IBM unveils risk management products

IBM announced on Tuesday several new services and technologies designed to help customers address risk management, regulatory compliance and security. The company also introduced two product upgrades to serve those markets.

Big Blue unveiled its new Business of IT Dashboard, a suite of risk management services, as well as its IT Lifecycle Management and Governance Services for Tivoli, which aims to make it easier for companies to generate and monitor compliance reports. IBM also introduced new software, called Tivoli Business Service Manager, to provide real-time feedback on the health and performance of a company's critical business services.

Although these services suites and software products are new, some of their components have been previously offered by IBM or companies it recently acquired. The services and software are currently available, with pricing linked to the range of components customers want to include in their suite.

IBM also unveiled two product upgrades, one of which is slated for release next month and another for later this year.

The IBM Rational Portfolio Manager 7.1, which is scheduled for launch next month, is designed to help companies meet and monitor regulatory compliance, including their compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley. New features include analytical components that enable software-development teams to automate the approval process on projects and generate automatic compliance reports.

IBM Tivoli Security Operations Manager 1.4, which will be released later this year, aims to provide a real-time dashboard to monitor security threats to the network and track administrative tasks. Manager 1.4 also features a simplified, centralized dashboard configuration. Pricing on the IBM Rational Portfolio Manager 7.1 and Tivoli Security Operations Manager 1.4 has not yet been disclosed.

[kamal9999]

This is a hard sell !

From what I read, IBM is trying to make this RPM dot release appear as a process enactment solution for developers while keeping the focus on solving a compliancy need. In my view this is a wrong approach to take and does not make sense at all. In fact this is completely opposite to the second generation process enactment tooling approach Osellus is taking. Why do I say this?

As I have mentioned in my earlier blog posts,http://www.osellus.com/blogs/author/kamal
a command and control approach to software process has proven to be a failure. Our approach is to reduce the overhead associated to process enactment. Process should be instrumented into the developer tools (IDE) delivered in a non-intrusive friction-free manner. Our second generation tooling on process enactment is bringing us closer to the ultimate objective of making process invisible during a project. Instead, from the information I have seen till now, IBM has chosen to take a mature portfolio management tool and as part of a dot release tried to inject process enactment into it. Developers who had no reason to use this tool will now be asked to update it during project enactment. I don?t see this working. In fact just yesterday I was in a meeting with one of the largest banks in Canada where they mentioned that their current investment in a portfolio management tool is underutilized. Project managers and other management folks do not want to go through the hassle of managing yet another tool simply to follow a process and get compliancy reports.

Osellus will continue to work with its partners to ensure that we take the practioners tools (such as IDE) and make them process-aware rather than imposing another tool simply to follow a process and compliancy reporting.