1) Make WEBTOP and ISM Web 2.0 >> “WebIsm” WebISM for BlackBerry, WebISMfor iPhone, AJAX enabled WebISM, Dynamic Maps, Name-Face associations etc.. .  No more JSP pages, Groovy based rich clients with more flexible, intuitive and highly accessible web clients. TRADITIONAL CENTRALIZED EVENT MANAGEMENT WITH PEOPLE SITTING IN THE NOC IS GROWING OLD. NOW THE TECHNICIANS WANT TO ACKNOWLEDGE ALARMS WHILE DRIVING THE CAR WITH ONE HAND AND A LATTE IN THE OTHER – AGILE INCIDENT MANAGEMENT IS THE ONLY WAY FORWARD. PLAIN AND SIMPLE: THERE IS NO OTHER OPTION.

2) Integrate Webtop and ISM :  Think about this — NOT ONE COMPANY THAT DOES FAULT MANAGEMENT DOES NOT NEED AN HTTP/S INTERFACE and INTERNET SERVICE CHECKS [ICMP, NTP, DHCP, SMTP etc]  But yet, if we consider the client that have WEBTOP is much higher than clients that have ISM. This is only because of lack of awareness of features that ISM provides with the DATABRIDGE, SLA profiles, Wizard driven rules etc.

ISM will only reach out to the masses when it is integrated where it fits best in Netcool architecture.

3) May not sound good: Open the source for WebTop and ISM to a registered development community: Let’s except the fact that products like Nagios, CACTI provide Internet service monitoring for no cost with similar reliability.  So opening the source would help achieve the 1st improvement easily in lower cost. If the community works for free, no-one pays Still no-one in the industry can use the product because it needs professional licenses.

Ahead of time – Not really! These are fundamental features of next generation of fault management in my humble opinion. History has proved that architectural improvements recommended by end customers have proven to be most beneficial and succesful for software products. Looking at these improvements from revenue model perspective, the revenues might consolidate but profitability attained by the end solution will be phenomenal, in my opinion.

So shout out to the wonderful Tivoli team @ IBM to consider these suggestions with further ATAM, CBAM and CBE’s.