Tivoli goes to town on embedded management

Computing reports from the Tivoli European user group conference in Lisbon.

Systems management tools vendor Tivoli has promised more support for OS/390 users after releasing a range of products to support the operating system, writes Steven Mathieson.

The IBM subsidiary's executive vice president Martin Neath said many of the vendor's releases over the next year will provide support for IBM's mainframe.

The releases were cautiously welcomed by Tivoli's UK user group. 'We would hope the price and functionality offering would be realistic,' said a spokeswoman.

Speaking at Tivoli's European user group meeting in Lisbon last week, Neath said that other releases will concern telecoms management, workflow software for IT departments, and embedded systems management.

'You should see some stuff on embedded management this year,' he said, adding that Tivoli has been talking to manufacturers of industrial robots, jet engines and health-care devices, as well as makers of palmtop computers.

The show included a demonstration of a Tivoli-managed 3Com PalmPilot.

Framework management vendors such as Tivoli have been hit by analyst criticism recently with Meta Group's Tom Scholtz telling the UKCMG conference in York that a US company had found it cheaper to station a member of staff at each server than buy expensive framework software.

Neath responded: 'If that was true, and businesses that needed to hire the hundreds of thousands of people it would take could find them, I would be out of business.'

He pointed to US telco Sprint, which had saved $80 million (£50m) over two years by replacing a series of system management applications with Tivoli software.

Neath admitted that Computer Associates' (CA's) Unicenter product - with which Tivoli competes head-to-head - is ahead on total market share and on mainframe management.

But he said the fact that Tivoli is owned by IBM will help it expand rapidly into the OS/390 and mainframe market currently dominated by CA.

Scholtz said that Tivoli was marginally ahead of CA on detailed evaluation, but that the IBM subsidiary was missing functionality in public key infrastructure and front-end authentication.

Additional reporting from VNU Newswire.