Too many resources

You know a company has too many resources when they develop an entire suite of products from scratch, aimed at 2% of the corporate IT market.

IBM's ThinkVantage Tools are, largely, very well written and certainly add value over the Dell garbage we had been buying until recently. For notebooks, it doesn't get much better than IBM Access Connections. This is a great technology that simplifies IP and wireless connectivity to an "Even-the-CEO-can-do-it" level. The Rescue and Recovery tools are very well done, easy to use, and actually could serve to get a PC back up in the event Windows will not start. Kudos to IBM for this.

However...

IBM is going to market - not aggressively mind you - with some rather half baked tools that offer similarly-intended functionality to products such as ZEN and Altiris. The development of Image Ultra Builder, as well as their "app distribution" and "asset management" tools, indicates to me that IBM may have too much time on their hands.

As a consultant, I've seen plenty of different organizations. I can't think of a single one that would select the IBM TVT suite for managing images or application distribution.

Why not? Because they aren't free. If you have to pay for something, you might as well get what you want. Be it Altiris, SMS, ZENworks, etc - there are a number of commercial products that do exceptionally good jobs of delivering applications, managing images, and capturing inventory.

Granted, the market for these utilities should be quite large... but faced with the mature offerings already available... I just... if you can't do it better than the other guys... seriously, why bother?

I wish I had IBM's problems.