Tying the knot between desktop and enterprise
Tivoli Systems and Intel announce the fruits of a two-year integration effort that tie together Intel's desktop strength with Tivoli's enterprise management capabilities.
At the heart of the agreement is a Management Services Broker (MSB), a management API that the two industry giants plan to release to the public. A draft of the new specification will be available in November.
Essentially, the agreement takes Tivoli from as high as mainframe management down to the desktop and gives Intel's industry leading LANDesk suite a fully integrated enterprise platform presence.
According to Tivoli officials, the new API addresses the lack of communication often prevalent between LAN (local area network) administrators and IT, rampant growth in PC cost of ownership, and the lack of integration between tools.
"I don't think there's any better combination of companies than Tivoli and Intel," boasted Tivoli CEO Frank Moss at the Networld+Interop show in Atlanta.
The MSB consists of management objects and a Request Processor that can interact with an enterprise platform like Tivoli's Management Environment (TME) 10 and communicate with LAN and workgroup-based suites and utilities via the API.
As part of the agreement, Intel will include Common Management Agent software that will let any PC based on Intel hardware be managed out of the box by both Tivoli and the LANDesk suite. The goal, according to Frank Gill, an Intel executive vice president, is to "make all PCs in the enterprise managed PCs."
The two companies also expanded a licensing agreement so that more components of the LANDesk suite will be embedded in TME 10.