TBSM v6.1 – NOT Just Another Upgrade or Migration!

Over the years, I’ve tried to use my blog as a platform to ‘preach’ the need for approaching Business Service Management (BSM) with considerable thought, research, discussion, transformation/change and ultimately design and architecture to be successful. These tenets become especially true when using the IBM Tivoli BSM portfolio and the Tivoli Business Service Manager (TBSM) product.

I believe that every major product release milestone offers opportunities to step back and reevaluate the current state of your deployment. I’m not a fan of upgrading or migrating without significant and thorough review of what has been successful, not successful, where you’ve had administrative challenges, product availability and performance challenges or where things can just be improved upon by just starting over, taking a different approach, leveraging a new feature or capability, etc.

If you always do what you’ve always done, you should expect the same results that you’ve always got! If you’re really sure that you’re delivering a quality solution that provides consistent and measurable value, that’s great! You should strive to continue to do that. However, do you really want to just push the “upgrade” button? If your end users think what you deliver is “crap”, do you really want to upgrade and get “higher performing crap”? 🙂

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll try to highlight some of the key areas I think you should consider when thinking about your plans for a TBSM v6.1 deployment, upgrade or migration as well as key differences and improvements over previous versions of TBSM.

For starters, here are some things to bring you up to speed on the new TBSM v6.1 release which is officially GA today via your normal channels.

Release Announcement

Documentation Central (should have 6.1 docs this week)

Important new key features for V6.1:

Enhanced user interface (UI) with self-service dashboard capabilities
Drag-and-drop dashboard creation with free form page layout
Portlet palette and catalogue support for simplified content selection
Widget builder support including hover preview and save to palette
Customization of look and feel – logos, titles, colors
Ability to remove portlet padding and title bars to maximize screen real estate
Improved export and import capability for UI customization
Simplified security administration with ability to manage by roles

Impact integration
Enhanced data access and automation with integrated Tivoli Netcool/Impact
Common UI in IBM Tivoli Integrated Portal (TIP)
Common Administration of policies, data sources, services

Service model creation
Automated rule-based service model composition
Resource enrichment capability with impact policies

Enhanced reporting
IBM Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) V2.1 including Cognos® metadata model
Data abstraction and modeling simplifies report creation and customization
Simplified report editing and ad-hoc reporting

Infrastructure updates
Update UI built on TIP V2.2
Export and import of configuration data from development to production systems
64-bit platform support
DB2® replacement of the PostgreSQL back end database

Integration
Tivoli Application Dependency Discovery Manager integration enhancements for performance, data integrity, and customization
Virtualization, green energy, and IBM Director solutions
Continued cadence with Tivoli Event Pump for z/OS