Tivoli Express Puts Smaller Businesses on IT Fast Track

Starting in the mid 1980s, small to mid-size businesses have been going through an IT evolution that has taken them from being PC-centric in their technology, to being Internet-centric, and now to embarking on becoming network-centric with distributed systems and early pilot grid projects. IT at these sites is faced with a unique set of challenges and the IBM Tivoli® Express Portfolio™ of IT management software addresses those challenges in the following areas:

• Automated backup and recovery
• Availability management
• Identity management
• Software patch distribution and
• Inventory management

As IT infrastructure at small to mid-size businesses evolved, so too did the impact of software on their business processes. Starting with simple spread support calculations, these sites have evolved to run mission-critical applications including CRM and business process automation. Now, small and mid-size businesses are facing the complex growing issues surrounding the optimization of IT resources in support of their business priorities and bottom line.

For companies with 100 to 999 employees, IDC found that business spending in 2005 had two top priorities: improvement of operational efficiency and business growth. In terms of business priorities, mid-size businesses, like their large-scale counterparts, are looking both inward and outward to improve and expand their businesses. For IT at companies such as small retailers, manufacturers, hospitals, and local banks, that means a focus on broader solutions rather than on hardware and software point products.

While the goals and challenges for mid-size businesses are the same as those of much larger organizations, IT’s frame of reference at these companies is dramatically different. The combination of smaller budgets and fewer staff dramatically lowers the threshold of pain that IT at a mid-size company can endure when it comes to systems management overhead. This changes the way IT consumes a software solution at a mid-size company: In particular, the requirements for what is acceptable in terms of ease of use, ease of installation, ease of configuration, and maintenance are significantly higher and much more stringent.

In addition to defining the necessary conditions that any software package must meet, the dynamics of having a smaller IT staff also creates an acute need for cost-effective system management tools that prevent the growing complexity of the IT environment at mid-size companies from spiraling out of control. Just as IT must deal with increasing amounts of customer, employee, and vendor data from a growing number of business-critical applications at large sites, IT at small to mid-size sites must deal with the same issues, but with a much smaller staff. As small and mid-size businesses become mode dependent on IT, they become more vulnerable to suffering losses in performance and revenues when it is difficult for IT to resolve resource, application, or network problems quickly.

To strike a chord with IT at smaller companies, IBM has unified a comprehensive line of hardware, software, services, and financing solutions, which have been designed, developed, and priced specifically for customers at these companies, under the banner of IBM Express Advantage. An expansive array of offerings are encompassed including 17 complete industry-oriented business solutions, 25 cross-industry IT infrastructure solutions, and over 300 solutions and services built by business partners and dubbed "Built on Express."

Equally important for customers at small to mid-size companies, IBM has put together a best in class network of business partners. IT at a mid-size business frequently buys through trusted local system integrators that bring together their applications and services bundled with specialized offerings from a channel partner, such as IBM, to solve business challenges for these customers.

The current offerings in the Tivoli Express Portfolio each include a free trial code download. They are:

• IBM Tivoli Identity Manager Express;
• IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) Express;
• IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager (TPM) Express for Inventory;
• IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager (TPM) Express for Software Distribution;
• IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Express; and
• IBM Tivoli Continuous Data Protection (CDP) for Files.

These offerings enable IT in a growing mid-size business to:

• Store customer and employee data from multiple applications in a secure database in order to grant, manage, and enforce user access permissions;
• Rapidly identify and resolve IT resource and application problems;
• Understand what hardware and software assets your business has, how much you have, and where it resides;
• Leverage a company-wide distribution system for managing the delivery and updating of business software through a secure Web interface;
• Help secure and protect company data, including Microsoft® SQL and Exchange, to disk or tape; and
• Protect important files on servers and desktop systems continuously and in real time with disk to disk protection.

All of these offerings feature preconfigured installation processes that require less skill and time to install than their enterprise counterparts. Nonetheless, each of these solutions supports all of a customer’s growing business needs by offering a clear migration path to its enterprise-class IBM Tivoli software variant. For IT, installation is only an immediate short-term problem. System maintenance, on the other hand, is a long-term issue that can be especially troubling in a heterogeneous IT environment. To resolve that issue, all of the offerings in the Tivoli Express Portfolio have been designed and configured in a way that just one person can easily manage that application within their environment, even one not formally trained as a system administrator.