InformationWeek

When looking beyond security, a new concern arises, says Chuck Stern, Tivoli's VP of Internet Business Solutions. "Once people are securely in your site, how do you monitor the level of service you're providing them?"

One of Tivoli's answers is Cross-Site For Availability, introduced last July. As companies struggle to manage apps running over the Internet and extranets, the notion of application performance management gets tricky. Cross-Site For Availability attempts to manage performance from a user perspective, using a persistent agent installed at an E-business partner's site or through Java code to get feedback on information on round-trip time for packets.

While Cross-Site for Availability tracks the round-trip time of the request for a Web page and its delivery, Stern hints that additional processes will be added soon. Some of the processes that may be measured in a future version, analysts say, will include how long a request to view a Web page lingers through the Internet, how long it stays behind a company's firewall, and how long the request sits inside the end user's back office.

Another step the company has taken to make E-business management easier is Cross-Site For Deployment. "When you need to move critical data over the Net, how do you do it from a management environment?" Stern asks. With Cross-Site For Deployment, companies have a way to synchronize information such as price lists, announcements, or updates to distributed applications running on their network, intranet, or the networks of partners.

With Tivoli Device Manager for the Palm Computing platform, Tivoli is also one of the few network-management vendors offering a way to manage the growing number of personal digital assistants in the enterprise. But Vanhook says he sees PDA management as a long-term strategy for most companies, not an immediate requirement. "Basically, Tivoli has a way to easily distribute software to the PDAs on the network. It's still not clear if and when a large number of enterprises will pay for PDA management," he says.

But it's Tivoli's mainstay systems and network-management tools that most of its customers have come to depend upon. Dwight Gibbs, the chief techie geek at online investment advice site the Motley Fool in Alexandria, Va., says he's found Tivoli's tools helpful at managing network assets and getting critical network status information to administrators. The 350-person company was doing a lot of "sneakernet management," Gibbs says. "We had to get our arms around management."

Last year, the Motley Fool implemented Tivoli's asset-management and software-distribution offering. All the company's management tools now report into Tivoli's console, with network managers having views of the areas for which they're responsible. The company's "LAN Sanitation Engineers" see data relating to the health of desktops and servers, while the app developers are constantly fed information detailing how well applications are running on the Web farm, Gibbs explains.

While the Motley Fool uses Tivoli for the network-management framework, Gibbs says, the company chose to use several BMC Patrol solutions, such as their SQL server and Linux modules, to monitor certain areas of its network. Why? "You can't find one vendor that is going to take care of everything. The idea that one size fits all is just not possible," he says.

But Patrol, like Motley's other point tools, sends data to Tivoli's main console. "The reason we chose to standardize on Tivoli is the high level of integration their products offer with other tools. CA has bought a lot of really cool products and is putting them together, but it doesn't tie them together as tightly as Tivoli," Gibbs says.

And that's what separates Tivoli from its competition, says David Murphy, senior VP of corporate development. "Customers have as many new boxes and packages coming into the enterprise as ever, and it's all got to integrate together," he says.

In fact, the complexity of management is growing so that companies are looking for ways to offload the job. With that in mind, Tivoli has moved its network-management technology into a new service provider business unit. "If you look at the trends going forward, network-management technology is going to be purchased in greater amounts from service providers," perhaps remaining the primary responsibility of IT departments in only in the largest enterprises, Murphy says. Others "just want the network up and running. They are not very interested in managing it, but they're very interested in knowing how it's being managed and having a view into it."

So, Tivoli now offers tools such as Tivoli for Network Connectivity and Performance Management, a service-level agreement management product, and Tivoli Comprehensive Network Address Translator, designed for service providers managing ever-extending networks. Murphy admits the products haven't yet made much of a splash in the market, but expects to raise awareness at the Planet Tivoli user conference later this month.

The future? "They seem to have everything in place," says CIBC Openheimer's Berlino. "I don't see any reason why Tivoli won't turn around in upcoming quarters."

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