IBM services bring On Demand closer

IBM unveiled three new service offerings last week, each designed to help corporate users better automate and manage datacenters.

According to a company spokesperson, the Infrastructure Management Assessment Service evaluates not just individual components, but the architecture they are attached to as well; the Tivoli Intelligent Orchestrator is a service that detects where resources are needed and then helps deploy them accordingly; and the Web Server Orchestration is an automation solution.

Among IBM’s first moves to drag its 15-month-old On Demand vision into the real world, the Management Assessment Service is also a first step toward realizing IBM’s latest initiative to partner with users on more levels. Late last month, IBM Chairman Sam Palmisano detailed the strategy to help bolster users’ marketing and procurement capabilities, rather than remaining merely a provider of hardware and software products.

Aimed primarily at customers with their own IT personnel and equipment, the service focuses on Big Blue’s UMI (Universal Management Infrastructure). The IBM Global Services e-Technology Center created the UMI, an IT-oriented framework that enables IBM to help corporate users create a more flexible, on-demand business.

“This will go a long way for those users who want help in managing their own environment based around UMI,” said Dev Mukherjee, vice president of marketing and strategy for e-Business On Demand at IBM’s Global Services unit.

Analysts see the new service and other forthcoming services as fundamentally important, if not well timed, to the success of both IBM initiatives.

“Putting this now right on the plate for users … sanctions the IBM initiatives. It makes it tangible, and it now empowers [IBM’s Global] services to actually go out and execute,” said John Dunkle, president of Workgroup Strategic Services.

Dunkle and others believe IBM’s biggest challenge will be the internal coordination of the many product and services groups needed to execute and deliver a multifaceted on-demand solution.

“IBM understands they have reached a certain market penetration now where a lot of their technology base is a commodity, and that they need these kinds of services to be distinct. But they need to pull together a lot of these services and products that previously were independent work efforts,” Dunkle said.

One example of how the new service helps users be more responsive to quickly changing business needs is its “sense-and-response” server and storage provisioning capabilities. This allows users to quickly increase or decrease computing capacity in real time as situations dictate.

“A fact of life is users have all these islands of infrastructure. With this service we can go in and look at their current infrastructure, do an assessment, and offer them guidance where they can be more efficient within that infrastructure. It will not be rip-and-replace strategy but building upon what users already have,” Mukherjee explained.

The Tivoli Orchestrator, which IBM acquired when it purchased Think Dynamics, will move pieces of the server and software environment around as usage increases and decreases. When it decreases you can drop components back into a free pool where the system can reallocate them from, say, the Web site to the development environment, Mukherjee said.

The Web Server Orchestration service is a blade server-based Web and application server automation solution, a company spokesperson said.