The IBM ESM Integration Story

Last night, I attended a Tivoli User Group (TUG) meeting in Atlanta.

One of the presentations was on IBM's new Tivoli Service Request

Manager product. During the presentation, my mind started to wander,

and I wondered how difficult it must have been for IBM just to get this

far in its story.

In the past five years it has acquired at least eight companies in the

enterprise systems management space alone. I am not talking about just

the coding efforts. I just can't imagine the cultures, the management,

and coordination it must have taken just to be able to show the

Powerpoint slide of its integration road map. So, before I tell you the

two questions that I posed to the presenter, let's do a little

refresher.

Chart of IBM ESM Related Acquisitions

Think Dynamics

The major changes in the traditional Tivoli stack started in 2003

with the acquisition of the privately held Think Dynamics. Think

Dynamics provided provisioning and orchestration technology. My

uneducated guess is that, by the end of 2007, more than half of the IBM

customer base has not fully converted from the old Tivoli Configuration

manager product.

Rational Software

In that same year IBM purchased Rational Software. I believe that

IBM has had reasonably success with the penetration of its Rational

products. HP, however, still has a strong hold in the testing market

with the Mercury tools. Rational products have leaked into some of the

enterprise systems, products such as IBM Tivoli Composite Applications

Monitor (ITCAM), which is primarily used for synthetic transactions and

transaction response timings.

Candle

Most IBM insiders will tell you that IBM purchased Candle for its Z

penetration and residuals. Somewhere along the way, however, it

realized that it could gain mammoth savings by shelving its IBM Tivoli

Monitoring version 5 upgrade development effort and by just using the

Candle product as the new ITM version 6. Very similar to the Think

Dynamics customer transition story, it has been difficult for many of

IBM's monitoring customer to make a clean conversion over to the new

Candle technology

Cyanea

Cyanea was small three-year-old company that IBM had invested in at

an early stage with an 11% holding. Cyanea has been integrated into the

ITCAM family of products.

Collation

Collation was probably the best per-price acquisition that IBM has

made in the last few years. The Collation discovery application will be

the linchpin for all the Tivoli products. The new name of the Collation

software is called Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager

(TADDM). TADDM puts the "C" in IBM's CCMDB. IBM describes its CCMDB as

both discovery and CMDB. In my opinion, you can't have one without the

other. If IBM actually pulls off this massive integration of all these

products, it is TADDM that is going to make it sail.

MicroMuse

This acquisition will put the final nail in what we Tivoli old

timers have called home for the last years. Netview, which actually

came from the original HP Openview code base, is finally dead. The new

IBM Tivoli Network Manager for IP products is the official replacement

for Netview. Now, IBM claims that it is the only vendor that can do the

whole layer 2 through 7 stack and that it can do layer 0 as well. Also,

IBM says that its go forward strategy for event management and

correlation is the Netcool Omnibus product line. What , no more TEC

Prolog? Good riddance. IBM is saying that Tivoli Enterprise Console

still has a shelf life until circa 2012; however, I am not waiting

around. Another area where MicroMuse has made a big impact is the

replacement of the Tivoli Business Systems Manager with the Netcool RAD

and Impact products. I wasn't a big fan of TBSM 3.x; the new TBSM 4.x

(Netcool) stuff is much better. Also, make sure that you now call it

the Tivoli Business Service Manager.

MRO Software

The IT service request story over the last ten years could make for

a great adventure novel. In 1997 IBM paid $200 million for a company

called Software Artistry. These were the boom years for Tivoli. Sales

were vertical, champagne was flowing, everyone was feeding off the

trough. Even lowly consultants such as myself were driving Cadillac

rentals and staying in the Ritz. IBM was selling a great integration

story in the late nineties. Between 1996 and the end of 1997, IBM had

acquired Tivoli, Unison (Tivoli Workload Scheduler), and Software

Artistry. No other company in the enterprise systems space could tout

that kind of integration story (sound familiar?). The Peregrine and

Remedy replacement business was on fire. Then, the year 2k and the

dot-bomb fizzle came. IBM unloaded the Service Desk product to none

other than Peregrine Systems for an undisclosed amount of money.

Meanwhile, all those poor customers who had to convert from Peregrine's

Service Center to Tivoli's Service Desk now had to convert back. A few

years later, Peregrine bought Remedy, and there was practically only

one vendor doing service request management at the enterprise level.

