The Four Hundred

At IBM's developerWorks conference in New Orleans last week, Big Blue talked about two new initiatives that seek to bring legacy environments into the present and to make self-healing autonomic computing technology a reality. Big Blue detailed its blueprint for autonomic computing, including tools based on open standards that it will encourage its partners to use. In a separate announcement, new software and services were introduced that modernize "spaghetti code" running on customers' mainframes and OS/400 servers.

IBM's blueprint for autonomic computing defines a set of technical guidelines that will allow IBM and other vendors to ensure that different components of a self-managing infrastructure work together. The blueprint begins the process of developing a common approach and terminology for architecting autonomic computing systems, and introduces a set of consistency mechanisms and control loops that developers can use to ensure the integrated roll-out of self-managing capabilities across the enterprise. IBM announced the blueprint a week-and-a-half ago, and revealed additional details about it at the show last week.

Along with the blueprint, IBM has introduced four new tools--all based on open standards and technologies--to promote interoperability of vendors' autonomic software. The tools include the Log & Trace Tool for Problem Determination, the ABLE (Agent Building and Learning Environment) Rules Engine for Complex Analysis, the Monitoring Engine providing Autonomic Monitoring capability, and Business Workload Management for Heterogeneous Environments. It was unclear at press time what applicability these tools would have for the iSeries. In some cases, these tools are redundant with features already in the iSeries and AS/400 platform. For instance, OS/400 already has what is arguably the best workload manager of any operating system in use today, and it can already manage multiple and incompatible operating environments (OS/400, Linux, Windows, and the OS/400 PASE AIX runtime environments today, and real, full-blown AIX early in 2004). Whatever IBM develops, it seems clear that the iSeries will have to be fully integrated into the autonomic blueprint, or the company will alienate some 210,000 of its 500,000 or so corporate customers worldwide. This is not a good idea, especially when these 210,000 customers are keen on low total-cost-of-ownership, lower administration costs, and higher resiliency--the benefits that autonomic computing promises to bring.

IBM is definitely offering iSeries-specific software and services related to its "spaghetti code" announcement. "Spaghetti code," according to IBM, is code that was written 20 to 30 years ago and has been modified so many times, by so many people, that it is difficult to untangle it to make further changes or improvements. But this legacy code is vital, as it underlies applications that run 30 billion transactions per day, or about 70 percent of the world's major business operations, according to IBM. Companies have spent well over $1 trillion in developing this code (that's a figure IBM had cited before the Y2K jump at the end of 1999). They are loathe to spend more money than they really have to, and this limits how they can adopt and adapt to new technologies as they are introduced.

IBM is rolling out a collection of software tools and services to help companies identify their spaghetti code and create plans to modernize and upgrade the business applications that they run. IBM Business Consulting Services has developed a tool its consultants can use to estimate how much a company can save by engaging IBM in either one of two services offerings. Those services include an offering called Application Portfolio Management Services, in which IBM consultants evaluate all of an organization's applications and recommend which ones to keep, abandon, or change. The second services offering, Legacy Transformation Services, seeks to renovate, integrate, migrate, and Web-enable these legacy applications.

IBM is also announcing new tools to help developers bridge the gap between older OS/400 and mainframe applications and new applications running on WebSphere. IBM says the tools, which support major Web services standards, can be used to help update older IBM mainframe CICS applications and OS/400 green-screen applications to run on the Web.

IBM says that it will be delivering a new "visual builder" specifically for the iSeries that will employ a wizard-driven interface to help developers build sophisticated Web applications that reuse programs, data, and programming skills. IBM also pointed out that its new visual builder--which was not given a proper name but could refer to the WebFacing Tool, or a new release of the WebFacing Tool--will not require programmers to learn new Java, Web, or Web-services programming skills.

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