Talk:Tivoli Software

IBM puff?
Was this article taken from the IBM puff website? I've read the whole thing, and I still don't have the slightest idea what the damn software actually does. Apart from "Managing stuff." What the hell does that mean?

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=================== You raise a very good issue. I worked in the Tivoli Marketing Communications department for a while after several years as a technical writer there. I was one of several people charged with developing and maintaining the messaging. I can tell you with some certainty that most of my marketing colleagues did not know what the software was supposed to do or how it worked. Here's a few more details that I hope will be meaningful to you.

The original idea for the product was conceived by Todd Smith. He was an IBM employee who saw a potential train-wreck on the horizon with all the variations of UNIX, which was quickly eliminating the portability of UNIX, the very purpose of its existence from its inception. IBM, of course, offered AIX, Sun offered SunOS and later Solaris, HP offered HPUX etc. I know that this was a problem because I worked at WalMart for about a year and they were dealing with this exact problem. They were running four different versions of UNIX on their network.

Todd's idea was to develop a framework that would be installed on any UNIX platform. It would then intercept requests from applications that run on UNIX, make them platform agnostic, and deliver them to the appropriate server and marshal the data in a way that was appropriate for the version of UNIX that particular server was running. Then when the server responded it would reverse the data flow and pass it back to the original client.

The idea was to charge very little for the framework, and to create applications that would automate IT processes (as mentioned by the original author of the Tivoli entry). A typical process that we tried to automate early on was software distribution. The idea for this particular application was that the IT administrator would build some kind of service pack to install an application or upgrade an existing application. When the software pack was ready, the administrator would notify all users to log out at the end of the day--but to not shut down their work station, because the application was being installed or upgraded. Overnight, Tivoli Software Distribution would deliver the software pack to every computer and if necessary restart it.

The original idea was to automate all IT processes like the one I gave in the example. The Storage Software that the author mentions was actually a re-branding of something called IBM ADSTAR which enabled IT administrators to manage data storage and do things like back-up and restore. Without a storage management system you have to create scripts that will run every so often that take all your data from one location and copy it to another location. Tivoli Storage manager makes it easier to do that (supposedly).

Tivoli Change and Configuration Management is supposed to make it easier for administrators to configure applications properly. Tivoli NetView is a re-branding of IBM NetView, which displays network topology and represents network nodes as either green (up) or red (down), so that they can narrow the location of problems on the network. Tivoli Enterprise Console (TEC) receives information about the health of a client/server application and display the information on a monitor. So if you're using Outlook, for example, and your client suddenly can't reach the server, TEC administrators would be aware of the problem and in some cases actually pre-empt it. It actually worked and it was a neat little application. Tivoli Monitoring was the engine that fed TEC event information, but could also be used independent of it. The value TEC added to Tivoli Monitoring was an event correlation engine that could understand the relationship of different events to each other.

I have no idea what Workload Scheduler does,as well as the other applications mentioned by the author.

In short, the whole idea was to abstract details and tasks out of any IT process.

If you have other questions about Tivoli, you can contact me at guyoliver2002@yahoo.com.

Guy Oliver


 * - Wow. That was a most excellent answer. Thanks Guy. Hopefully someone can work this info into the wiki page.

Background on Tivoli Systems, Inc missing
I feel that the page is missing some background info. A link for Tivoli Systems, Inc redirects to this page, however it provides no information on the background of the company prior to IBM acquisition. That it is an acquisition is implied only by the links in the See Also section. The List of mergers and acquisitions by IBM has more information on the acquisition than the page itself such as when it was acquired (1996). The talk page classifies this as related to Austin, TX, but I see no mention of the location of the company in the main article. Chaozu42 (talk) 20:59, 8 May 2013 (UTC) I hope I've just provided a little on this Djm-leighpark (talk) 07:48, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

Article title
Someone suggested in private that they wanted to change the article title. However, the current title doesn't seem to cause any problems or is inaccurate, unless one wanted this article to be about "Tivoli Systems, Inc." before "Tivoli Software". If anyone has a better title, please mention it here. Despatche (talk) 08:16, 7 October 2013 (UTC) Beware of incoming linking issues if page name is changed. Djm-leighpark (talk) 07:47, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

Updating page
I plan to make a few edits to this page over a couple of days. A may add a little more and some links regarding: - The Tivoli Brand. - New names for Products such as TSM - Some details of Tivoli (Management) Framework as the article for that page has been deleted. I've started doing a little re-sectioning and refocused a couple of things from IBM to a 'Tivoli' context. I've left the statement on market share it but I've recontexted it from 'currrent' to 2013. Djm-leighpark (talk) 06:35, 18 February 2017 (UTC) I've worked the article a little. I need to beef up the Tivoli (Management) Framework section and generally recheck how its going. Djm-leighpark (talk) 07:45, 19 February 2017 (UTC)

Essentially finished, that isn't to say I wont still come back for some tweaking. Djm-leighpark (talk) 09:35, 20 February 2017 (UTC)

Article Comments
Following my amendments... current Wikipedia article. Having their own heading means they can be linked to by Tivoli Software#Heading Djm-leighpark (talk) 09:35, 20 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Probably doesn't achieve the energy and vision that Tivoli Systems Inc originally had
 * Comment: Bob Fabbio is probably a notable candidate for an article given his success with various start ups.
 * I've limited information of who originated this the Tivoli idea, and references (and earlier talk) seem to conflict, so I may tried to be neutral and factual here.
 * Some of this information had been lost by a speedy delete of the TMF article with a few references on various article going unfulfilled. However that article spoke far more not about TMF that about it and was not in my opinion likely accurate.  And the article rename may have been inbound links were not immediately visible.  I have however lifted a little about netcool as that was missed from Wikipedia.  I've ignoed the bit about netview.
 * The section on 'Service Management Segments' seems to have been taken from https://www-01.ibm.com/software/tivoli the statement 'Manage your business infrastructure in real time with Tivoli, Maximo, Netcool, TRIRIGA and Endpoint Manager' which ranks 'Tivoli' co-equal with the others mentioned. Tivoli services link seems to go to "devops".  I cant begin to unravel the current brand meaning from that.
 * I've added the sections for the products TMF and Netcool due to their arguable disputable notability and lack of a
 * Probably best not to try to merge this article with IBM Cloud and Smarter Infrastructure wikipedia article.
 * Feel free to discuss / improve the article and improve by citations.

No Lead Section Discussion

 * In my previous edits I omitted move a lead section. This was correctly flagged and I've now added a lead section.  (I'm not sure I *like* it but there we have it).
 * It certainly needs to be sympathetic to the fact Tivoli is a brand and that Tivoli Systems Inc. also redirects here.
 * I *could* have promoted the history of the Tivoli Brand to the lead section but that doesn't work for me either.
 * Feel free to discuss/improve it with the objective of removing the 'No Lead Section' banner. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Djm-leighpark (talk • contribs) 03:44, 22 March 2017 (UTC)

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