IBM Brings IT Operational Efficiency to Businesses of All Sizes

fact sheet Vendor: IBM Vendor's Information: About IBM

Small and medium-sized organizations are focused on running their business and often lack the resources to manage operating systems, email and database servers and hardware devices. In-person or manual monitoring of IT resources is costly, time consuming and prone to errors — with additional staff time often needed to troubleshoot problems.

Many growing mid-sized organizations turn to multiple solutions to monitor various individual systems. The result is that tracking capacity and performance across these systems is not integrated or cohesive. Many organizations lack central visibility to effectively monitor the health and availability of IT systems, jeopardizing the delivery and quality of services to their customers. In addition, when new machines need to be introduced or replaced, configuration and integration is both tasking and costly.

IBM Tivoli Foundations are IT service management solutions designed and priced for mid-sized organizations. Tivoli Foundations solution components are easy to deploy for improved time to value and return on investment, and are built on the Lotus Foundations core platform, which provides advanced disaster recovery, hands-off protection and automated disk back-up for Foundations servers.

Tivoli Foundations includes two software appliances — IBM Tivoli Foundations Application Manager and Tivoli Foundations Service Manager. With these new, integrated offerings, IBM is positioned to help mid-market organizations optimize service management in an effective, fast and cost-efficient way.

Tivoli Foundations Service Manager provides SMB-focused service desk capabilities through ITIL v3.0 aligned service request, incident and problem management processes.

Tivoli Foundations Application Manager provides the capabilities to quickly and comprehensively monitor alert and report on the performance and availability of your key IT infrastructure elements.

IBM Tivoli® Foundations Service Manager
IBM Tivoli® Foundations Service Manager provides focused service desk capabilities through ITIL®v3.0-aligned service request, incident and problem management processes. It encompasses a variety of features that enable a single point of contact to automate service request, incident and problem management. The offering includes pre-defined features that have been found key to growing needs of small- and medium-sized organizations. Equally important, it is easy to install, configure and deploy.

IBM Tivoli Foundations Service Manager has built-in features that streamline service desk operations through process workflow configuration and escalation across an organization. This software appliance-based service desk improves the productivity of service desk agents by providing problem-solving tools such as remote diagnostics and Web replay capabilities. The remote diagnostics capability enables the agents to remotely take over workstations to fix problems, saving time, reducing costs and improving customer satisfaction.

IBM Tivoli® Foundations Application Manager
IBM Tivoli® Foundations Application Manager provides entry-level monitoring for the growing medium-sized organization looking for an easy-to-use, cost-effective solution. It provides capabilities to implement application management, including IT asset discovery, network monitoring, server monitoring and monitoring for key IT elements such as databases, mail servers and virtual servers.

This easy-to-use and install monitoring solution delivers both real-time and historical views that allow clients to visualize and intelligently report on how their IT environment is currently operating and has been operating over time. This enables customers to see service performance and health across network devices, servers, middleware, and application components to improve service quality. IBM Tivoli Foundations Application Manager helps IT organizations reduce operational costs, increase productivity, maintain desired performance and availability goals and increase customer satisfaction.

IBM Tivoli Foundations Application Manager is built with IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) technology. This is the same solution used to manage server OS, virtual servers, networks, databases and email applications in an enterprise environment. A customizable user interface can bring together the right set of data and reports (called workspaces) in an easy-to-use interface. Additionally, the Application Manager is integrated with discovery capabilities for quick inventory and deployment of monitoring agents. It can also integrate with IBM Tivoli Foundations Service Manager for complete, end-to-end management of incidents and problems.

IBM Tivoli Foundations Application Manager is designed to help growing mid-sized organizations with limited funds and resources achieve quick time to value with minimal install and configuration time. It runs on the IBM Lotus® Foundations Server — an ideal server for businesses with limited budgets and IT resources. Intuitive deployment tools can help IT administrators quickly deploy and get running for fast time to value.

More Tivoli Tools for Increasing IT Efficiency
Growing business can get visibility into their IT infrastructure without the need to deploy additional hardware or purchase additional software licenses using IBM Tivoli Live — monitoring services. IBM Tivoli Live — monitoring services is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that delivers Tivoli Monitoring and Tivoli Composite Application Management software over the Web.

Customers can use IBM Tivoli Live — monitoring services to manage the health and performance of their data center's resources — including operating systems, virtualized servers, middleware and applications.

IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager helps organizations optimize efficiency by automating best practices for data center provisioning activities. Customers can use IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager to discover and track data center resources to enable highly accurate server provisioning and software deployments. It can be used to create thousands of virtual machines simultaneously and automatically provision software and configurations to Microsoft Windows servers and clients, as well as Linux and UNIX servers.

IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager can also be used to facilitate efforts to consistently follow your own policies and preferred configurations in support of corporate and regulatory compliance efforts.

IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment helps organizations reduce the time and costs associated with desk-side support and direct interaction with target systems. It can be used to automate remote deployment of operating systems from one simple interface and eliminate costly on-site support. It allows IT departments to standardize on fewer "golden master" images for heterogeneous systems and minimize security risks by ensuring that data is safe and that desktop systems conform to secure configurations.

IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for Images allows administrators to manage the virtualization infrastructure and accelerate provisioning to target computers by building a virtual image once and deploying it multiple times.

IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager for OS Deployment for IBM Systems Director Edition (ISDE) automates and manages the remote deployment of operating systems from IBM Systems Director.

Summary
Too many growing companies rely on manual processes to monitor, configure and deploy IT resources, devoting valuable time to such tasks instead of working on new products and services that grow the business. IBM offers a number of Tivoli tools that will help businesses of all sizes gain the visibility into their IT infrastructure that enables more efficient operation while reducing IT costs.