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10/13/2006 -  October 09 - IT Change Happens. Assess its Impact Ahead of Time - The deployment and release of new software is a classic white-knuckles period for any CIO. This is the time when end-users feel the most vulnerable and CIOs are the most susceptible to criticism.

10/13/2006 -  October 02 - Business Excellence through Service Management - Service management is rapidly becoming a central issue for a growing number of businesses all over the world. This new focus stems from the desire to improve brand equity by offering high quality, value-added services that attract and retain customers. But to deliver on this critical objective, virtually all common business functions need to be rallied: cost management, regulatory compliance, security risk reduction, and above all, the meeting of financial performance and market share growth expectations.

10/13/2006 -  September 26 - Provision Software Security Before It's Too Late - On January 25th, 2003, the BBC World Service reported on an attack by a fast-spreading piece of malicious computer code that dramatically slowed Internet traffic and interfered with e-mail delivery. The BBC chronicled the attack as having been started at about 5:30 a.m. GMT by a malicious piece of code just 376 bytes in size. With extraordinary prescience, they compared the attack to the Code-Red virus, which had brought Internet traffic to a halt in the summer of 2001. By Sunday, CNN reported that the attack had shut down 13,000 ATM's within the Bank of America network.

10/13/2006 -  September 18 - Why Security Matters For Midsized Business - For some time, Linux® has been a hot server technology for midsized businesses. Now there are over 6,000 ISV applications available on Linux to entice IT demand even further. In Linux, many IT decision makers see the solid reliability of UNIX® enhanced with greater flexibility in the choice of hardware for lower total cost of ownership. On the other hand, others see an ease-of use that rivals Microsoft® Windows with the solid reliability and security of UNIX. What is common to those looking to Linux from either a UNIX or Windows perspective is security.

10/13/2006 -  September 12 - Rethinking Tape and Backup for On Demand Business - Dealing with issues from shrinking product life cycles to expanding global markets has led businesses to pursue real-time sense-and-respond operational strategies. At the same time, growing regulatory pressures are putting significant restrictions on the access, handling, and retention of data. For IT, those issues are fostering a growing dependence on database-resident transactional data, which leaves production systems susceptible to performance degradation as the volume of data expands.

10/13/2006 -  September 05 - Netcool Service Management helps build hot brands. - We are rapidly approaching the 25th anniversary of the breakup of AT&T. At the time, this grand legal experiment appeared to be the biggest parting of the waves since Moses. Naturally, such disruption engendered significant opposition from many quarters, including Defense Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, who argued that the military needed a single, integrated communications network, and Nobel laureate and Big Bang luminary Arno A. Penzias, who adamantly believed that the innovative Bell Labs would flounder.

10/13/2006 -  August 30 - Rx for Healthcare IT - When Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast last year, it not only ravaged the landscape of the Gulf region, it also devastated countless paper-based medical records and exposed the extraordinary gulf between the state of IT for medical research and the state of IT for healthcare delivery.

10/13/2006 -  August 22 - Automating Data Access Security - Controlling access to data is a critical element to any security policy. While the challenge is universal, there's a very wide range of security access needs for individual sites. At the extreme end of security consciousness, one site is using a 3,000-line security policy just to define the rules securing three servers.

10/13/2006 -  August 15 - Provisioning Just-in-Time Not Just-in-Case - For IT to function successfully in an On Demand business environment, it must master change as a normal event. The old line that change is constant has finally given way to the realization that change is changing—it's accelerating. In the face of that accelerating change, IT is frequently called upon to repurpose existing infrastructure, such as reprovisioning an older database server as a Web server, as well as to roll out new equipment, especially in the form of new laptop or desktop PCs. Typically, these are highly labor-intensive tasks that could be made significantly more cost-effective and less prone to error through automation, with a solution such as IBM® Tivoli® Provisioning Manager. What's more, Tivoli Provisioning Manager integrates with Tivoli Change and Configuration Management Database (CCMDB) in a sophisticated ITSM framework.

10/13/2006 -  August 08 - Building Manageability into Applications - Today's software applications can be tricky to deploy, diagnose, and troubleshoot – challenges which only become exponentially more complex in a multi-tier service-oriented architecture (SOA). As a result, CIOs, who are constantly under pressure to cut IT overhead, are making built-in manageability and instrumentation to ease the load on their operations staff a non-negotiable requirement for applications.

