| IBM's decision to acquire Think Dynamics, a privately held company headquartered in Toronto, Canada, was a bold move in its autonomic computing strategy. Think Dynamics' software capability accelerates a critical element of IBM's strategy to help customers respond more quickly to changing business needs—such as peaks in demand and potential system failures—by dynamically allocating the right computing resources at the right time to the processes, minimizing human error in the process. To achieve an on demand operating environment, the system must be integrated, virtualized, and automated. For automation to be effective across the whole environment, it must be able to provide high availability, optimize the use of resources, secure the infrastructure, and provision resources as required by the business needs. To make this automation successful, the system must choreograph or orchestrate the changes across many disciplines. The automation blueprint in Figure 13.2 defines for customers how they can achieve this automated, on demand operating environment. Figure 13.2. Think Dynamics enhances IBM automation computing by providing a way for customers to define their path to automate their environments to achieve on demand. With Think Dynamics, they have the ability to use a wider range of provisioning automation capabilities to maximize the utilization of their existing IT assets to achieve that goal. 
This type of automated systems management tied to business needs is known as "orchestrated provisioning" and is a key component of IBM's e-business on demand. Orchestrated provisioning allows customers to respond quickly to business requirements, thus freeing up a company's IT staff to focus more on its core business needs. Based on autonomic technology, orchestrated provisioning obtains real-time feedback on the state of the IT environment, checks the status against business policies, and makes changes by dynamically reallocating a broad variety of computing resources—including servers, middleware, applications, storage systems, and network interfaces—in an orchestrated and coordinated manner. Think Dynamics capability is unique in the industry in that it is based on key open standards, such as Web services, which allow customers to automatically and dynamically provision resources based on the unique policies and processes of their business. The Think Dynamics products are built on open technologies such as J2EE, XML, and SOAP, which make them easy to integrate with IBM's products as well as third-party systems-management products. By acquiring a leading provider of provisioning software, IBM will bring customers a platform-agnostic solution that further unlocks the value of an on demand infrastructure. Think Dynamics capability changes the business response from "just in case" provisioning, where expensive resources, such as backup systems for disaster recovery, sit idle "just in case" they are needed, to "on demand" provisioning, in which resources that support lower-priority work can be dynamically reallocated to meet higher-priority needs in minutes. The result for customers will be an on demand capability that aligns IT more closely with business priorities, reducing costs through increased efficiency and better utilization of current IT investments For example, a bank running an online financing promotion within a traditional IT environment might need to begin preparing months in advance for the potential surge in Web traffic. IT personnel would identify and manually prepare servers, middleware, and other technology to manage resources according to IT policy, which dictates that when an IT system reaches its defined utilization threshold, additional resources must be brought online to balance the workload. Orchestrated provisioning can automate this process, eliminating guesswork. Sensing that a server has reached its peak utilization level, Think Dynamics capability would locate and deploy the appropriate resources and begin sharing the workload. Additional resources would be deployed as needed, and then redeployed back to their normal state when the promotion ends and Web traffic decreases. In addition, Think Dynamics capability supports heterogeneous environments, so it works with companies' existing IT infrastructures, enabling them to transform themselves into on demand businesses in a straightforward and evolutionary fashion. Think Dynamics capability also supports clustering capabilities, like WebSphere clustering, which enable the dynamic addition of Web services across a cluster of WebSphere servers. The ability to automatically manage IT resources will help customers get more value out of their technology investments. With the acquisition of Think Dynamics, a leader in IT resource provisioning, IBM promises to be at the cutting edge of this technology. The incorporation of orchestrated provisioning capabilities will enable organizations to more rapidly achieve the promise of utility computing—accessing processing power and applications where and when a customer needs them. Customers may choose to build it on their own, have IBM build it for them, or leverage IBM utility services on an ongoing basis to provide their company IT and business functions on demand. This capability will be supported via IGS' Utility Management Infrastructure (UMI), which allows companies to begin benefiting from utility computing today by enabling them to integrate and run e-business processes and related applications on a dynamic, consolidated infrastructure. Think Dynamics will be integrated into IBM software products and leveraged throughout the IBM portfolio of products. In the first instance, expect that Think Dynamics products will be available through IBM Tivoli software, with others to follow. The combination of Think Dynamics and IBM's products should bring great benefits to IBM customers. It's a leap forward for changing the management of IT resources from a reactive, over provisioning approach that wastes resources to a proactive approach that provisions and delivers just the right amount of resource, when it's needed. As Forrester Research summed up the deal: Small Buy, Big Impact.[2] [2] Forrester Research TechStrategy Brief, May 2003 |
