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Today’s enterprises are faced with the management of increasingly complex IT environments, an issue that IBM addresses with IBM Service Management solutions from Tivoli®. These industry-leading service management solutions enable customers to better understand their IT environments by discovering business critical application components and their inter-relationships. This capability, together with out-of-box best practice service management processes and tasks, provides customers with a more effective and efficient way to manage their IT environment, while controlling cost and mitigating compliance risk. IBM’s recent acquisition of MRO Software provides us with the opportunity to strengthen our solutions and extend them beyond IT for solving these types of enterprise-wide service management problems.
As more types of corporate assets are touched by technology, companies are also looking for ways to consolidate how they manage these assets—both operational and IT-related. IBM’s acquisition of MRO Software addresses this need by providing customers with a consistent, comprehensive set of asset management solutions. IBM will integrate MRO Software’s product portfolio, which provides clients with a single approach to managing all industrial and IT assets, into the IBM Service Management strategy. As a result, IBM will be the only company to provide such a comprehensive solution to managing this convergence of IT and industrial assets. Since MRO Software’s offerings are built on a modern standards-based architecture, they can be easily integrated into IBM’s service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based capabilities, including business process management and IT service management.
Consider a customer in the package delivery and logistics industry. Their business services include not only IT systems for ordering, managing and tracking, but also other assets such as trucks, planes and conveyor belts for delivering the packages. For this customer, business services are delivered not with IT assets alone, but a combination of IT and industrial assets, brought together in a way that provides critical, timely and competitive business services. Having an integrated set of management tools for handling assets and processes and automating repetitive tasks across the entire enterprise would be a significant step toward realizing true service management.
In addition, they would be well prepared for the convergence of IT and non-IT assets. In order to improve manageability, many non-IT assets have become “IT-enabled assets,” by taking on IT attributes such as network IP addresses. It is becoming more common to see generators, power meters, hospital instruments and other industrial assets networked and managed by systems management software tools.
As part of managing both enterprise-wide IT and non-IT assets, service management applies to many common processes and methods, including human collaboration, work management, chargeback, notification and escalation, process automation and business service management. Therefore, even though there may be multiple classes of assets and other resources being managed, there are clear advantages in providing a consolidated best-in-class platform that can be shared across a set of service management solutions.
MRO Software has nearly 10,000 customers across vertical industries such as utilities, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, healthcare, government and telecom. The organization has long been on the service management path, offering a single platform and incorporating their expertise in Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and IT service management. IBM’s strategy to aggressively expand its presence in the service management marketplace aligns strongly with MRO Software’s rich out-of-box solutions and applications based on its Maximo® platform.
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