IBM Tivoli Maximo Asset Management Deployment Guide

   I am pleased to announce that F5 Networks and IBM’s deployment guidance for Tivoli Maximo Asset Management is now live on the Resources section of f5.com and that the solution has been officially designated as “Ready for Tivoli.”. This comprehensive guidance covers acceleration, security and availability, showing how to configure LTM, WAM, APM and WOM with Maximo.  Please check out the guidance and send us your feedback.  But how did this come about, what is Maximo, and why am I blogging about it?

IBM

After more than three years working with SAP, VMware, Citrix and a host of other great partners I have moved to a new role working with IBM software solutions.  As a solutions engineer with F5’s Business Development team, I am excited to be looking at a tower of joint solutions between F5 and IBM.  Maximo represents the first of these solutions under my watch.  I am so excited to be working with IBM solutions, for a number of reasons.  First, they are a great partner with unparalleled responsiveness and every group I’ve worked with brings a real spirit of cooperation and “get the job done” attitude.  Second, the technical solutions have few parallels, and I’m working with them all, form Tivoli to Websphere, Rational, Cognos and more. Finally, I’m very impressed by IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative and its ability to deliver, just as we have at F5.  When Warren Buffett gives a thumbs up to a company (in the form of $10 billion dollars), you can’t help but feel you’re on the right track.

Maximo

So, IBM is awesome and F5 and IBM are great partners, but what is Maximo and how is it used?  In short, Maximo is Asset Management Software designed for the most demanding industries in the world.  This enterprise tool is used for many applications including maintenance, scheduling, inventory management, planning and SLAs, and it is a complete end-to-end solution. In my environment I tested a sub-set of Maximo features and found that F5 and Maximo are an ideal match.  In the coming weeks we will publish the Maximo Application Ready Solution guide which will provide even further details about the specifics of a Maximo deployment, but in the meantime, you can get the specifics of how to deploy BIG-IP and Maximo in the deployment guide.

BIG-IP and Maximo

The exciting results for me, in the joint testing of the solutions, was how we were able to bring value to Maximo and BIG-IP customers from so many different perspectives. The chart below summarizes some of these findings:

BIG-IP Module	Maximo Feature	Benefit
BIG-IP LTM	Core functionality	High availability; TCP Optimization; SSL Offload; Compression; Caching and intelligent load distribution
BIG-IP WAM	Asset tracking; image, PDF and file download	Asymmetric acceleration of content using the browser
BIG-IP WOM	Access from remote branches	Symmetric acceleration, deduplication and encryption
BIG-IP APM	Sign-on, authentication, entitlement and remote access	Singe Sign-on; SSL VPN; Endpoint inspection

 

Next Steps

Coming up next for Maximo specifically, we will be publishing our Application Ready Solution guide, so you can read all about the benefits, we will be doing a couple of quick recorded demos so you can see the acceleration first hand, and we’ll be at the IBM Pulse conference in March to talk about it in person.