SMALL and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) around the world are gearing up for globalization, and IBM's Tivoli Systems Inc. recognizes this trend. Tivoli, an IBM company based in Austin, Texas, has launched a system that would help SMBs with up to 1,500 employees manage their IT environment.

IBM Philippines software manager Virgil Pedro stressed that majority of SMBs will not stay SMBs forever. Add to that an increasingly complex IT environment for small- and medium-sized companies.

"In today's e-business environment," said Pedro, "small- and medium-sized businesses demand cost-effective solutions to help them manage their information technology infrastructure."

Roughly 80 percent of businesses in the Philippines are small- to medium-scale.

"Our small- and medium-sized customers have told us that they have a combination of Windows NT, AS/400 and Netware in their IT environments, and are faced with limited resources to manage the growth. All they want is just a simple, cost-effective solution to help them manage their infrastructure," said Pedro.

In addition to its existing support of Microsoft Windows NT, Tivoli IT Director 2.1 has been developed to run on AS/400 servers. This would give companies the option to use whatever management server platform they choose_NT or AS/400.

"A typical IT director customer has hundreds of LANs or WANs (wide area networks) connected. We're not talking about thousands but IT Director 2.1 can manage up to 1,500 LANs and WANs," said Ian Donovan, Tivoli's IT Director product manager for the Asia Pacific.

He recalled that in the previous version_IT Director 1.2_only a maximum of a thousand nodes could be managed.

Donovan stressed that in an Asia Pacific situation, 1,500 nodes are not for small- and medium-sized businesses, but for large ones. He added that IT Director covers a very large percentage of all businesses in the Asia Pacific.

Today's small- to medium-sized businesses inevitably confront the same challenges that large businesses face.