Path to an autonomic computing fiefdom

How Dave Bartlett became an autonomic computing guru at IBM

Early in his career, Dave Bartlett was a systems programmer responsible for implementing and maintaining United Technologies' global network, which at that time largely comprised IBM products. "Having been a customer myself and having felt the pain, my passion is making customers successful with information technology," he says.

Bartlett previously worked in London supporting Tivoli customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He considered himself "an escalation point," in that when problems seemed unsolvable, he jumped in to help solve them. In this job, "it became clear that we needed to do something different as an industry to get to the root cause of increasingly complex problems," he says.

At IBM, Bartlett and autonomic computing are all but synonymous. He was one of a trio of company insiders that launched the initiative.

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Early in his career, Dave Bartlett was a systems programmer responsible for implementing and maintaining United Technologies' global network, which at that time largely comprised IBM products. "Having been a customer myself and having felt the pain, my passion is making customers successful with information technology," he says.

Bartlett previously worked in London supporting Tivoli customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He considered himself "an escalation point," in that when problems seemed unsolvable, he jumped in to help solve them. In this job, "it became clear that we needed to do something different as an industry to get to the root cause of increasingly complex problems," he says.

At IBM, Bartlett and autonomic computing are all but synonymous. He was one of a trio of company insiders that launched the initiative.

Over the years, for example, Bartlett has helped IBM's hosting group provide more robust services using autonomic computing. In his own words, he describes that work:

"We're constantly challenged with the cost of running these events at the same time as delivering new features and capabilities. And as with any sporting event, we're faced with incredible peaks of traffic. So how do you manage that reasonably without provisioning for peak performance, etc.?

"We worked with the hosting group to transform the infrastructure into more of a virtualized infrastructure. We've had no outages, and that's with a 130% increase in Web site visits over time while achieving a 70% reduction in cost per visit - an overall 35% reduction in annual hosting costs since 2001.

"You can think of this as an industry solution for the entertainment or sports industry involving our pSeries servers and a number of Tivoli software products, as well as WebSphere and DB2 - multiple products working together, integrated based on autonomic computing standards and technology."

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