10/13/2006 -  August 01 - OPAL: The Fast Track to Fast Value in Operations Management - IT Service Management (ITSM) is all about delivering IT as a service by managing IT as a set of discrete consistent processes which can be automated. That notion alone will be enough to generate a steady stream of theoretical papers coming from the Harvard, Sloan, Stanford, and Wharton business schools. For the real world of IT, however, what's needed is an actionable infrastructure plan that is built on real products. What's more, those real products need to work with and encompass the existing real products from multiple vendors already in use. All of the rigorous consistency and repeatability of ITSM is of little value if, at the end of the process, it does not deliver greater choice and flexibility in terms of adding new hardware, applications, and middleware.

10/13/2006 -  July 25 - The Express Path to Secure Identity Data - Across all industries and all sizes of business, IT is challenged with security issues never dreamed of in the halcyon days of planning for Y2K. Then, the major issue for IT was single sign-on for internal users. As new operating systems were introduced and mission-critical applications proliferated, each having their own user directory, end users rapidly became frustrated trying to weave their way through a maze of usernames and passwords. Large IT shops found themselves trying to manage with an infrastructure of up to 100 different fragmented user data repositories.

10/13/2006 -  July 18 - Tivoli's Antidataloss File Protection - Surveys of backup practices at mid-sized businesses by Imation show a remarkable absence of concern for performance or time constraints; but administrators have considerable concern for backup procedures. That concern is centered on complexity and proper implementation. To solve that problem IBM developed Tivoli Continuous Data Protection (CDP) for Files, which is specifically targeted at end-user computers such as laptops and workstations.

10/13/2006 -  July 11 - Change and Configuration Management Database - Talk to a CEO or CFO about business applications and they'll tell you that they want the ability to quickly sense and respond to business-environment changes no matter from where in the value chain those changes are coming. For an application to meet those needs, it must be easy to integrate with existing business functions and rapidly deployed. For a CIO to deliver that kind of application, it takes an IT environment built around a service-oriented architecture (SOA), in which services are composed of elemental business functions with well-defined, standards-based interfaces.

10/13/2006 -  July 04 - IT Fault Line: Where SOA Meets ITSM - Early this year, the Forrester research report, North America's 2006 Enterprise IT Spending Outlook, cited 77% of firms as having rated the improvement of IT efficiency as their most important operational priority in 2006. Making matters worse, the Forrester report came on the heels of findings by Gartner Research in "U.S. IT Spending and Staffing Survey, 2005" that pegged 75% of IT budgets as going to maintain the status quo. Dig a little deeper and you'll find that nearly 25% of the money allocated to maintenance goes into software support. If you dare to add in help desk costs, that number starts closing in on 40%. Is it any wonder that IT is often thought of as an impediment, rather than as an enabler to business efficiency and growth?

10/13/2006 -  June 27 - IBM Tivoli leads in IT Operations Management - A recent market share report confirms that IBM has maintained the top position in IT Operations Management for the 5th consecutive year. To get a perspective on the current ITOM market and how it is evolving toward IT Service Management (ITSM), we talked to Michael McCarthy, Director of Strategy, IBM Tivoli Software.

10/13/2006 -  June 20 - Tivoli Express Puts Smaller Businesses on IT Fast Track - Starting in the mid 1980s, small to mid-size businesses have been going through an IT evolution that has taken them from being PC-centric in their technology, to being Internet-centric, and now to embarking on becoming network-centric with distributed systems and early pilot grid projects. IT at these sites is faced with a unique set of challenges and the IBM Tivoli® Express Portfolio™ of IT management software addresses those challenges in the following areas:

10/13/2006 -  June 13 - The IBM IT Service Management Roadshow - For CIOs, today's foremost issue is how to demonstrate that IT is functioning as effectively as the other lines of business within their company. These hard-pressed CIOs, however, have little time for theory and an immediate need for an actionable plan to begin implementing IT Service Management (ITSM). To meet that need, the IBM IT Service Management Roadshow will be laying out a roadmap to a practical ITSM transition in over 50 cities worldwide between May and September 20th. At each event, IT practitioners are led through four critical business scenarios and learn to: