ARMONK, NY & ORLANDO, FL - 20 Oct 2004: IBM today announced that Whirlpool, Service Delivery for Distribution Company and the Credit Union of Texas are among the customers who are reaping the benefits of autonomic computing. In three years since IBM launched an industry push for autonomic computing, customers are experiencing significant cost and time savings, higher levels of security, reduced downtime, increased end user satisfaction and higher productivity rates.
Autonomic computing, a key enabler for an on demand business, is the "unseen" technology that is allowing IT infrastructures to become more self-managing. By simplifying the increasingly complex management requirements of IT systems, autonomic computing allows IT management to concentrate on actual business issues and innovation.
Customers Reaping Benefits Today
Whirlpool Corporation saved over $1M in help desk costs using the self-protecting autonomic capabilities inside of IBM Tivoli Identity Manager and IBM Tivoli Access Manager. Whirlpool customers no longer have to wait for someone else to help them with simple tasks, they can do it themselves faster, and as a result, their satisfaction has increased significantly. In addition, the time required to set up employee user accounts was reduced from 10 days to one day, considerably increasing practitioner productivity.
"With security concerns at an all time high, it is more important than ever that our infrastructures can anticipate, detect, identify and protect against potential threats," said Jim Haney, vice president, Global Architecture and Planning, Whirlpool Corporation. "That's why we're excited that IBM's autonomic computing initiative is making systems more self-protecting. It will enable us to secure our various web applications in minutes and allows us to assure the privacy and security of our customers' information."
Service Delivery for Distribution Company (SDDC), a leading computer services provider for the retail industry, estimates they will save 15% in operational costs over the next two years using IBM Autonomic Computing's technologies. The self-healing autonomic solutions have already increased productivity up to eight fold in typical problem resolution cases, enabling IT managers to determine problem sources in 15 minutes, as opposed to two hours. This reduction in time will help SDDC prevent outages and react more quickly to service disruptions, thereby improving application availability -- something that is critical for the 380 stores they serve.
The Credit Union of Texas has increased employee productivity and customer satisfaction, and has gained a competitive edge using the self-optimizing autonomic capabilities in the recently released version of the IBM DB2 Universal Database. The autonomic solutions have allowed the credit union to cut several hours out of their month-end cycle and provide faster response to their end users during this peak time of the month. Credit union managers are also able to increase efficiency, with the ability to access updated monthly and daily reports faster.
"We compete against national finance institutions where the economies of scale work against us," said Bruce Moore, director of business intelligence, Credit Union of Texas. "Autonomic computing capabilities allow us to compete with those national institutions."
Changing the Face of IT
Autonomic Computing promises to change the face of IT, and IBM has already made major accomplishments to make solutions available today. In the past three years, IBM has developed the broadest autonomic computing portfolio in the industry, with more than 415 autonomic capabilities in 50 distinct IBM hardware and software products.
IBM also announced that IBM WebSphere Extended Deployment Version 5.1 -- designed to automatically optimize the performance of companies' software and hardware, on demand, particularly during unexpected spikes in usage or changing market conditions -- is expected to be generally available on Oct. 22. A beta program for the software had been announced in June.
Personal computers, like the IBM T41 laptop, have autonomic features like the active protection system, which uses an accelerometer that senses when someone has "dropped" it and immediately protects itself so that the hard drive will not be damaged and data will not be lost.
The autonomic capabilities extend into the electronic component side, such as the recently introduced chip morphing technology, eFUSE, which can sense that a chip needs a "tune-up." This autonomic capability is expected to change the way chips are designed, manufactured and integrated into computers, cell phones and other consumer electronic products.
IBM Global Services offers the Autonomic Computing Readiness Engagement, which helps customers evaluate the current level of autonomic computing maturity in their existing IT environments and management processes. With this service, customers are provided with a guide to improve IT responsiveness to business needs through the development of autonomic computing strategies.
IBM Research continues to make great strides in developing technologies and architectures that support self-managing systems. Current projects include Unity, a prototype of an autonomic data center that configures, optimizes and heals itself and CHAMPS, a system able to plan and schedule change management actions automatically and in real time.
Beyond IBM
To fully address the needs of customers, most of whom operate heterogeneous IT environments, Autonomic Computing requires open standards. IBM utilizes existing standards where possible and works with others to create new ones where none are in existence. In October 2003, IBM and Cisco submitted a specification to the OASIS standards body, called the Common Base Event format, which is envisioned as the basis for standardized exchange of problem determination data. In July 2004, IBM, Novell and others submitted the Solution Installation Schema, a specification for software packaging, to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
IBM is working closely with the developer community to get autonomic technologies out into the market. The Autonomic Computing Toolkit debuted on developerWorks earlier this year, which is the first integrated collection of assets and tools, with support, to assist software developers in designing and testing autonomic solutions. The second version of the Toolkit, with new upgrades and technologies, will debut later this month.
Moreover, IBM is collaborating with the global academic community by establishing and sponsoring several university partnerships and conferences, including this year's first ever International Conference on Autonomic Computing, which was held in New York City in May.
IBM today is also making available a revised architectural blueprint for companies creating autonomic solutions. The blueprint, first introduced in April 2003, was created to help companies as they begin to build autonomic computing systems. IBM has made the blueprint available free of charge and without royalty, and is working with business partners, customers and open standards committees to help drive the architecture's continued evolution. The latest version of the blueprint is available on ibm.com/autonomic.
"Although there is still much to be done, we are proud of the major advances that we as an industry have made since the introduction of the term by Paul Horn three years ago," said Alan Ganek, vice president, Autonomic Computing, IBM. "We are delighted at the benefits our customers and partners are starting to reap from implementing autonomic capabilities."
Contact(s) information
Libra White
IBM Media Relations
(408) 463-3002
libra@us.ibm.com
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