IBM Tivoli Now Available on Amazon EC2
Adoption of the AWS Cloud by mainstream ISVs is underway as you read this. There are numerous posts about IBM's work to bring their product line into the AWS environment, and today's is no exception. IBM Tivoli monitoring is now available …
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a loop opened in February 2009, when IBM announced plans to tap Amazon Web Services, and continues a pattern that began with Microsoft's Windows Server arriving as EC2 machine images in October 2008. What makes this step different is what is being ported: not an operating system but enterprise management software, the layer IT departments use to watch over their own data centers.
The irony is pointed given that Amazon positioned SimpleDB against IBM and Oracle back in December 2007. Two years later the incumbent whose databases Amazon was attacking is putting its own monitoring stack onto Amazon's infrastructure — evidence, as the AWS blog frames it, that mainstream ISV adoption of the cloud is no longer hypothetical.
First-order effects
- Enterprises running workloads on EC2 gain a supported path to monitor those instances with IBM Tivoli tooling they already know, removing a practical objection to putting production systems on AWS.
- AWS gets its strongest enterprise-credibility signal yet: a vendor of IBM's stature treating EC2 as a legitimate deployment target rather than a competitor to be fenced off.
Second-order effects
- Rival enterprise-software incumbents like Oracle and Microsoft now face pressure to offer their own management stacks on EC2 or risk ceding the monitoring seat at cloud deployments to IBM by default.
- For IBM, each product line moved into AWS converts a license-and-hardware-attached revenue model toward usage-based consumption — a pricing shift its sales organization has to absorb.
Third-order effects
- If mainstream ISVs keep porting their portfolios to rented infrastructure, the enterprise software industry drifts toward distribution through a small number of cloud platforms, with platform owners gaining leverage over which vendors' tools sit closest to the workload.
- The boundary between 'cloud provider as threat' and 'cloud provider as channel' — drawn sharply when SimpleDB launched against the database incumbents — dissolves into coopetition, with former adversaries selling through each other's infrastructure.
The trend: Enterprise software vendors are shifting from resisting public-cloud platforms to distributing their products through them, turning AWS from an adversary into a channel.