By MICHAEL FOREMAN
IBM-owned IT management specialist Tivoli Systems has formed a business unit to address the growing security concerns of firms opening up their systems to e-commerce.
Steve Burke, Australia and New Zealand general manager at Tivoli, said the Security Business Unit had been created in the light of an "explosion
of viral activity and denial of service attacks."
Specialist personnel have been drawn from IBM, Tivoli and Dascom, a security management developer acquired by IBM last September, to create the business unit.
Dascom included a Gold Coast development facility employing about 20 developers in Australia and Mr Burke said he expected this would continue to recruit another 20 staff a year.
The new unit will develop and market products from all three of its constituent companies but Tivoli security products spokeswoman Kate Brew said the unit would also recommend third-party software.
Tivoli also revealed a new product family named SecureWay, which includes access management software, policy software and a public key infrastructure (PKI) system to authenticate users across enterprise computer systems.
Mr Burke said Texas-based Tivoli's revenue in Australia and New Zealand was growing 70 per cent a year. This compared with a worldwide annual growth figure of about 20 per cent.
Tivoli markets its products and services directly as well as through systems integrators such as Unisys and EDS.
Its New Zealand customers include Vodafone Communications.
While Mr Burke estimated that 90 per cent of end-users were on Windows or NT-based systems, he denied that the company's product offering would be threatened by Windows 2000's management and security improvements.
At the server level, users were employing a wide range of operating systems, including AIX, HPUX, Solaris and IBM mainframe, which were all supported by Tivoli.
