Are we automated yet?

For the past five years, Dave Bartlett has been IBM's chief authority guiding large enterprises on how best to use self-managing technologies and standards. Today, as vice president of industry solutions, Bartlett is charged with using his autonomic-computing expertise to create highly repeatable, end-to-end packages that any company in a vertical market segment could implement easily. Here he delivers a status report about autonomic computing, a foundational New Data Center concept.

Has autonomic computing achieved its promise yet?

If you look back five years, the big concern was that IT systems were too complex to manage and maintain. That's still where we are today, and the autonomic standard of self-managing technology is still the solution. It's the one initiative that cuts across multiple customer platforms and technologies.

What we didn't realize was how much time and effort it would take to have autonomic computing take hold throughout the industry and truly transform the way we work. I can point to many individual examples of success, but autonomic computing still is not pervasive across the industry.

Have you changed your approach because autonomic computing technologies aren't as widely used as you thought they would be by now?

We knew from the beginning that solving the problem of complexity went beyond IBM's scope. But in working with large enterprises, we've learned how much collaboration is needed on the standards and technologies that will bring about this sea change. And so we've built what I call the autonomic ecosystem. This is about getting participation, not just from other software vendors but from systems integrators, as well as working with channel partners and resellers. Part of the ecosystem also heavily involves research, and now we are working with other research organizations, corporations and universities. If you're really going to address the full set of what customers are faced with, that's going to require a certain amount of innovation, as well as group-level support for this transformation. We've moved from yesterday's concept of innovation being a closed, proprietary thing to something that really needs to be open. And when I say open, I'm talking about very open in a way I haven't seen in this industry, in IBM, before. This is contributing to open source, being very open in the standards work with traditional competitors, being very open on bringing our research-and-development resources right to the customer site, doing open partnerships with universities.

Read how Dave Bartlett became an autonomic computing guru at IBM

I've read that IBM has implemented more than 500 self-managing features in 75 distinct products. What are the coolest?

At the most fundamental level, an example is the "airbag" technology in the ThinkPad [notebook computers]. One of the things we focus on is self-protection. We often think of protection in terms of viral intrusions, but really the biggest danger to a laptop is dropping it and then losing data on the hard drive if the head crashes. So we put in a chip that can sense a change in velocity and pull the write-read-write heads off of the drives and thus protect the data. Another example is the eFuse technology in the Power5 chips. It can change circuit design based on environmental attributes, such as voltage or temperature. This means performance problems can be handled right in the hardware without human intervention.