IBM health check diagnoses enterprise pain points

ORLANDO, FLORIDA: Jeanine Cotter, vice president, IT Strategy and Architecture Services and Doug Brown, vice president, Tivoli Marketing, talk about IBM’s architecture services, health checks for enterprises with regard to IT infrastructure and about the Tivoli and Maximo software to CIOL at Pulse 2008. Excerpts:

CIOL: What role does IBM’s IT strategy and Architecture Services division play? 

Jeanine Cotter: In the context of IBM’s Pulse 2008 event, what my team built into to leverage to the market are a set of services around the alignment of business and IT and  service management; strategy planning and process design. This was followed by a set of implementations and services and we also had accelerators, who turn on investment tools that help us set faster time to value with the clients working with the Tivoli software. 

We also have a set of managed services. If a client particularly in the medium-sized business space has the infrastructure to run Tivoli on their own with their internal staff along with the required operational capabilities, we can run it for them inside of an IBM data center. In line with this, we have announced health check services for understanding the IT infrastructure of an enterprise. 

Our findings all over the world has been that clients are very interested in understanding where they are on the maturity spectrum of being able to manage an isolated IT silos all the way through to the other end of the spectrum. Here we can help enterprises in continuing with the basic maturity to advanced maturity and then do the design work for the processes and the software implementation.

CIOL: Please elaborate on the health check services?

JC: The health check services allow us to help the client diagnose where their pain points are, what the maturity level is and help them develop a road map. The health check concept is not new. The services were there. The idea of pooling them into a solution and discovering the ability to diagnose and fix the problem is really the new aspect. 

Doug Brown: The health check plays its role when, for example, you have an IT infrastructure today, but are focusing on managing the resources and devices but still want to shift your focus to managing the services, but don’t know how do you approach doing that? The health check helps people who have best practices and knowledge, a shift in thinking and approach.

JC: Once we help our customers with identifying where they want to be on their journey, we can help them with tools to identifying the costs that you have in place today and a calculator for helping to define ROI after the implementation. We also have accelerated services to get those implementations done faster. Using these services, we see up to 30 percent improvement in the time it takes to deploy the Tivoli software and the required process changes.

CIOL: How receptive are Indian enterprises to health check services?

JC: The size of an IT organization certainly makes a difference in terms of how sophisticated you need to be with your services. However, this a basic capability that all IT organizations really need to demonstrate their value to the business and be as efficient and effective as possible to deliver their services. So, we see a growing demand in the Indian domestic market for these services. And it is coming in the form of companies who are doing mergers and acquisitions, who are interested in consolidating and streamlining the organization, companies who realize that they are growing quickly and want to establish control or gain control. We see that it is coming out in different flavors. 

To address the company size, the various entry points that was announced during the Pulse conference, really helps in terms of what your biggest pain points is and whether you are in need of a more sophisticated approach or a basic approach like the automated discovery of the assets you have in your enterprise.

CIOL: Is this demand vertical specific?

JC: We see this entirely from the software point of view. Though we see that the financial services and the telecom sectors are growing tremendously in India, this is something that has definite cross-industry appeal. 

DB: From the worldwide perspective, a lot of demand for the software is coming from the non-traditional industry. For IBM it is definitely from the financial services sector, oil and gas companies, telecommunications and the industrial sector. These companies have lot of equipments, smart devices and remote devices. They collect all the data and put them into the infrastructure. This is what is supporting the demand. Thus we are seeing a kind of difference in the traditional IBM business model.