Through various acquisitions in its long history of delivering software products, IBM has developed five major software brand designations. If you're new to IBM brands, this page helps you navigate the brand structure to determine how to find the products you need.
This is a simplified view, but the brands basically cover these five categories of business application:
Information on demand is the ability to deliver the right information to the right people or processes at the right time to take the proper action. It also provides the capability to integrate, analyze, and optimize all information to manage risk and create new business insight.
To support information on demand, the Information Management brand delivers these key capabilities:
The Lotus software brand dynamically connects people with business, extending the value of existing investments and providing a new, flexible way to build applications. These products enable businesses to create adaptive, role-based work environments and deliver the people-focused capabilities of the Software Reference Architecture.
With a single, secure point of access, the Lotus offerings deliver a unified environment for:
Mail, calendar and scheduling, and collaborative applications (Lotus Notes/Domino)
Composite applications, front-end integration and client services (Lotus Expeditor)
The Rational brand is known for its leadership in driving process innovations for software development. This process is now called business-driven development, which recognizes the need to focus development projects on business need rather than IT-centric solutions. Business-driven development enables organizations to govern the business process of software and systems development.
The Rational portfolio provides a large set of role-based tools that help development teams:
Harvest, create, test and assemble service assets
Define requirements, code business processes, and enforce standards
Standardize, automate, and integrate business processes and the underlying infrastructure
Align business models and processes with strategic objectives
The Rational products comprise these product categories:
Tivoli software has long been a leader in providing intelligent infrastructure management solutions to understand and manage the business value of your IT systems. It provides integrated views for managing and optimizing critical IT systems with policy-based resource allocation, security, storage, and systems management solutions.
The Tivoli brand provides these key capabilities:
Automated IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) aligned workflows
Open, standards-based configuration management database (CMDB) and workflow engine
Automated infrastructure-aligned tasks
Self-managing autonomic technology
Best practices and implementation support
IT Service management (ITSM) has three key components:
The IT Service Management Platform that helps you standardize and share information and administer consistent policies
IT Process Management products that integrate and automate processes using the ITSM platform and the IT Operational Management products
IT Operational Management Products (traditional management products) that automate tasks
To learn more about IT service management, visit the Tivoli software page.
WebSphere software provides businesses with an IT infrastructure that enables people, process, and information integration. WebSphere delivers end-to-end business process capabilities throughout the SOA life cycle, including products for modeling, assembling, deploying, and monitoring your business processes, plus tools to simulate and optimize business processes. All of these elements are connected through an enterprise service bus (ESB), which provides connectivity infrastructure for integrating applications and services to power an SOA.
The WebSphere portfolio comprises these product families:
Application servers - the foundation of the IBM WebSphere software platform, this family of servers delivers the secure, scalable, resilient application infrastructure you need a for deploying and running applications for SOA.
Business integration - including application integration and business process management with SOA, to integrate data, applications, processes, and people across and beyond the enterprise to leverage existing IT investments.
Commerce - lets you deploy a wide variety of value chain solutions, from an online store to a completely integrated, multitier demand chain, all on a single platform.
Development tools - tools to create, test, and deploy enterprise-scale J2EE and SOA applications.
Portals - a frameworks for for integrating your enterprise on the front-end into a single, customizable interface called a portal.
To learn more about the WebSphere platform, visit the developerWorks New to WebSphere page.
In addition to its rich set of middleware offerings, IBM also provides the following operating systems:
I5 for IBM System i™ integrated business servers (formerly iSeries): For our small to medium business customers, the I5 operating system (I5/OS™) reduces cost and complexity by integrating the components of robust, business-driven computing in a single box. For more information, see the IBM System i page.
AIX® and UNIX™: AIX 5L is an open, standards-based operating system that conforms to The Open Group's Single UNIX Specification Version 3. It provides fully integrated support for 32- and 64-bit applications. AIX 5L provides binary compatible support for the entire IBM UNIX product line including the IBM System p™ and Bladecenter® JS21 servers and IntelliStation® POWER™ workstations. For more information, visit the New to AIX and UNIX page.
Linux®: Linux and IBM have partnered to drive the open standards revolution, moving business beyond the limits of proprietary software and hardware solutions. The entire IBM Systems product line is Linux enabled, making it easy for any size business to take advantage of the power of open standards. And because Linux is an open operating system it benefits from a broad developer base, making it one of the fastest growing operating systems in the world. For more information, visit the New to Linux page.
z/OS® for IBM System z mainframe servers (formerly zSeries®): For our large enterprise customers, z/OS is IBM's flagship mainframe operating system. z/OS helps leverage, extend, and integrate your core business applications, and to manage and integrate your IT operating environment. For more information, visit the IBM System z page.
