Leading IT Industry Players, Customers Join IBM's Project Eliza Initiative

IBM Delivers New Self-Managing Services, Technologies

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ARMONK, NY - 31 Oct 2001: Six months after unveiling its strategic initiative to make the IT infrastructure self-managing, IBM is delivering on its promise with a new set of service and technology offerings, including:

The industry's first services to automate key e-business processes that predict, identify and intercept problems on a real-time basis;
A partner program in which major IT vendors and customers develop a roadmap for advanced e-business technology; and
New technologies for IT infrastructure security and management, including software from Tivoli.

These three advancements are part of IBM's Project eLiza, a multi-billion dollar program to develop self-managing systems that reduce the cost and complexity of the IT infrastructure. IBM recently issued a grand challenge to industry, government and university research organizations to focus on developing technologies that will allow computing systems to operate "autonomically." Project eLiza is IBM's company-wide initiative to address that grand challenge.

"Customers are overwhelmed by the rate and pace of technology, so we need to simplify managing an e-business infrastructure," said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Vice President, Technology and Strategy, IBM. "By incorporating technology that automatically manages itself, we can minimize the degree of human management and dramatically improve performance and efficiency while we make it easier for our customers to take advantage of new technologies."

For the first time, the industry has joined IBM to shape the strategic direction of Project eLiza. Information technology leaders BMC Software, Candle, and Nortel Networks as well as customers Danske Bank, Merrill Lynch and Terra Lycos are among more than 20 companies that have joined IBM to help define self-managing technologies.

"Nortel Networks has a history of collaboration with IBM and helping to define and support the strategic direction for Project eLiza is yet another facet of that long-term relationship," said Robert Burke, senior vice president of the company's Metro Networks business unit. "Using the connectivity capability of Nortel Networks optical platforms and edge-to-edge IP management solutions, we can work with IBM to deliver customers secure, high-speed, self-healing networks."

"Security is a key element to our e-business banking infrastructure and we spend many days and efforts to ensure consistency is maintained. The Project eLiza initiative will allow us to eliminate all that overhead and insure a single policy is administered," said Claus Torp Jensen, Senior IT Architect, Danske Bank of Denmark.

e-business Management Services
IBM's new services offering, formally named e-business Management Services, directly links business process objectives for the first time to supporting information resources. This comprehensive services package provides real-time alerts of risks and detailed identification of issues that will affect a business process via a "dashboard" graphical interface. The dashboard highlights any event affecting business process objectives, ensuring that any performance disruption is identified on a real-time basis. This virtual "command center" arms executives with a centralized, instantaneously updated overview of business operations to allow for real-time business decisions.

By enabling critical business and information system resources to stay focused on core functions, this service provides an automated analysis of all elements of a business process. Senior IBM Global Services consultants analyze a client's environment and set up rules and policies for infrastructure operations that are then monitored by IBM 7x24 for immediate notification about performance concerns.

One of the leading-edge technologies developed for e-business Management Services is a flexible and powerful inference engine that translates business objectives and policies into machine language rules. This engine, called the Active Middleware Information Technology, dynamically correlates of events that occur in an IT infrastructure with critical business processes. This invention is an element of a broad "active" framework to optimize business performance.

Leveraging IBM Research innovation and external technology partnerships, highlights of the comprehensive service offering include:

Mine, Map, and Initialize, a self-optimizing service to map business goals, processes against supporting information resources to show problematic areas affecting business objectives and to visualize end-to-end business process dependencies,.utilizing an automated device discovery and business process mining tool.
Workload process performance, a self-optimizing tool that dynamically allocates capacity to prioritize business transactions, thus improving customer service, operational efficiency, and business utilization of infrastructure investment.
Monitoring, Alert, and Manage, a self-protecting service that provides real-time notification of concerning events that will impact the business process outcome all managed from a virtual, graphical dashboard.

In addition to this new service, a number of technologies, developed under the Project eLiza umbrella, now are available within those IBM's eServer family and software offerings that automate infrastructure security and management. These new technologies allow customers to avoid costly unplanned downtime, improve system performance, and simplify the management of user information. [Editor: see fact sheet.] Future technologies developed as part of eLiza include storage solutions that enhance the integrity of business information while providing continuous availability -- even if part of the system has been hacked or damaged.

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The IBM eServer brand consists of the established IBM e-business logo with the following descriptive term "server" following it. The following are either trademarks or registered of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States or other countries or both: IBM, the IBM e-business logo, eServer, and Tivoli. Nortel Networks is a trademark of Nortel Networks.

All others are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Statements concerning IBM's future development plans and schedules are made for planning purposes only, and are subject to change or withdrawal without notice.