IBM Enlists Business Partners To Help Automate IT Environments

13 Companies Join IBM Initiative to Create Workflows Utilizing IT Best Practices

HostReview.com
Tuesday, May 18, 2004; 12:00 AM

ORLANDO, GIGA WORLD, May 18, 2004— IBM today announced more than a dozen new Business Partners that have signed up to participate in its Orchestration and Provisioning Automation Library (OPAL) initiative to help companies increase the efficiency of their IT environments through on demand automation.

The work being done by IBM and its Business Partners through OPAL will allow IT organizations to utilize automation technology to eliminate redundant tasks so they can streamline every-day activities and refocus resources on more strategic initiatives that map directly to business goals.

The goal of OPAL is to foster an ecosystem for Business Partners to share IT best practices for storage, network infrastructure, server platforms, applications and middleware. OPAL also provides a source of new revenue opportunities for Business Partners, providing them with the tools and resources they need to help their customers automate many time consuming IT processes.

Since its inception in March, 22 companies have agreed to join the OPAL initiative, including the following ISVs, SIs and resellers announced today: Alterpoint, Aurema, Deloitte, Elyzium, E.Piphany, Evident, Inkra Networks, Intelliden, Nortel Networks, Peregrine, SAP, Temenos and Voyence.

OPAL addresses two of the most common IT pains - over dependence on manual processes and low utilization of resources - by taking advantage of best practices for automating changes to an IT environment. This can be accomplished with a workflow - a logical sequence of steps to install, configure and deploy a given response to changing business conditions that is reusable and has automated sense and respond capabilities. Using workflows, a company could update its IT infrastructure in a matter of hours rather than weeks.

Workflows created through OPAL can be used with IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager, a key component of IBM's automation strategy, to help customers eliminate the risk of human error by automating IT processes using best practices. Once completed, the workflows are added to an online On Demand Automation Catalog that serves as a collaborative network where business partners and customers can share and obtain information on workflows that have been reviewed and validated by IBM.