What are leading-edge customers doing?

---

IBM's largest customers are finding ways to use their excess capacity as a part of their transition to e-business on demand. With help from IBM, they determine which application is the best candidate for their early work. Here are examples of three customers who have begun their transition.

• A leading financial company that offers online trading wants to be able to 'borrow' resources from the high-priority trading application while maintaining its service level agreements (SLA) for trading. The company plans to provide online self-service advice using the excess, available resource. The advice application will run as a lower priority application and be as responsive as it can be with available resources, which will vary based on the needs of the trading application. This application of grid and autonomic computing enables the company to offer their customers more with no additional investment, thereby improving the company's return on investment and improving its ability to compete.

• A large insurance company has the objective of making all servers available to all applications, essentially making their server farm a single virtual computing resource. By doing so, the excess capacity will serve as a 'shock absorber' during peaks in workload. Server grids facilitate workload management by eliminating the need to plan for and manage standby capacity.

• An automobile manufacturer has the vision of allowing a potential customer to design a car online. The new technologies enable such visions without investing in additional capacity.

The limited IBM offering called IBM Server Allocation for WebSphere Application Server addresses these needs using open Web services standards, such as Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). The next section introduces the technology.

---