Supernova: Alan Ganek, IBM

[Collaborative notes taken by Nat, Tom, Kevin, me et al. EAOE.]

Connecting Worlds – a collaborative approach to innovation in self-managing technology. Autonomic computing is about tackling complexity in the IT environment. Everything we do relies on a manageable flexible infrastructure. Without it, nothing works. Fundamental.

The word autonomic comes from the autonomic nervous system – like your pupils dilating when it gets dark.

Have to develop technologies but also an ecosystem to support this stuff. What’s needed is an ecosystem of participating vendors and technologists that can fit together in a modular way.

(GLIAC has a strong committment to research – over 3000 patents. Over 500 patents are on autonomic patents. From having intellectual property, you can then open it up to the public sphere – they’ve contributed 120+ collaborative projects into the Open Source community. Embraced Linux. Also put together a venture capital team that goes out and puts together partnerships – 750 relationships with venture capital backed companies. reaching out to find a community to collaborate with. Also collaborating with 1000s of innovative companies.)

“We now face a problem sprinigng from the very core of our success in th IT industry… More than any other IT problem, this one – if it remains unsolved – will actually prevent us from moving to the next era of computing… The obstacle is complexity. Dealing with it is the single most important challenge facing the IT industry”

80% of money in organistaions around IT is spent on maintenance. Therefore on 20% can be spend on new stuff.

Most orgs have lots of systems inteconnecting. Also that means a whole range of different job roles. The way that people approiach technology today is orthogonal to the way it needs to be delivered – the user sees a simple process completely distinct from the job roles / sections and componentised tech structures.

Many people think that Autonomic Computing will allow machine sto take over all management tasks (ROBOCOP PICTURE / JOKE ABOUT ARNIE). Isn’t about getting rid of people, but producing a blanace between what people do and what technology does – technology not living up to its side fo the bargain – people forced to do things in time-consuming, tedious and error prone ways.

Characteristics of the solution:

– end to end modular reference architectural concept

– self-managing autonomic technology in all components

– common componentry

– virtualised resources

– federated configuration management data

– unifying standards

– process automation (workflow / portal technologies)

Technorati Tags:

Comments are closed.