On 7/10/2016 3:34 AM, Juergen Kehr wrote:
there were some rumours upcoming last week, that IBM solds TWS/IWS (Tivoli/IBM Workload Scheduler) to a Chinese company. Is this a (bad) joke or is there any truth behind these rumours?
The seemingly never-ending staff reductions at IBM have forced them to seek partnerships with third parties to help maintain a "business as usual" posture with much of their software portfolio. These are not standard product re-marketing or sub-contracting arrangements, but rather intellectual property code-sharing agreements (called IPLAs) wherein a third party ISV takes over all development activities in exchange for a _huge_ percentage of the profits and any code they write is theirs to keep and use in their own products royalty free.
Through these arrangements, IBM is able to reduce costs by disbanding their product development teams while continuing to "own" their product portfolio (which they technically still do on paper) despite having only minimal involvement. SDSF and OMEGAMON fall into this category as do numerous others, including at least one with the Tivoli brand. Such arrangements are generally not publicized and there is no legal requirement for IBM to do so.
I don't know for sure what's going on with TWS, but I would not be the least bit surprised if it has fallen victim to one of these arrangements. I would, however, be quite surprised to learn a Chinese ISV is involved since none of the eleven IPLAs I am aware of involve Chinese companies.
Another possibility is that IBM has simply moved development of TWS to China as they have done with z/OS BINDER, z/OSMF and numerous other products and components. In that case, there's likely no third-party ISV involvement at all (except possibly as sub-contractors) and nothing has been officially "sold."
Please post additional details as you discover them... -- Edward E Jaffe Phoenix Software International, Inc 831 Parkview Drive North El Segundo, CA 90245 http://www.phoenixsoftware.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
