of Tivoli Systems for Canada in Toronto. He said the packaged products are at least 20-per-cent cheaper together than individually priced.
Richard Ptak, vice-president of systems and application management with the Hurwitz Group in Framingham, Mass., said the suites are a good move on Tivoli’s part, especially for what he called “the vastly under-served” small and medium-sized market.
“A lot of the problems that have been described around framework and platform solutions had to do with the fact that they were expensive and took a long time to design around them and complex and hard to learn how to use and so forth, and this addresses all of those situations,” Ptak said.
“[The suites] address three concerns: the price, complexity, and time to get it running.”
All six suites include Tivoli Management Framework, which Tivoli’s Amzallag said allows all the application elements to be linked and provide the customer with a cross-enterprise vision. Several of the suites contain similar elements, but each set is geared to a specific set of uses, he said.
“Tivoli Applications Management Suite includes software distribution, the distributed monitoring, and the centralized cross-industry console where you can have an integrated view of your system,” Amzallag said.
The Change and Asset Management Suite also includes software distribution, but adds in asset control elements such as Tivoli Inventory.
“The Operations Management Suite is the job schedulers, storage management, and the framework. It’s really more into the management of the organizations,” Amzallag said.
The Problem Management Suite combines many problem-resolution elements such as Tivoli Service Desk and Tivoli Remote Control to enable multi-tiered automation and cross-system correlation, according to the company’s Web site.
“The Security Management Suite is the security management application, user administration, the framework, global sign-on which allows you to have one single password to sign on to several applications, and the software distribution,” Amzallag said.
Finally, the IT Readiness Management Suite enforces year 2000 readiness in a cross-platform distributed environment.
Ptak said one of the benefits to the variety in the packages is customers are forced to focus on a subset of problems in choosing the suite.
“By making it more modular, it makes it easier for companies to prioritize where their management problems are and what they want to address. Then they can just incrementally expand their capability to manage the different aspects of their business.
“They’re reasonable and logical packages. I think you’ll see similar activities from other vendors,” Ptak said.
Canadian pricing information was not available at press time.
Tivoli Canada in Markham, Ont., is at 1-800-426-2255. The corporate Web site is at www.tivoli.com.