A manager of managers: Tivoli moves to telecom market with managed services

Tivoli Systems expanded its focus on the telecom market last week with the creation of a new business unit and several strategic partnerships. The moves are part of Tivoli's Net Generation initiative.

"This is a significant investment for Tivoli. We are investing $50 million in the initiative this year, $110 million next year and $350 million over the next three years," said Robert Davis, vice president and general manager of the Service Provider Business Unit for Tivoli.

The SPBU will be staffed by more than 400 development personnel from Tivoli and IBM. That IBM has transferred people into this business unit is an endorsement of Tivoli as its management brand for service providers, Davis said.

The SPBU unveiled six new service provider solutions designed around managed services and announced strategic partnerships, which are key to the initiative's success, said Rob Rich, an analyst with The Yankee Group. "The best move for [Tivoli] that gives its product credibility is the partnerships with companies like Cisco [Systems] and Telcordia [Technologies]. They're very well-positioned within the industry and are excellent partners who can pull [Tivoli] through in various places."

With Cisco, Tivoli will build policy-based management solutions for the implementation and operation of networks. Tivoli's partnership with Telcordia aims to produce technology management solutions for creating and managing new services. Both solutions will address flow-through provisioning, end-to-end service level agreements (SLAs), deployment and monitoring of virtual private networks and quality management.

"It's a very synergistic partnership. Each of the partners can focus on core competencies - Tivoli on the computing side, and Telcordia more on the network side," Rich said.

Other partners include Applied Digital Access, CrossKeys Systems, Newbridge Networks, Open Networks Engineering and TTI Telecom. CrossKeys, in particular, will provide multivendor management and SLA software.

Finally, Nortel Networks has agreed to imbed the Tivoli Management Agent into Nortel's Enterprise Edge platform.

"You'll see us expanding that partner list over time. Our house is open," Davis said, noting that the Net Generation initiative has been in the works for more than a year. "We wanted to have a lot of the pieces in place - new products and new partners - before we really went to the market on it. We feel pretty good in terms of our ability to address this market."

That market is being created by the demands on service providers to support an explosion of non-traditional services on traditional backbone networks. "Service providers are terrific at getting out the bandwidth, but they are going to struggle with system management and application management. I don't think they understand application solutions today," Rich said.

The suite of managed services for service providers builds on Tivoli's experience in enterprise technology management. The Managed Network and Managed Computing services handle the configuration and operation of IP networks and the management of customer endpoints such as desktops, routers and servers. The Managed Application and Hosted Business services feature security and access to hosted applications, event monitoring, SLA enforcement and storage.

Most important to service providers is the Tivoli Subscription Manager. Aimed at ISPs, the product lets service providers differentiate themselves through custom services such as personalized home pages and self-provisioned e-mail.

"Others will play in this space, such as Computer Associates and even Bull, but Tivoli has a good head start," Rich said. "Timing is good. Partners are good. I think they've done their homework."