Unison carries MPE tools into Tivoli’s lineup

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Unison carries MPE tools into Tivoli’s lineup

IBM’s network management provider will continue with HP 3000 point solutions

With shareholder approval of a pending merger in hand, the vice president of marketing for MPE datacenter tools provider Unison Software is promising that the company’s Roadrunner backup software has a secure place in Tivoli System’s plans.

Chuck Stern reported that he expects Roadrunner to thrive after Tivoli’s acquisition of Unison. The deal was announced in September, prompting some immediate speculation on the fate of such a point solution, one that didn’t seem to match any of Tivoli’s existing products.

With the acquisition, Stern is going through his second shift at Unison, having been part of the Tymlabs organization that Unison acquired in a stock sale in 1992. Roadrunner began its life as a Tymlabs product, created from the ground up to replace the BackPack backup solution that Tymlabs had sold successfully through the late ’80s to HP 3000 sites.


	Stern reports Tivoli’s management is “very excited about bridging to the technology on the HP 3000. Tivoli is going to keep the MPE investment going.”

But there was no mention of Roadrunner in Unison’s announcement of the $170 million deal with Tivoli this fall. At the heart of the acquisition was Maestro, the datacenter management suite that Tivoli plans to integrate into its TME network management product. Maestro became a cross-platform product six years ago, while Roadrunner has remained an MPE-only solution.

Unison recently announced that Southwest Airlines made a company-wide commitment to Maestro, including the scheduling for all jobs the Southwest Ticketless System. It’s also about to begin scheduling for the new reservation system that will be launched next month at Southwest. Unison broke the news by noting that NT systems would ultimately have jobs managed by Maestro as well.

Despite all of Unison’s attention on Maestro’s cross-platform capabilities, Stern reports that Tivoli’s management is “very excited about bridging to the technology on the HP 3000. Tivoli is going to keep the MPE investment going.”

While the two companies work out the details of their post-merger structure, Stern stressed that operations and development are proceeding at Unison in the same way they have during 1997. Terry Tipton, Roadrunner’s creator, remains at the head of the development team for the product, Stern reported. Roadrunner’s online backup option with zero downtime was in beta test in late last year, the second such test phase for that new feature of the product.

“Who’s maintaining Roadrunner is a real telling question,” Stern admitted. “The products aren’t much good if they just get passed around.” Stern expected the zero downtime feature to go into general availability this month.

Stern had very little to report on the possible structure of Unison in a post-merger world. “That’s the work for the first quarter of 1998,” he said, adding that the challenge “is to maintain the sharp focus we’ve had.” But he pointed out that Tivoli has taken over products in its system management efforts in the past, and has worked to preserve the resources that feed those products in its lineup.

“They are very concerned about keeping everybody around,” Stern said. “One of the reasons we decided to have serious discussions with Tivoli was what we saw happen to Tivoli Systems after its acquisition by IBM. When that was announced, I figured within six months Tivoli was going to be invisible. That was almost as much on track as my prediction that the Republican Party would never nominate Ronald Reagan for President.”

Tivoli has taken over increased responsibility for IBM’s mainframe scheduling product after its own acquisition, and Stern expects the same thing to happen to Unison’s MPE-centric business in Roadrunner. “We feel like they saw the need for the systems utility technology that Unison had, and we felt very comfortable in dealing with them,” he said. “They’re going to move into the point solutions business” with Roadrunner.