Friday saw the official launch of the IBM Tivoli Foundations Appliances for Application and Service Management. Having worked with IBM technology since the days of Courier and Sentry, I have seen a number of product launches and initiatives to provide the midmarket with a targeted solution – in truth the fact remains that there is no such thing as a typical customer and the balance between feature rich and ease of deployment is a fine one.

Pirean were fortunate to be a part of Appliance discussions in their early stages, and as a participant of both Beta programmes I have worked closely with the teams and technology. The leveraging of the Lotus Foundations platform was a very important move, and it provides a solid base on which to deliver this ground breaking technology. The simplicity of installation, and the time to value is truly impressive.

From the customer’s perspective, I belive that the Tivoli Appliance initiative is significant on two fronts:

First, IBM have managed to take the Enterprise Class feature rich products from the Tivoli Portfolio and deliver user friendly products that essentially walk customers by the hand through the delivery of the services supported by the appliance.

Secondly, unlike other offerings in the market, the technology has not been crippled or ‘dumbed down’ from the enterprise solutions. In truth, the solution’s have actually been enhanced in the areas of automatic discovery and ‘web replay’ training – features I suspect we will see soon in the Enterprise editions. For any customer who wants to extend the scope of the appliance and customise it to their environment there is no restriction - other than a limit on the physical systems being managed in the case of the Application Manager, or the number of Users in the case of Service Manager – and even these numbers have been increased on previous midmarket offerings to ensure the scope to address most midmarket organisations.

From personal experience, with Tivoli Foundation Service Manger I had a fully functional service desk up and running in under 20 minutes. My experience with Application Manager demonstrated a high performance, low maintenance Business Service Monitoring solution.

This is true enterprise class software, packaged for the mid-market.