The State of Autonomic Computing Today

It is pertinent in this last chapter to review how far autonomic computing has come in the technology race and where it needs to go in order to be more successful. We need to take a long hard look at this technology, and I will provide a number of specific recommendations.

The Marketplace and Companies

An increasing number of companies have developed their own autonomic computing projects. Large organizations, such as HP, Sun, and Microsoft, are already developing this technology. The markets follow the latest products and services. It is essential that all companies exchange research ideas. For example IBM, Sun, HP, and other companies in the industry should be exchanging ideas at the research level.

An area where this will be successful is the collaboration in building autonomic infrastructure around grid computing. This is precisely because in order to build a heterogeneous, self-managing infrastructure, you need to have a set of common protocols that run on every system, so that the various systems can collaborate with each other.

You will see more collaboration in the IT autonomic community on security that works across various systems and on self-healing algorithms. For example, workload managers that run across the infrastructure can detect which nodes are having problems and should therefore be taken offline, and route that work to other nodes that are operating well. Because of heterogeneous infrastructure, we need common protocols. Building autonomic capabilities is one of major application areas on top of grid protocols.

Open Standards

Good progress has been made in the development, construction, and assessment of the much-needed open standards for autonomic computing. Industry participation and corporate interest is increasing. All IT vendors must become engaged to keep this momentum going and not let it flounder or become dormant—which is always a risk in the standards. The IT industry is going through major changes. New concepts in technology, such as autonomic computing, Web services, and grid computing, are opening the door to tremendous opportunities for taking business to the next level of profitability. The potential of these technologies to transform business is truly remarkable, and open standards and autonomic software will play increasingly critical roles in this new world. Just as open standards were critical to the emergence of the Internet and the first generation of e-business, they will play a critical role in the next generation of autonomic computing, e-business on demand. In the first generation of e-business, standards allowed heterogeneous systems to communicate with each other and exchange data. This was critical to the development of the World Wide Web, e-markets, e-commerce, and intercompany integration. These capabilities drove cost down and productivity up, while increasing both speed to market and business agility. During the next 10 years, business agility will continue to be the critical business differentiator for businesses and governments, and those that can shift their business strategies quickly in response to market dynamics, emerging opportunities, and competitive threats will prosper as on demand organizations.