Intelligent Enterprise

Better Insight for Business Decisions

RSS
Webcasts
Whitepapers
Subscribe
Home

January 1, 2003

The Dozen 2003

IBM Corp.

Armonk, N.Y.

Autonomic computing: As we head into 2003, perhaps no other phrase is buzzing as hotly as this one. IBM got it started with a speech given on Oct. 15, 2001 by Paul Horn, senior vice president of IBM Research. The objective: "Build computer systems that regulate themselves much in the same way our autonomic nervous system[s] regulate and protect our bodies," IBM's Web site reports from Horn's speech. In 2002, a year in which IBM Research shattered barriers to the development of computing at a molecular level — advances that may in the long run have civilization-altering impact — it was "autonomic computing" and the notion of self-healing systems that rang the most profound chord.

Why? Because the body is not well: Surveys report variously that IT must spend 80 percent or more of its time, energy, and money on maintaining infrastructure, leaving little for discretionary activities. Many businesses are choking on IT — and those that aren't have grown leery of stepping into the big ring for fear of TCO body blows. Automation, the productivity goal of so much computing, "produces complexity as an unavoidable byproduct," an IBM white paper observes. Forget the brain in the box: dealing with complexity is "our next Grand Challenge," says IBM.

IBM's new chairman, Sam Palmisano, is staking the company's growth into on-demand business computing on how well it handles the Grand Challenge. And he has elevated a long-time IBMer with varied experience like himself into a prominent leadership role: Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who as of this writing is vice president of IBM Server Group Technology and Strategy. Without discounting the contributions of other key IBM executives, Wladawsky-Berger has proven most able to deliver the holistic view — the big, bold vision of how IBM can heal the IT body.

Do No Harm

Self-healing software became the top-line story in the release of DB2 version 8, supported by an array of tools designed to elevate the DBA's lot above performance tuning tedium — and discreetly take a tad more control over the costs and implementation of DB2. Oracle and IBM duked it out all year, but both surely have an eye on the market growth and price pressure coming from Microsoft SQL Server. IBM is hard at work earning DBAs' trust that its tools will keep their databases out of the emergency room.

Those still puzzling over IBM's Linux evangelism found more to noodle over with the direction of Websphere, the heart of IBM's application development, middleware, and perhaps someday, even collaboration portfolios. Websphere embraces Eclipse, the open source platform for tool integration. IBM seems to think open source is hardly a "cancer" — and is in fact a significant part of the cure.