Somewhere along the way, Peregrine pulled an Enron and had to unload

Remedy on the cheap. The "M" (John Moores, owner of Peregrine) sells

Remedy to the B and C in BMC. In 2006, guess who has the best ITIL/CMDB

story? Somewhere along the way IBM gets religion and realizes the error

of its ways and tries to start an ITIL strategy. It realized that,

without Asset, Problem, Change, and Config software, you are stuck with

just vapor. In 2006, IBM acquired MRO Software, and in 2007, it is back

in the game with ITSRM.

Cognos

The ironic part of this from an ESM perspective is that Tivoli used

to have a product that OEM'd Congnos. It was called Tivoli Decision

Support (TDS). TDS took Tivoli's DM 3.x monitoring data and built cubes

using Cognos. It was a nightmare to implement. IBM Tivoli has recently

announced the Tivoli Common Reporting product (TCR) for common

reporting for all of its Tivoli portfolio. TCR is based on the Eclipse

BIRT open source product. I am guessing, however, that this might

evolve into a stop gap. Why would IBM pay $5 billion for a company with

over 3500 employees and continue to use BIRT as its reporting tool?

My Questions

Now that we have completed the refresher, let me get to my two

questions. My first question was really more of a comment: "It looks

like you have around two more year to go for complete integration." The

presenter disagreed with me and wanted to say that his demo was proof

that I was wrong (see my joke about demo's... My Views on OSS ESM (Part 4).

He went on to say that Gartner said the same thing a year ago and

changed its story a few months ago after seeing the demo (see thoughts

about this in My Views on OSS ESM (Part 1)).

Ok, the demo, sure. So, when I asked him if he could tell me one

fortune 5000 comnay that is currently running an integrated solution

with TPM, ITM, TADDM, Netcool OmniBus, and ITSRM, he said that he cold

name only one company that was running three of the five. I rest my

case. So, is IBM's ESM integration story a mission impossible? For any

other company, I would definitely say, "Yes." But IBM has a lot of

resources to make this all happen. If it does make it all happen, it

will have the best story in ESM.

I know this question has been asked many times before but in the

enterprise space it seems that ITIL is always a given. My thoughts are

maybe changes in the IT industry might change the need for ITIL. To be

clear on this I am not proposing to know the answer to this question.

Some Industry Considerations

Five years ago when I would teach a class to enterprise customers I

would always ask all the customers how many servers do you manage? On a

good day I would get maybe 10k and only a couple of super

infrastructure banks would answer above 20k. Recently I have been

attending a number of open source meetings and I am meeting people who

tell me that their infrastructures have over 100k servers and I finding

more and more that these numbers are actually small in the new WEB 2.0

world. I have talked to some consultants who are working with RackSpace

and they have told me they have over 100k servers. A recent article by

Robin Harris suggests that Google might have over a million cores. I

can’t image how many servers Amazon is farming with their S3/EC2

offerings.

Changing the Game

Companies like Facebook are adding 350k user’s a day and doubling

ever six months. Virtual World networks like Second Life and Kaneva are

growing with numbers that are mind blowing. How do companies cope with

change in these types of environments? My belief is that they have two

options. One, they go and blow and don’t focus on traditional ITM/ESM

techniques or two they change the game. If you look at what Google is

doing in Portland on the Columbia River, they are indeed changing the

game. They are using free software and cheap hardware to build what

they call “Power Provisioning for a Warehouse-sized Computer”. I

recently attended an IBM session where their development lab in Markham

Ontario is completely virtual and is run by a giant provisioning system

called Tornado. IBM developers in this facility select their

provisioned system from a self service portal and its all on demand.

Perhaps the best example of a company changing the game is Amazon’s.

Amazon processes over 4 million purchase transactions per day utilizing

over 150 different network services to deliver these successful

transactions. They are building their infrastructure based on the

Google Three Rules.

1. Cheap Servers - Mass produced low end servers, free software. Energy efficient switches and unmanaged switches.

2. Expect Failure - Cheap hardware will fail. Therefore build recovery into the software.

3. Scalability - Create monster scalability. Google has created clusters that exceed 8000.

Enterprises like Google and Amazon are defining a new type of data

center. I compare it to RAID 1 for servers. Plan for failures the way

large companies plan for redundant electricity. This kind of future

could normalize IT to the status of electricity that is a true

commodity. If you take a closer look at Amazon’s Elastic Computing

Cloud (EC2), today you are guaranteed 99.999% availability for your

servers and your total investment is a light switch and service bill

with no ITIL required.

John Willis

johnmwillis.com