Empowering Growth in Mid-Sized Companies

Service management enhancements can drive business growth for organizations of all sizes

Tivoli Beat - A weekly IBM service management perspective. The magnitude of change that is affecting businesses today is unprecedented. Difficult economic conditions, a broader set of business imperatives and evolving technology requirements are presenting companies of all sizes with new opportunities and challenges. While large and growing mid-size companies are striving to address similar issues and both depend on IT to run their businesses, mid-size companies have unique challenges. They must find affordable solutions that are easy to install and maintain and that provide an entry point into a more comprehensive service management solution.

Tivoli Foundations: New, affordable solutions for mid-sized businesses

IBM Tivoli Foundations are service management solutions designed and priced to meet the needs of mid-sized organizations. Built on the Lotus Foundations core platform, Tivoli Foundations provide advanced disaster recovery, hands-off protection and automated disk back-up. Pre-installed and integrated management components make Tivoli Foundations Solutions easy to install and configure for improved time to value and return on investment.

Available on August 14, 2009, 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.

IBM Tivoli Foundations Application Manager: Application monitoring

Tivoli Foundations Application Manager offers mid-market companies the enterprise level functionality they need to implement performance and availability monitoring in their environments. Unlike free-ware and other available solutions, Tivoli Foundations Application Manager offers IT asset discovery, network monitoring, server monitoring and monitoring for key IT elements such as databases, mail servers and virtual servers—all in a simple, easy to deploy solution priced for mid-sized organizations.

Tivoli Foundations Application Manager delivers mid-size organizations with both real-time and historical views of how their IT environment is currently operating and has been operating over time. This ability to see service performance and health across the network, server, middleware and application components enables them to effectively manage risk and improve service quality.

Tivoli Foundations Application Manager helps clients optimize their resource allocation and reduce cost by giving them the ability to identify underutilized resources and reallocate them to support new business operations. At the same time, risk is reduced by anticipating resource over-utilization and generating proactive events and reports against resources that do not have the capacity to address growing business needs.

Tivoli Foundations Application Manager comes with out-of-the box best practice monitoring policies that track IT Infrastructure health against pre-defined thresholds. This allows organizations to quickly and proactively identify and respond to problems and issues before critical applications and customers are impacted. Overall service is improved by restoring the service or application that is experiencing performance problems with the shortest mean time to recovery possible, using autonomic capabilities before human intervention is even needed. Reducing problem determination time decreases cost and allows organizations to spend more resources focusing on business innovation and creating competitive advantage.

IBM Tivoli Foundations Service Manager: Service desk capabilities

In today’s rapidly changing IT environment, the service desk delivers critical support to the entire company by keeping key business systems and services available and reliable. As technology becomes increasingly complex, problem resolution becomes more time-consuming, skill requirements increase and costs to maintain quality services escalate.

In the face of tighter budgets and fewer resources, prioritization, responsiveness and standard, well-defined workflows are the key to maximizing the availability of business-critical IT services. Tivoli Foundations Service Manager is the "service desk in a box" solution designed specifically for mid-market organizations.

Tivoli Foundations Service Manager provides service desk capabilities that allow mid-size companies to handle help desk calls, track problems and make changes that prevent existing problems without creating new ones. It also provides a self-service, searchable knowledge base that delivers fast answers to common IT problems.

In addition, Tivoli Foundations Service Manager delivers dashboards that provide real-time performance views and out-of-the box content including workflows, templates, key performance indicators (KPIs), queries and reports targeted for mid-size clients.

The Tivoli Foundations Service Manager appliance-based service desk solution helps mid-market clients reduce their costs by optimizing the productivity of operations personnel through its built-in problem solving tools, providing operations a way to increase the efficiency of its service support functions. The robust self-help portal, which is populated with best practice resolutions to common problems, gives end-users a way to quickly resolve problems on their own, without having to involve any additional personnel.

Managing risk is key to small and mid-market clients that have extremely limited IT skills in-house. The Tivoli Foundations Service Management solution ensures process compliance by integrating standards-based incident and problem management processes resulting in a repeatable and consistent service support process.

Tivoli Foundations Service Manager delivers streamlined standards-based incident and problem management processes that enable rapid service restoration and improved overall service quality. It provides real-time visibility to end users on priority, urgency and impact of problems, incidents and service requests. These built-in survey capabilities allow organizations to track and trend overall end-user satisfaction with their operations and creates a closed loop environment where overall service quality can continually be improved.

Only IBM offers appliance-based entry points into their service management portfolio, providing mid-size companies with solutions to fit their current and future needs. Rated number one in Service Application Management and Service Desk, IBM delivers the visibility, control, and automation needed to help mid-size organizations reduce cost, manage risk, improve service quality and build agility into their operations.

IBM understands the service management needs of mid-market companies. To learn more about how Tivoli Foundations Manager and Tivoli Foundations Service Manager can help empower growth for your mid-size organization, contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, visit us online at http://www.ibm.com/software/tivoli/solutions/smb/, or follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ibmtivoli?cm_sp=ZZ999-_-SWK00-_-5988 (link resides outside of ibm.com).