The latest product line out of IBM's Tivoli division is designed to bring self managing IT to the business masses, freeing resources and cash for use elsewhere in the channel, IBM executives said.
Three new Tivoli software packages, released this week, are designed to automatically identify and respond to situations defined by the user.
IBM executives billed the technology as a troubleshooter able to self-healing or self-administering system able to respond automatically to certain situations, removing waves of labor-intensive processes.
While similar applications were previously available, the new line is designed and priced to be scalable across the spectrum, IBM said.
From a channel perspective, the development has the potential to be an all-purpose monitoring or management solution for enterprise down to SMBs (small to midsize businesses), or a more efficient approach to managed services, said Ric Telford, IBM's vice president of autonomic computing.
IBM reaches another milestone in its autonomic computing drive with the latest release from Tivoli. Click here to read more on eWEEK.com.
"For ISVs and Sis, this is a nice solution where you can build the appropriate set of monitoring capabilities out of the box with the solution you are delivering," he said.
"Then you have room to create customer situations which are a value add over the base."
IBM integrators said the applications' ease of use were their hallmark.
"It's basically framework-less," said John Willis, of GulfBreeze Software, in Round Rock, Texas.
"It lacks the complicated framework that inhibited other applications and makes it accessible across the board."
A holistic solution and a visualization portal offers a scalability that previous Tivoli autonomic applications did not, said Constance Lamicela, chief technology officer of ESM Technology Inc., in New York.
"Tivoli always had superior architecture, but they were point solutions, which were hard to work with," she said.
"This is a turnkey solution. It's a very powerful statement to say we will have monitoring in place and you'll be up and running in 10 days."
MSPs will benefit from the products' automated infrastructure, Telford said.
"Right now, someone makes a request of their MSP and it might get printed out and delivered to a tech, who processes it," he said.
"You can set up situations here that move the process automatically. You're no longer hiring new people every time you pick up new business."
The development might have the unintended consequence of freeing up IT budgets for spending elsewhere in the channel, Telford said.
"If you think of IT budgets as basically flat, and you know you're spending 80 percent to maintain what you already own, you're very limited in spending for new technology," he said.
"If you reduce the cost of basic operations and staff, you can take those folks and work on new initiatives. It benefits everyone."
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