IBM targets online Tivoli service at SMBs

IBM is offering the capabilities of its Tivoli systems management to small and medium businesses in the form of its Tivoli Live Monitoring Service. The online service can monitor and manage between 25 to 500 resources, which can range from the operating systems, applications to hardware. In fact, the service is also capable of monitoring virtual machines under VMware's ESX Server, Microsoft's Hyper-V and Citrix System's XenServer.

There are two versions of the service, a "touchless" one in which no agents are installed on machines, and one in which agents are used to report back on monitored systems. The former cost $44 per month per resource, while the latter is $58 per month; an additional $6,500 setup fee is required for initial configuration.

Unlike similar services by competitors, operating systems such as AIX, HPUX, Windows and Linux are supported. A broad number of applications such as IIS Web server, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase DBMS and SAP can also be monitored, among others, though the list is not exhaustive.

Al Zollar, general manager of IBM Tivoli summed up IBM's move to offer this service, "IBM is delivering our smartest data center software in which businesses may choose and pay for what they need." Of course, IBM is probably hoping that these companies will eventually switch to its Tivoli systems management suite when they grow larger.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at InformationWeek

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