Tivoli announces strengthened ties to Compaq, Sun Companies want to improve product integration for sysadmins By Marc Ferranti

May  1998

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At its Planet Tivoli user conference in Orlando, FL, today the company announced that it will be cooperating with Compaq and Sun to ensure that Tivoli Enterprise software will work with current and upcoming products from the two vendors.

With Compaq, Tivoli is working to ensure that its Enterprise software can work with Compaq's Insight Manager management software to take advantage of WBEM (Web-Based Enterprise Management) capabilities being integrated into various Compaq servers and desktop machines. The WBEM specifications offer an information model to relate system and application data.

The two companies also announced that Compaq Proliant and ProSignia servers and workstations will be configured with Tivoli software by mutual channel partners.

For its part, Sun announced that its Solstice Domain Manager network management software has met the Foundation Integration requirements of the Tivoli Partner Association. This means that Solstice and Tivoli's Enterprise software can exchange network data and offer users a single point of control to manage network systems, industry analysts said.

Sun also announced that it plans this year to submit other products for Tivoli Partner certification, including the Sun Enterprise SyMON, Soltice Backup, and StorEdge Enterprise NetBackup.

Though such agreements between hardware vendors and network-management product vendors are not uncommon, the bottom line for users is that such continuing cooperation and integration among management products and different hardware platforms is a good thing.

"This makes all kinds of sense for end users," said Richard Ptak, vice president of solutions for enterprise management at D.H. Brown Associates Inc., a consultancy in Amherst, NH. Such cooperation means that users have less of a headache making sure that management tools and different hardware work together, Ptak said.

The Tivoli-related announcements today follow similar partnership announcements from Computer Associates International Inc. last month.

CA and Tivoli are jockeying for position to become the network management software vendor of choice for IT managers.

So far, deals announced by both Tivoli and CA this year appear to be "opportunistic," Ptak said. That is, various hardware vendors are working with the two software vendors to exploit customer demand, without placing all their bets on one particular software partner to do so.

In related developments at Planet Tivoli, the company gave users a peek at its upcoming network management releases, including Version 3.6 of the Tivoli Management Environment 10.

--Marc Ferranti is a correspondent with the IDG News Service

Resources

• Tivoli http://www.tivoli.com/

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