IBM Adds Partners to Help Project Eliza

IBM is working with a number of it vendors and customers to develop a strategic design road map and assist with the infrastructure for autonomous, self-healing systems.

The Armonk, N.Y., company announced last week a services offering to automate key e-business processes and better predict, identify and intercept problems on a real-time basis.

These initiatives follow IBMs April announcement of Project eLiza, a multibillion-dollar initiative aimed at creating an e-business infrastructure of self-managing servers that require little or no human interaction.

“But we cannot do this alone, and so we have partnered with some 20 companies, including BMC Software Inc., Nortel [Networks Ltd.], Danske Bank Group, Merrill Lynch [& Co. Inc.] and Terra Lycos [SA],” said Greg Burke, director for Project eLiza. “They are telling us what is required to move toward automated computing from a management point of view. They are telling us what they are having the biggest problems with, which helps us prioritize exactly what and where the investment should be.”

IBM and its partners are jointly working on issues such as what standards and policy-based implementations are required to achieve functions such as heterogeneous workload management across different platforms and architectures, Burke added. But this process is still in an early stage. IBM and some of its partners met in Austin, Texas, last week to share what they believe is needed to move forward. They are also forming detailed technology working groups to define and orchestrate the types of design necessary to provide a managed end-to-end infrastructure that allows interoperation among multiple partners in an open-standard way, Burke said.