IBM Making Strides Toward "Autonomic" Computing Initiative

What IBM calls "autonomic" computing is an attack on the complexity that saps the productivity out of the latest and greatest technology, said Alan Ganek, a 20-year IBM veteran who is vice president of the new Autonomic Computing organization. "Deployments are incredibly complex and almost acting at odds against the improvements we've had in price/performance," he said. "Chips are getting cheaper and cheaper, but the way we put them together is more and more complex. That's an obstacle."

In the short term, IBM is working to make its software products, including DB2 and the Tivoli management offerings, more self-healing and self-tuning, even as the hardware groups work on similar problems.

How much sway Ganek will have over IBM's disparate product groups is unclear, however. Frank Gillett, principal analyst at Forrester Research, likened the vendor's autonomic computing initiative to its Pervasive Computing effort, which also extends across different departments of the company. The head of that effort had a mandate but was not in charge of a lot of products per se, Gillett said.

Also, it's critical that this not be an IBM-only effort, Ganek said, adding that the company is pursuing an open-standards road map. Both IBM and Microsoft have already blessed the Open Grid Services Architecture game plan and are proponents of other Web-based standards that fit in with that strategy. The "general idea is that any solution limited to a specific hardware technology architecture, whether it's mainframe or Intel, doesn't solve customer problems," said John Humphreys, an analyst at research firm IDC.

"We're building a reference architecture and approaches that will be available to other companies. Lots of other people's software drive our servers," Ganek said. The goal here is to coordinate the effort across multiple product lines, he said.

What will be key is raising the lowest common denominator so users get the most out of their IT spending and integrators can spend more time and resources extending capabilities rather than getting existing systems to work right, IBM said.

Everyone agrees the complexity problem is real. "A lot of [computing capability is wasted now. I have to buy double, triple,maybe even five times,the stuff I need because I have to buy for peak volume, not average volume," Ganek said.