Maxtec Limited has been appointed as a Tivoli Storage Management Value Added Distributor (VAD) by Tivoli Systems Inc. This business relationship positions Maxtec as the sole value-add distributor of their advanced storage systems in South Africa.
Tivoli Systems Inc., part of the IBM stable, provides open, scalable and cross platform IT management solutions that span networks, applications and business-to-business commerce; helping companies around the world reduce the cost of managing complex networks, systems, databases and applications.
Within IBM`s $13 billion software business, Tivoli`s stellar growth has certainly been noted. Since Big Blue acquired Tivoli in 1996, they have grown their revenue base from $50 million to $2 billion. This growth stems, according to Nick Drabble, director of storage management at Tivoli Systems (UK) Ltd., from a shift in storage requirement thinking, which is fast becoming an integral part of the network, and less of a peripheral. Nowadays, in excess of 50% of the corporate IT spend is directed towards storage.
Headquartered in Texas, Tivoli distributes its products through a network of global value-add distributors, resellers, systems integrators and IBM sales channels. Their client base diversifies across several sectors, including finance and securities, computer services, entertainment, telecommunications, transportation, and utilities & energy services; servicing some of the world`s leading companies such as Deutsche Bank, Panasonic and Daimler-Benz.
"Companies require information to be both detailed and current, and constantly updated. Pervasive computing is amplifying the need for information to be protected and stored for comprehensive back-up: a process demanding fast, sophisticated storage systems, able to tirelessly service network demand."
Three key realities challenging the way in which we do business, are holding high value opportunities for the storage market: Firstly, the value of information is rising. Information availability is paramount in the retention of customers. In an electronic trading environment, the competition is just a mouse click away. Secondly, only 44% of all outages are caused by hardware failures. The remainder rest in human error, software failures such as viruses and natural disasters. Since a mirrored data centre cannot compensate for these interferences, companies need storage solutions. The emergence of Enterprise Wide Solutions that can interface across the UNIX, NT, AS 400 and mainframe spectrum.
Tivoli offers a solution across 39 different platforms, with a single web-enabled interface, which can be remotely controlled.
Tivoli`s core product, Adstar Distributed Storage Management (ADSM) is a unique storage management software solution able to manage information across multiple heterogeneous platforms, in addition to allowing companies to manage their networked PC`s and distributed systems from a single location.
For Maxtec, this partnership offers multi-level growth opportunity. "The global village is placing unique demands on business.
Tivoli makes IT management more efficient and versatile. And now, as a Tivoli partner with the all leading system and application vendors, Maxtec customers can choose from hundreds of best-of-breed solutions to leverage their common management architecture. The Tivoli Ready programme - a device level management code - will ensure that the more than 100 million global hardware and software partner products will always integrate into their solutions with plug-and-play ease," explains Graham Hayes, managing director of Maxtec.
Tivoli has become far more selective in their choice of Business Partners, rating their ability to be able to add value and uphold key competencies such as technological support, training, product demonstration, consultation, architecture building, logistics and fulfilment, ordering and marketing. Tivoli has narrowed their EMEA channel from 100 distributors to just 10, and Maxtec is one of them.
"We believe that this is an opportunity for us to stay abreast of the global developments in the IT storage industry with a solution that is vendor independent. Tivoli allows us to lower the IT cost of our clients, whilst ensuring greater productivity across their enterprises, thereby securing a higher return on their IT investment," he concludes.
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