Comments on the future of TEC

With the Micromuse acquisition, there was a great deal of curiosity about this year's Tivoli Technical User's group conference in Chicago. Does TEC 3.9 face the same future as ITM 5.1?

In my humble opinion the short answer is yes, but not for a while. IBM representatives maintain that no customer will be left behind, and that the moving to the new products will be as simple as an upgrade. Within a few years the TEC product line will converge with Micromuse line. The correlation engine and interface (to include even more TEPS integration) will be from Micomuse, while the distributed correlation capability provided by the SCE and its successor ACT will be preserved, although transformed a bit to work with the new converged correlation environment. The fist steps in the convergence will take the form of connectors that allow the Micromuse line and TEC to share events. Some of this exists now, and some will have to be developed. The IBM presenters repeatedly said that they understand the investment that their customers have made in Prolog based rules and will provide some form of a migration plan.


Attendees of the last few conferences may remember lots of presentations about Common Base Event (CBE), Common Event Infrastructure (CEI), and the adoption of this technology as the OASIS standard Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM). IBM representatives said that WSDM is and will remain a part of the Websphere Process Server (WPS) and there will be support for getting WSDM events into the correlation environment.