Tivoli Netcool offers end-to-end service mgmt

ORLANDO, FLORIDA: Service providers rely on IBM Tivoli Netcool software to ensure their most critical services are performing to the highest standards.

Tivoli Netcool software for service providers offers the leading Service Management software for monitoring and management of critical services, application and network-based systems.

The software, which is highly scalable and rapidly deployable, delivers end-to-end service management, problem isolation, and automation to help service providers operate more effectively.

Elaborating more on Tivoli Netcool, Pierre Coyne, IBM Tivoli Manager, Marketing Enterprise and BSM Solutions, Netcool Software says: “When we speak of Netcool software, we focus on the key capabilities and its ability to integrate a variety of different tools that people have for monitoring.”

“IBM offers all sorts of monitoring tools that one requires but in some cases the reality is that customers are using different products. So, we integrate these tools very well. We are able to go from small size environments and integrate them with few products and direct them to scale to large environments. Many leading service providers and enterprise customers are happy using Netcool software,” he says.

Coyne adds: “Another thing that we do is correlating and understanding the different infrastructure problems that occurs and how it is affecting your businesses and services. So, ‘correlation requires analysis’ is the key piece here and here we can determine specifically what the cause is and help in getting rid of them in a lot of new ways in IT operations and in service provider organizations who have their safe drill to identify the cause for concern.”  

Is the product vertical specific? The software is designed in such a way that it can manage most of the silos within IT operations, similar to the ones we are doing in service provider organizations, government and the military. It is very flexible and can be monitored across different organizations and is built on a single platform, he explains.

“We have also done a lot of work with the IBM Network Manager, which is designed specifically for small and medium business space. It has monitoring capabilities, root cause analysis, and has quick and easy installation. If large enterprises need to use the product, they need to customize and tailor it in different places. And when it comes to entry-level installation we have designed it in such a way to make it easy and address most of the common scenarios that they would need to address for the smaller environment,” he said.

“Depending on the size of the organization, you can use some of the existing monitoring products you have. But the Tivoli Network Manager will monitor the network and Tivoli monitoring product will monitor the systems and applications. These products integrate well together as they have common initialization. So, for small environments you can implement the small monitoring pieces and lot of the correlation comes along with that, right out of the box, Coyne adds.

Explaining further, Pierre Coyne, IBM Tivoli Manager, Marketing Enterprise and BSM Solutions, Netcool Software, says: “As the company grows and environment grows, the platform itself supports the growth. And you can also take that to one level above that and start looking at it holistically in the services. It is a very modular design that helps customers address specific problems and then add all the stuff and integrate all of these from a visualization standpoint and administration standpoint.

On the Indian market, he comments: "We have seen good growth in the Indian market, both in the SMB as well as the large enterprises segments. Traditionally, IBM helps large companies. But, we also made significant strides in packaging, delivering and providing the set of capabilities with ease of use and offered breadth of capabilities small and mid-sized enterprises need out of the box now. 

Coyne says: “Because it is a suite of products, we have created common utilization, common data and the model. Our product helps all those enterprises wanting to expand and move upwards. The fact is that you have to integrate all of them and just need to plug in if you have a single silo across all of the components. As your organization grows, it helps you scale and simplifies the whole process. Market realities always challenge IBM irrespective of who it is.”

One of the key reasons why enterprises, service providers and government organizations have gone in for Netcool products is because of its ability to really integrate with anything you already have. “We saw this as a kind of fundamental to what the product is supposed to do. It is supposed to be able to leverage what you already have there and it is not just any other monitoring tool. We make sure that we integrate with everything and make it easy for the customers to use the products and scale it up.”

Adding his views on using the Tivoli Netcool software, Dilshan Perera, principal systems architect, TelstraClear, an IBM customer says: “We initially deployed the software across our known limited footprint, which is our IP network. For the last six years, we have pretty much retained the core, without doing major openings for expansions as such. The solution is very scalable. And, during any new product roll out, we keep in mind how the product has shifted across. Netcool has been a sort of co-architecture for us. Use of Netcool has been fantastic and we have been able to extend and scale it.”