IBM this week introduced two products for its mainframe customers that Big Blue says will help manage users’ access rights better and track application performance across mainframe and distributed systems.

At the Share user conference in Baltimore, IBM previewed Tivoli Federated Identity Manager for the z/OS mainframe platform and Tivoli Composite Application Manager for z/OS. The company also detailed integration upgrades to its Tivoli Workload Scheduler and Tivoli Omegamon XE products that will let them share data with the identity and application managers.

Tivoli Federated Identity Manager lets systems administrators manage users’ access rights to z/OS systems, applications and business services. The software enables automated authentication and integration for the loosely coupled components common to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment, IBM says.

Tivoli Composite Application Manager uses a combination of server software and distributed agents, depending on the level of insight customers want into various transactions across infrastructure components. For instance, the agents can collect performance metrics, such as message size, response time, service calls, turnaround time and number of faults, and send the data to the management server for real-time alerts.

IBM has showed renewed interest in mainframe management products during the past year. Industry watchers say these vendors’ large, mainframe customers could be looking for ways to add value to their existing investments, and bridging the gap between legacy and distributed systems management could help.

IBM says Identity Manager and Application Manager for z/OS, as well as product pricing, will become available in stages until year-end.