Ibm Reaches Deal To Acquire Tivoli

Making its second major acquisition in eight months, IBM agreed Wednesday to spend $743 million on Tivoli Systems Inc., a maker of software that keeps track of what’s happening on large computer systems.

Tivoli is a midsize software firm with about $50 million in 1995 sales and a leader in an industry niche known as “systems management,” which has grown quickly in recent years as computer systems have become more complex.

Tivoli has gathered technical standards from many different computer makers and used that information to create software that looks over networks of mixed devices. It can help system administrators figure out what software is where, how and when data is being used and, in some cases, update programs without sending engineers around to each desktop PC.