Stay Current via IBM Tivoli Subscriptions

What's the best way to stay on top of your solutions?

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. Technical support is no place for compromise-and that's particularly true in the case of enterprise-class business software.

It's one thing to make the initial investment in leading solutions. It's quite another to get the highest possible business value from them, via the optimal integration, configuration, and utilization in any particular case.

Then there's the question of infrastructural currency. Software is an extremely dynamic world, in which solutions are constantly being patched, updated, and revised. Add up the number of solutions you have, and multiply that by the number of updates (bug fixes, security patches, etc.) and new version releases issued for them per year. You'll rapidly get a sense of just how much time and energy you spend just keeping the infrastructure up-to-date.

And, of course, in cases where those updates are major new releases, there's also a literal price to pay-just at a time when the IT budget may be challenged.

For organizations in this all-too-common situation, IBM has a great alternative model: software subscriptions. The subscription model is both simple and cost-effective; you pay a single flat, annual fee, and in return get as many new versions of a given solution as come out that year for no additional cost.

Whenever updates are released, you'll be notified immediately, and can get them online. By making software costs wholly predictable, this approach not only simplifies forecasting and budgeting, but also drives those costs down compared to the traditional model of buy-as-you-go.

Perhaps even more importantly, a subscription helps to keep the infrastructure much more current-fixing bugs, enhancing security, and adding new features and functionality that can enhance service management and contribute to a better business outcome.

ITM for Energy Management: A dynamic solution to a dynamic problem

The subscription model is both simple and cost-effective; you pay a single flat, annual fee, and in return get as many new versions of a given solution as come out that year for no additional cost. A subscription also helps to keep the infrastructure much more current—and that can enhance service management and contribute to a better business outcome. Take, for instance, the particular case of IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management (ITM for Energy Management). This is a particularly dynamic solution that just keeps getting more and more compelling over time-if it's updated appropriately, that is.

ITM for Energy Management targets an area of critical importance to organizations today: energy consumption. In the case of data centers, in particular, energy represents the fastest-growing overall element of the cost picture-;and IT services are also increasingly threatened by the fact that most of today's data centers were never designed to support an electrical load comparable to the one they currently face.

ITM for Energy Management provides a key link between the domains of energy management and service management, with the goal of helping customers reduce energy use while maintaining business service levels.

So the more information can be obtained about how, when, and why energy is consumed, the more effective energy consumption strategies will be.

But data centers are more than just the sum of IT assets; there is also a facilities element to consider. HVAC units, for instance, play a key role in both overall energy consumption and business resilience by keeping systems below heat thresholds.

ITM for Energy Management addresses the complete business need by aggregating energy data from supported assets-including both facilities and IT assets-and presenting it under a single pane of glass. This gives organizations a centralized way not only to see how the energy situation is changing in real time, but also to create strategies to improve that situation. Because they can easily detect and isolate energy consumption changes, as well as establish the root cause in each case, they can also drive costs down-and drive service availability and business resilience up.

ITM for Energy Management also generates actionable intelligence in a larger sense-spanning not just the multiple domains of IT and facilities, but also multiple periods of time. This happens via the solution's historic analysis and trending features. Managers can see how energy consumption has varied over a user-selectable period, such as a week, a month, or a year-remarkably powerful information, with many possible uses.

Perhaps HVAC costs have increased significantly in the first week of summer compared to the first week from a year ago. If so, that's key information that suggests a problem and that warrants further investigation and action. The alternative is to let a problematic trend continue and wind up with a substantially higher energy expenditure for every subsequent week of the summer as well.

A wide variety of integrations with both IBM and non-IBM assets and solutions

Additionally, ITM for Energy Management offers enormous additional power via integration with other members of the Tivoli portfolio.

For example, it integrates with IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager to help establish not just how energy consumption is changing, but how those changes might translate into a business impact. It integrates with IBM Maximo Asset Management for Energy Optimization to create color-coded thermal maps—at-a-glance insight into just how hot, or how cool, different areas of a building, such as a data center, may be.

It integrates with IBM Systems Director to track the energy consumption of complex virtualized architectures. It integrates with IBM Tivoli Usage and Accounting Manager to help determine costs at any necessary level of granularity (factoring in accurate energy costs). And, of course, it also integrates with a wide variety of non-IBM assets and solutions, particularly in facilities, such as lighting systems or HVAC cooling systems.

Subscribe to ITM for Energy Management and multiply its value

Like all IBM Tivoli solutions, ITM for Energy Management is constantly being updated—and that's where a software subscription for it can deliver real value.

For evidence, just consider how this solution works at a basic level.

To collect energy consumption information, it integrates with a wide variety of assets, including facilities assets produced by non-IBM manufacturers, made possible via IBM business partnerships.

Those aren't fixed; the number of partnerships, and supported assets, is growing all the time. Furthermore, IBM is also committed to creating new, cross-domain integrations with other Tivoli solutions whenever and however that can help clients in the ways they need most.

With each new business partner, each new supported asset, and each new IBM integration, a new update for ITM for Energy Management will be needed before the intended benefit can be realized.

In other words, it's only by keeping ITM for Energy Management up-to-date that you can be sure it's generating its maximum value, by monitoring the largest possible percentage of your IT and facilities assets.

Fortunately, given a subscription, that process is remarkably simple. Instead of having to manually check to see if a new version has been released, you will be notified automatically. You can immediately download and deploy it—and immediately get a more complete picture of energy consumption.

And the cost-reduction argument is equally strong. If you have a subscription for this solution, the cost of all of those updates—however many there may be in the course of an entire year—is simply abstracted out of your decision-making process. Instead, you can concentrate on what really matters: getting the new features and functions you need to keep your services running effectively and cost-efficiently.

Learn more

Recent Articles

Contact IBM

Considering a purchase?

IBM Impact2011

IBM Software. Impact 2011. April 10-15. Las Vegas, NV

Changing the Way Business and IT Leaders Work. Now with over 40 Tivoli Sessions! April 10-15

Register for Impact2011

Featured community

Featured community

Leverage and contribute to the collective wisdom around Tivoli

Engage the community