At its PULSE 2008 conference, IBM today announced new software and services designed to help organizations improve the management and delivery of their business and IT services while reducing costs.

IBM Service Management was developed to help address one of the biggest challenges facing clients today: aligning business and IT processes to support overall business goals while creating a greater view of the assets and applications that support those goals and deploying automation to improve efficiency, security and compliance control. The new offerings to help clients include those covering:

- Service Delivery and Process Automation

- Application and System Management and Monitoring

- Service Management Center for System z

- Service Management Quick Start and Healthcheck

- Tools and Accelerator Services

A recent IBM Global Business Services study of more than 1,100 CEOs showed that organizations are facing faster, broader and more complex change than ever before. The study also indicates that organizations are struggling to manage services in line with these changes. IBM Service Management provides enhanced visibility, control and automation of services so decision makers have the knowledge and capability to deliver services that meet business goals and cost objectives.

"IBM Service Management delivers a unique combination of the software, services and supporting hardware our clients need to improve the management of services across the enterprise," said Al Zollar, General Manager of IBM Tivoli Software. "Just like Henry Ford did with the manufacture of automobiles in the early 19th Century, the goal of IBM Service Management is to industrialize services by streamlining workflows and processes to provide repeatable, scalable and consistent high-quality results."

New Service Delivery and Process Automation Offering

IBM's new Service Delivery and Process Automation solution is built on a set of common capabilities, called the Tivoli Process Automation Platform. It includes new releases of several products that complement IBM Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database, which provides IBM's vast application discovery capabilities. The platform provides clients with an integrated solution that helps improve their ability to deliver quality, efficient IT services with a common way of defining, refining, linking, and automating tasks and processes in the context of a common, federated and reconciled view of their infrastructure and application relationships. It uses a single user interface to help customers move from one process or task to another.

IBM's enterprise asset solutions also are built on the Tivoli Process Automation Platform, enabling both IT and Enterprise Asset Maximo customers to automate and converge enterprise asset processes and IT processes, at will, as enterprise assets increasingly become IP-network-enabled. The new products supporting this platform include:

- IBM Tivoli Service Request Manager - offering advanced and flexible service desk and catalog capabilities that help to improve problem resolution time while automating customer interaction with a built-in service catalog which provides on-line order fulfillment to expedite new service requests. It also provides computer telephony interchange support to automate call management and routing, auditable remote desktop takeover, knowledge management and bulletin boards to assist in self diagnosis and problem resolution, integration with Lotus Sametime, and a Web-based catalog with an integrated shopping cart function.

- IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT - to help manage an IT asset's lifecycle, optimize sourcing and utilization, reduce asset costs and improve service levels.

- IBM Maximo Asset Management - to help improve the performance of assets and work management processes with comprehensive functionality around asset, work, contract, inventory, procurement and service management processes based on industry best practices. It supports asset lifecycle and maintenance management for all asset types from production equipment to linear assets, and now has new benefits around work management, job plans and reporting.

- IBM Tivoli Business Continuity Process Manager - to automate disaster recovery and improve speed and reliability of recovery tasks. It leverages data provided by automated discovery of IT infrastructure such as z/OS sysplexes, LPARs, z/OS subsystems, and GDPS K-systems, to enable rapid, out- of-the-box implementation of service continuity processes.