InformationWeek

Just last month, IBM partially blamed the unit for the company's poor performance in its first quarter of fiscal 2000. For that quarter, IBM posted software sales of $2.9 billion, a marked decrease from the fourth quarter of 1999, when software sales totaled $3.6 billion. Notably, Tivoli's revenue remained relatively flat in the first quarter--while competitors prospered in their most recent financial results.

Tivoli also has continued to lose key executives. In October, chief technology officer Tom Bishop and VP of marketing Mark McClain said they'd be moving on. They were just the latest in a long line of Tivoli executive alumni--a list that includes Mike Turner, former VP of enterprise business solutions; Martin Neath, former executive VP; Phil Sheridan, former product line manager; and Mike O'Rourke, former VP of packaged solutions. A few sources close to the company say some of the executives left because they believed Tivoli was losing its autonomy and becoming increasingly micromanaged by IBM.

"They've suffered quite a bit of executive loss," says Herb Vanhook, VP at Meta Group. Jim Berlino, an analyst with CIBC Openheimer, says the departure of key executives always has a negative impact, but says he's still puzzled by Tivoli's latest financial results. Says Berlino, "They're doing the right things, making the right announcements, getting decent customer wins. It doesn't make sense."

Tivoli has the advantage of close relationships with large, global companies via IBM, Berlino says, and has been on target with its own recent E-business application offerings. There's no reason for their sales to remain flat, he says, adding that "Tivoli can't afford to have another negative quarter."

Perhaps better times are ahead. Vanhook says the group is in "good, experienced hands with Jan Lindelow as chairman and CEO; Bob Yellin, senior VP; and David Murphy, senior VP of corporate development." Also, the company is working at addressing a complaint most customers have about most systems and network-management tools, regardless of the vendor. "What they've got to do is to make their stuff easier to deploy, configure, and use," Vanhook says.

Last week, the company disclosed the most significant enhancement in two years of NetView, its flagship network-management product. NetView 6.0 for NT and Unix provides several key improvements, says Jim Carey, director of network management development for Tivoli.

A new browser-style Java console offers a more intuitive graphical user interface and presents information in a more digestible fashion, and it scales beyond 100 simultaneous clients, Carey says. The console also remains available as a standalone, character-based application. "Enterprises don't have to choose between the better Java interface or faster performance as a standalone application," Carey says.

Another NetView 6.0 enhancement is its new SubMap Explorer, which presents the network in a similar view as the Windows NT Explorer: Users can view their entire network by topology, system-configuration information, and network address configuration. "By presenting a number of different views, we're able to put a bunch of extremely pertinent information into a single panel with 30 to 40 different lines of data. This is extremely useful because we find different people have unique ways of approaching network problems," Carey says.

Another major enhancement is NetView Network Fault Isolation, which provides an integrated root-cause analysis for network failures. In the event of a substantial network failure, NetView automatically evaluates the state of the network and determines the status and location of the systems that caused the crash.

In previous releases of NetView, the entire network would turn red when, for example, the router underneath the operations center failed. "The new tool takes a very aggressive approach to taking one problem and solving it quickly and well," Carey says. Also, because NetView doesn't have to continue polling the entire network searching for problems, the administrator can realize a 50% to 70% reduction in server CPU load during a failure, he says.

Last September, in a move to strengthen its secure authorization technology, IBM acquired Dascom, a privately owned Web and enterprise security company creating products that control users' authorization to access enterprise data and network services for E-business transactions. A few months later, Tivoli unveiled its Security Business Unit and its Tivoli SecureWay portfolio for security-management and control solutions. This unites Dascom, IBM Secure Authorization Technology, and Tivoli security products under one brand to offer end-to-end enterprise security.

Tivoli's security suite now includes six products: Tivoli SecureWay Global Sign-On, SecureWay Policy Director, SecureWay Privacy Manager, SecureWay Risk Manager, SecureWay Security Manager, and SecureWay User Administration. The SecureWay Risk Manager is integrated with NetView's centralized console to display Simple Network Management Protocol events. The SecureWay Security Manager is integrated with Tivoli Enterprise Console, Distributed Monitoring, and Software Distribution. It also has a Tivoli Decision Support Guide, which enables visualization of security-access rights.