Design thinking updates on Deployment - Network Management for Netcool Operations Insight

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Transforming the deployment experience for our Netcool clients is a major goal of the product management team. Time-to-value isn’t just another clever metric thought up to bamboozle our customers; it is a critical measurement of how quickly our solutions can be performing and providing value for our customers.

The Network Management deployment experience, as with all participating capabilities in Netcool Operations Insight, will be underpinned by IBM Install Manager. There are many aspect that contribute to a successful and rapid deployment of the Netcool solution for IT and network management operations. For example, remote integration with the IBM software library to access purpose built repositories facilitates preparing and retrofitting for the deployment needs of similar clients, which will be especially useful for IBM business partners. Also, the ability to access multiple versions to easily select the appropriate version for a particular deployment removes the manual aspect of such tasks in the past. A recent comment from a business partner, who is also Sponsor User, on this capability:

"It is hard to find which packages we need manually, now it is just presented to you. That's perfect!"

The WebUI has also been of particular interest to sponsor users as an alternate remote install, as it saves having to do remote logins to multiple servers and instead treating the target deployment servers as a single domain.

Response files provide an important feature of IBM Install Manager to facilitate silent installs of a sequence of pre-determined tasks. These XML files contain the necessary data to complete installation operations silently and can easily be generated from a laptop, or from an existing installation.

"It normally takes a lot of time to create response files, so this is easier and faster - you are getting us excited!"

Other important aspects that contribute to a greatly improved time-to-value deployment are:

• The ability to install FPs at the same time as the main product install.
• Improved error checking and highlighting as part of the deployment process

Beta program

Network Management development will conduct a “Netcool Operations Insight – Network Management” beta program commencing in September, 2015. Expressions of interest for this beta should be sent to randles@ie.ibm.com

Beta focus will be on IBM Tivoli Network Manager 4.2 and IBM Tivoli Netcool Configuration Manager 6.4.2 in the context of Netcool Operations Insight integration.

Tom Randles
Product Manager
IT Service Management - Netcool Network Management
http://www.twitter.com/RandlesTom