Toolset lets managers monitor servers, enforce rules
By
Clinton
Wilder
Issue date: March 25, 1996
Tivoli Systems, making its first strategic move since being acquired by
IBM last month, will bring its flagship systems management software into
the fast-growing world of corporate intranet management.
At the Internet & Electronic Commerce Conference and Exposition in New
York on March 25, Tivoli will roll out net.TME, an intranet management
version
of its Tivoli Management Environment toolset for managing corporate networks.
The key component of net.TME is Tivoli/ net.Commander, which lets network
managers monitor multiplatform intranet servers across an enterprise and
enforce user standards for Web browser configuration, Internet access, and
password control.
Tivoli's move to provide industrial-strength management tools signifies
the maturing of the Internet into an important corporate resource. "The
traditional systems management companies are starting to bring some level
of stability to the Wild West characteristics of the Net," says Val
Sribar, service director in the Reston, Va., office of the Meta Group, a
market research firm. "That needs to happen, and corporations will
pay for it."
Companies that use Tivoli tools to manage client-server networks hail the
Austin, Texas, company's move to intranets. "We have a significant
investment in Tivoli and if they can support our intranet efforts, that'
s
an excellent idea," says Dave Kessell, VP of infrastructure projects
at brokerage Charles Schwab & Co. in San Francisco. "It's a lot
better to consolidate the same vendor's [intranet management] software into
the tools we already have, rather than have to find something else."
The first release of Tivoli/net.Commander is available for $5,000 per server
and $49 per client. The software supports Netscape servers running Solaris
Sun/OS and Netscape Navigator browsers running on Windows 95, NT and 3.1.
The second release, due by June, will support Microsoft's Internet Information
Server running on NT Server and its Internet Explorer browser running on
Win95, NT, and 3.1