New Tivoli Decision Support Discovery Guides Accelerate IT Knowledge Management for Customers

Business Wire, May 19, 1999

NASHVILLE, Tenn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 19, 1999--

Empowers Informed IT Decision Making, Provides Insight

for IT Innovation Through Predictive Analysis and Reporting

(Planet Tivoli) - Tivoli Systems Inc. today announced the availability of new Tivoli Decision Support Discovery Guides as part of Tivoli's innovative Customer Service Assurance(tm) initiative that will allow customers to transform raw data into competitive business information. An essential component of Tivoli's IT Knowledge Management(tm) capabilities, the Discovery Guides provide customers with pre-determined "best practice" knowledge to analyze IT data. By combining IT data, best practices knowledge and OLAP-based multi-dimensional analysis, IT executives are better able to manage and optimize policies, budgets and resources in support of fundamental business objectives and goals. The four new Discovery Guides focus on the ERP/e-business area, covering management for SAP R/3, Peoplesoft, Tuxedo and Lotus Domino, bringing the total number available for use with Tivoli Decision Support to 19 (see below for a complete list).

Tivoli Decision Support Discovery Guides help IT organizations plan for future capacity and ensure IT Service Level Management(tm) agreements defined by Tivoli Service Desk are met. In addition, the Discovery Guides enable IT organizations to group systems by business purpose, set meaningful thresholds, quickly spot performance trends and anomalies, and correlate system performance information with network loads.

"My primary objective is to turn the vast array of management and infrastructure data that we have into meaningful information to support IT business decisions," said Arun Kant, vice president of Information Systems, Corporate Technology Services, ESM Design & Development, The Prudential Insurance Company of America. "Through Tivoli's new Decision Support Discovery Guides we can leverage the combined IT Knowledge Management experience of other similar organizations and adopt their proven best practices to achieve much faster and more accurate results.

"As companies look to technology to give them an edge over their competitors, they need to look at the big picture and understand how the IT organization is performing in relationship to key business goals," said Mike Turner, vice president, Enterprise Business Solutions for Tivoli Systems. "Tivoli's new Decision Support Discovery Guides allow customers to analyze trends in their critical business systems that they can then use to leapfrog the competition. By making IT more effective at meeting the needs of business users, our new Tivoli Decision Support solutions are vital components in providing Customer Service Assurance."

Taking advantage of Tivoli's One Touch Management(tm) technology and a unique forecasting methodology from IBM Research to collect information, the Tivoli Decision Support Discovery Guides are also able to predict when system upgrades or load redistribution needs to occur. Customers can then best optimize scheduled down time and avoid emergencies that happen when capacity is exceeded.

New Tivoli Decision Support Discovery Guides Align IT with Business Goals

The new Tivoli Decision Support Discovery Guides integrate data from a variety of sources, including application transactions, server and network performance, event information, and inventory and asset information to provide a consolidated, enterprise-wide knowledge-base. With Tivoli Decision Support solutions, customers can identify and analyze trends that would be difficult to identify when data is studied in isolation. Leveraging today's rapidly emerging On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) technology, Tivoli Decision Support Discovery Guides allow customers to exploit the vast amount of IT data and information to help meet business goals. Information can also be scheduled for automatic publishing to the Web to update customers and suppliers.

The Discovery Guides help customers identify issues impacting application performance, and determine optimum resource usage and load balancing, in order to meet service level agreements. For example, Tivoli Decision Support for Domino Management can automatically identify the busiest Web and mail servers, total mail routed, failed replications, database sizings and mail queue length, in addition to conditions such as memory and disk utilization. This information can then be used by the IT organization to improve e-mail performance, deliver against service level agreements, and plan for capacity increases through deployment of new e-mail and web servers.

Pricing and Availability

Tivoli Decision Support Discovery Guides are currently available for the following topics: Year 2000 Readiness, Software Deployment Analysis, Event Management, Information Management, Network Event Analysis, Network Element Performance, Network Segment Performance, Call Center Management, Knowledge Assessment, Relationship Management, Service Level Management, Telephony Asset Management and Change Management. Discovery Guides for SAP R/3, Peoplesoft, Tuxedo, Lotus Domino and Server Performance Prediction will be available within 90 days. Pricing is US $10,000 per Discovery Guide. For additional information on Tivoli Decision Support and Tivoli Decision Support Discovery Guides, call 1-800-2Tivoli (1-800-284-8654) or visit the Tivoli Web site at www.tivoli.com.