Analysis & Commentary:

NEW IBM SERVICE TO HELP COMPUTERS MANAGE THEMSELVES

As reported by Peter Henderson, International Business Machines Corp announced business software that offers the promise of machines that heal and manage themselves.

Built with lessons from IBM's chess-playing supercomputer, the system is hardly plug and play, and setting it up ensures steady employment for the firm's consultants.

For half a year, IBM has promised 'self-healing' computers that react to failing parts and rising workloads by finding ways round problems without breaking down or involving technicians -- a key issue amid a tight supply of technology professionals.

Technology in IBM's e-business Management Services is partly based on work in creating Deep Blue, the company's chess champion computer, which was given the rules, told to weigh nearly every scenario and then choose the best.

That strategy of using "brute force" computing power helped Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

It can be applied to business by telling the computer the rules of a business process and letting it work out and respond to scenarios rather than giving it blow-by-blow instructions.

For technical problems, that could mean letting the computer choose and switch to a backup microchip when one starts to fail. On a business level that could mean telling a computer facing a backlog of work on a priority job to search out free computers on a corporation's network and reschedule low-priority jobs.

Considers All Responses

To do that, the computer considers all the responses and chooses a path.

"This is really the essence of making systems behave in an intelligent manner ... God knows if this means they are intelligent," Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM vice president, Technology and Strategy, said in an interview.

"But what we really like about this, and we learned a lot about this in Deep Blue, is the brute force techniques of having a lot of information and a lot of computer power is the most effective way of making systems behave in what we humans would call intelligence," he said.

"Asking the question how well is the system doing, is not an easy question."

While the goal is to let machines manage themselves, the IBM package comes in a services offering that will require about 20 weeks of initial consulting and $30,000-$100,000 per month in ongoing maintenance from Global Services, said Todd Gordon, IBM's general manger of business continuity and recovery services, who is targeting very large corporations.

For years IBM has been promoting itself as a services provider rather than a simple box maker, and has become the largest technology services provider in the world.

In fact, much of the initial consulting includes solving basic problems of how to get systems to work together that have haunted businesses for years.

The answer was a 'correlation engine' which analyzes information, Gordon said. "The invention that has been required is this correlation engine and some of the active management of how you move processes around and how you integrate across all these platforms," he said.

"Certainly at the business problem side ... you would have thought we would have fixed it sooner," he added.