Systems/Enterprise:

IBM MAXIMIZES AUTONOMIC CAPABILITIES OF BUSINESS TRANSACTIONS

IBM introduced new Tivoli software designed to help give customers a more complete map of Web-based transactions while identifying transaction failures and inefficiencies. These capabilities represent a major advancement in the development of "self-healing" autonomic computing systems.

IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance 5.3 allows organizations to view key business transactions as they flow through an IT environment, dynamically discover what systems the key business transactions use, and obtain detailed response times for each step. This helps to capture critical transaction information and analyze performance bottlenecks across the entire system.

"As the complexity of a distributed environment increases, the importance of the transactional view becomes much more critical," said Bob Madey, vice president of strategy and business development for IBM Tivoli Software. "To align IT with strategic business objectives, an organization must have the ability to align itself with the end-user experience and with the business processes that support that experience."

In addition to launching the new IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance product, IBM also announced it has completed work with Siebel Systems to integrate this new solution with Siebel 7.7. IBM and Siebel worked together to design and develop Siebel's Application Response Measurement instrumentation, which helps give customers the ability to more effectively isolate IT performance issues, which in turn can help lower cost of ownership, and allow for better manageability and reduced downtime of their application environment.

"IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance helps customers to more quickly evaluate the performance of individual Siebel transactions, highlighting ones that exceed appropriate thresholds, and identifying and diagnosing lower performing components of the transaction," said Skip Bacon, vice president of technology at Siebel Systems. "This enables Siebel customers to monitor and diagnose performance issues and ensure higher levels of end user productivity and satisfaction."

While other competing products monitor individual infrastructure elements and alert IT to any and every break or failure, this solution learns what normal response times are for each step of a transaction and gives administrators predictive and adaptive information, only alerting them to deviations from the norms.

A critical goal of this product has been to continually expand the topology view so one can obtain a complete view of transaction flows. In IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance 5.3, the topology has been expanded to view Web services, Web servers, IBM CICS, IBM IMS, IBM DB2, Siebel 7.7 and SAP back-end services as well as network delays between ARM-instrumented nodes. The new software also allows one to group individual transactions into a set of higher-level policy groups, improving usability in large environments where hundreds of transactions may be defined.

When organizations integrate these solutions they enable their systems to heal themselves, which in turn helps:

Reduce the cost of problem determination.
Minimize downtime.
Optimize performance.
Ultimately deliver high levels of satisfaction among end users and customers.

Self-healing is an autonomic capability that demonstrates how one can use IBM solutions as part of an effort to become an On Demand Business.