Systems management vendor Tivoli Systems kicked off its annual conference here this week with the announcement of an upgrade to a key application in its Customer Service Assurance initiative, as well as new guidelines to aid in decision support.
The company yesterday announced Version 6.0 of Tivoli Service Desk, a part of the company's IT Service Level Management program that manages an IT organisation's problems, assets, and change, company officials said. IT Service Level Management, along with IT Process Automation and IT Knowledge Management, make up the Tivoli Enterprise suite. Tivoli Enterprise is the technology behind the company's Customer Service Assurance initiative, designed to align IT use with an organisation's business goals, according to company officials.
Tivoli's Service Desk 6.0 gives users centralised control over IT service levels and has been updated to include the following features, company officials said:
--heightened integration with Tivoli Enterprise, linking back-office operations with IT service-level management; --a service-level agreement module so that IT managers can control every aspect of service delivery; --role-based configuration, so that the interface can be tailored and secured for different types of managers; --a common people model that lets users, contacts, and people be administered through on interface across the Tivoli Enterprise suite; --multicustomer support for problems, assets, changes, and defects; --an open application programming interface that third-party software vendors can write to and integrate their products with; --a common administration utility, and --support for IBM's DB/2 database, in addition to Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft's SQL Server, and Informix.
Tivoli Service Desk 6.0 is slated for availability in the third quarter; pricing information is not yet available.
Also announced yesterday were the Tivoli Decision Support Discovery Guides, knowledge bases of predetermined "best practice" information to help analyse data, company officials said. Part of the Customer Service Assurance initiative, the four new guides concentrate on helping customers manage software such as SAP's and PeopleSoft's enterprise resource planning suites, BEA's Tuxedo middleware, and Lotus' Domino, officials said.
The four new guides, slated for availability within 90 days, are priced at $10,000 each, officials said.