| IBM has announced their vision for the next major strategy of business adoption. They call it e-business on demand™. It is a statement of IBM's belief of how businesses will need to transform themselves to be successful. Businesses will have to adapt to cope with ever-increasing pressures from competition and other factors associated with the global economy. The modern business will require full integration across people, processes, and information, including suppliers, distributors, customers, and employees. Autonomic computing is a fundamental aspect of IBM's e-business on demand strategy. E-business on demand is designed to address the growing dynamic between IT solutions and business strategies. Corporations and their management regard technology as a means to power business evolution to the next competitive level. To compete and win in today's markets, companies must be agile and responsive to customer demands, marketplace shifts, and competitive pressure. The ability of e-business on demand solutions to leverage existing IT infrastructures with additional integrated services and capacities has implications for corporations of every size. Small- to medium-sized businesses can use e-business on demand solutions to gain the economic scale of large companies. Large corporations can use e-business on demand to become as nimble as small businesses. At its heart, IBM's e-business on demand offers corporate IT environments where every single employee, customer, partner, application, and process has seamless access to any and all necessary business assets, information, and resources. IBM defines an e-business on demand business as a corporation whose business processes, integrated end-to-end across the company and with key partners, suppliers, and customers, can respond with speed to any customer demand, market opportunity, or external threat. There are four key attributes of an e-business on demand business: -
Response— The ability to sense and respond to dynamic, unpredictable changes in demand, supply, pricing, labor, competition, capital markets, and the needs of its customers, partners suppliers, and employees. -
Variability— The ability to adapt processes and cost structures to reduce risk while maintaining high productivity and financial predictability. -
Focus— The ability to concentrate on its core competencies and differentiating capabilities. -
Resiliency— The ability to manage changes and external threats while consistently meeting the needs of all of its constituents. These attributes define the business itself. For a business to successfully attain and maintain these attributes, it must build an IT infrastructure that is designed to specifically support the goals of the business. An entirely new kind of IT infrastructure must be put in place to support an e-business on demand business. IBM calls this infrastructure the e-business on demand operating environment. To achieve this vision, IBM believes that information resources must be: -
Virtualized— allowing business assets, including data, applications and resources, to flow freely wherever and whenever they are needed; -
Integrated— enabling the efficient movement of information between systems, applications, databases, and business processes; -
Open— assuring the free integration and flow of business assets in an IT world that is both practically and philosophically heterogeneous; and -
Autonomic— empowering the stability and reliability of solutions in endemically complex corporate IT environments. There are many technologies, both new and evolving, that can make this environment a reality. An e-business on demand operating environment is about a broad set of standards working together to provide a consistent and comprehensive set of services and deliverables, as illustrated by Figure 1.3. Figure 1.3. The e-business on demand environment based on open standards and shared components. 
An e-business on demand business is responsive, variable, focused, and resilient. To attain these business attributes, an information technology infrastructure must be put in place that supports the business and provides true business value. An e-business on demand operating environment supports the e-business on demand business by providing the capability to integrate, virtualize, and automate systems and processes. |
