| Santix AG is an established systems integrator in Central Europe, delivering IT management and e-business solutions to large national and multinational corporations.[1] The company has teamed with IBM to help its customers integrate business processes and effectively manage their IT infrastructures. As an IBM Business Partner, santix resells the full range of Tivoli infrastructure management solutions and has a long history of success in delivering Tivoli Performance and Availability and Tivoli Configuration and Operations management solutions. Headquartered in Munich, Germany, santix has offices across Germany as well as in Zurich, Switzerland. Challenge—Helping Companies Meet SLA Requirements In recent years, the role of IT organizations has changed dramatically. No longer designated as cost centers, IT organizations have become service centers, providing IT support to business units under an service level agreement (SLA) model. Ultimately, Michael Santifaller, president of santix, predicts that sophisticated service and provisioning models will evolve under which IT must customize its offerings for each line of business, and deliver and document rapid response time.[2] Companies across Central Europe have been turning to santix for robust tools that help them improve the availability and performance of their IT infrastructures and understand the business impact of an IT outage. Now, these companies also want products that provide the comprehensive service reports needed to demonstrate if their IT department is meeting their SLAs. In Europe, as it is everywhere because of budget constraints, IT executives are also demanding solutions that help them to do more without increasing staff resources. This is an area where autonomic computing can help. Products such as Tivoli employ autonomic computing self-managing capabilities that allow hardware and software to dynamically adapt to their environment and automatically configure, heal, optimize, and protect themselves. Solution—Managing IT against SLA Using Tivoli Software To help IT organizations meet SLA requirements and reduce the cost of IT management, santix offers companies an end-to-end service management solution that supports IT administrators across the entire service management life cycle—monitoring, reporting, analyzing, solving, automating, deploying, securing, and controlling. The company provides clients with design, implementation, training, and troubleshooting services to help them leverage industry best practices and realize a rapid return on their investment. At the heart of santix's offering is Tivoli software from IBM. For example, Tivoli Performance and Availability management solutions, such as IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console®, IBM Tivoli NetView, and IBM Tivoli Monitoring, allow companies to monitor their infrastructure at the component, business system and enterprise levels and, in many cases—through self-healing capabilities—cure problems before they occur. IBM Tivoli Service Level Advisor simplifies and automates the management and reporting of SLAs and provides proactive alerts for SLA violations. Tivoli software is the foundation of the santix solution. It offers best-of-breed products to help its customers effectively manage IT against their SLAs and provides an open architecture to easily integrate point solutions for asset management and service desk support. Santix originally became an IBM Business Partner because of IBM's innovative approach to IT management. This innovation relationship has continued and, as proof, highlights the fact that new releases of Tivoli software deliver more out-of-the-box functionality and autonomic capabilities than ever before. For example, the self-optimizing features in the latest version of IBM Tivoli Service Level Advisor include predictive capabilities that can help prevent SLA breaches. IBM Tivoli Service Level Advisor can perform trend analysis based on historical performance data from Tivoli Data Warehouse and can predict when critical thresholds could be exceeded in the future. By sending an event to IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console, self-optimizing actions can be taken to help prevent the problem from reoccurring. The autonomic capabilities, such as the self-optimizing features of IBM Tivoli Service Level Advisor, help IT departments more efficiently manage IT resources while reducing the workload on administrators. Other software, such as the Tivoli Data Warehouse, can be a significant advancement in enterprise systems management that helps administrators identify trends, predict business needs, and support predictive management tasks, all critical in meeting end-user requirements. The Tivoli Data Warehouse is an open repository that acts as a central data store for historical data for management applications—both Tivoli and non-Tivoli applications. Results—Simplified Management, Lower Support Costs With Tivoli software, santix customers are seeing significant improvements in their IT operations. For example, a large European bank looked to santix to help it both monitor its online banking system and measure the solution's performance against SLA metrics. The online banking system is an important revenue source for the bank, enabling customers to manage account activity and purchase products online. If the system isn't available or is too slow, the bank can lose money. In response, santix installed IBM Tivoli Monitoring, IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Databases, IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Messaging and Collaboration, and IBM Tivoli Enterprise Console to help the bank increase the availability of its online banking system along with other critical business applications. IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Transaction Performance measures response time and incorporates self-optimizing capabilities that allow the software to tune the environment to meet predefined service-level objectives. IBM Tivoli Service Level Advisor will also help the bank reduce the cost of SLA management and align IT management closely with business needs. Customers know that SLA management is very complex. IBM Tivoli Service Level Advisor provides a powerful tool that simplifies this task, enables self-optimization of IT infrastructures, and helps to communicate the value of IT to the business. As part of the bank's infrastructure management solution, santix also deployed IBM Tivoli Configuration and Operations management products to help administrators deliver reliable services to end users at a lower cost. For example, IBM Tivoli Configuration Manager reduces the cost of rolling out new software by helping administrators to automate software distribution from a central location. IBM Tivoli Remote Control provides remote support capabilities to reduce the need to dispatch technicians for expensive and time-consuming onsite visits. The bank plans to use the policy-based centralized user administration capabilities of IBM Tivoli Identity Manager, a Tivoli Security management solution, to bring users, systems, and applications online faster and reduce the cost of managing user identities across the enterprise. Future—Refining SLA Support Santix IT administrators will continue to see an increasing emphasis on supporting SLAs against business requirements, and santix plans to leverage the IBM Tivoli Business Impact Management solution to help customers in this area. This solution includes IBM Tivoli Service Level Advisor along with IBM Tivoli Business Systems Manager, which groups and correlates resources into business views, and IBM Tivoli Web Site Analyzer, which helps administrators identify performance trends and user traffic patterns so that they can evaluate the impact of their Web-based programs. Santix can offer companies a clear vision for end-to-end service management and provide clients with products and services necessary to implement this vision. IBM's Tivoli software, with its autonomic capabilities, fits well into this offering, delivering state-of-the-art technology that is unparalleled in the industry. |
