IBM’s Pulse: vital signs for software?

With its Rational User Software Developer Conference just two weeks away, IBM still managed to pump out 5444 words (count ‘em) of news announcements this Tuesday to coincide with its Pulse Service Management event being held in Orlando from 18 to 22 May.

' Image: courtesy of Morguefile.com

Within this smorgasbord of press morsels was news of updates to IBM’s eco-friendly Project Big Green, which was announced in May 2007. The latest improvements ("Software for a Greener World") are directed at server-based technologies and according to IBM are designed to help monitor corporate energy consumption and control carbon emissions by using Tivoli software products in the data centre.

"While most people think of energy conservation from a hardware perspective, increasingly it is actually software that is providing more options to go green across the entire organisation,” said Al Zollar, general manager, Tivoli Software, IBM.

Fanfare please…

When you’re as big as Big Blue, you don’t just “announce”, “launch” and “roll out” news – steady now, IBM has “declared a new era” for IT industrialisation. I’m jealous, can I declare a new era sometime please? Enough silliness – this news is concerned with how, much like the assembly line and automation that transformed the automobile and telecommunications industries over the past century, IT operations are ripe for industrialisation.

In Zollars words: The industrialisation of IT operations includes a process of continuous innovation that uses automation and best practices to link together the phases of designing, delivering and managing IT systems.

Right that’s the starter (sorry, Entrée) and first course out of the way – onto main course.

IBM also used the Pulse Conference to announce new service management offerings (in the form of both new software and new services) designed to help (and this is an IBM favourite) business and IT processes to support overall business goals while creating a greater view of the assets and applications that support those goals.

IBM Tivoli Software’s Zollar was there again saying, "Just like Henry Ford did with the manufacture of automobiles in the early 19th Century, the goal of IBM Service Management is to industrialise services by streamlining workflows and processes to provide repeatable, scalable and consistent high-quality results."

There was also Tivoli process automation platform news, change and configuration management database news, fresh security product announcements, enterprise asset management and service request technologies to talk about – and heck, I didn’t even go to the show. However, I will be at the Rational User Software Developer Conference from 1 to 5 June and I hope my show blog and news reports will make good reading.

So there you have it – well, there you have about 444 words instead of 5444. If you’re keen on finding the other 5000, you know where they are.