These new technologies lay the foundation for systems and networks to detect, analyze, correlate, and resolve IT problems and automatically diagnose the root cause of a problem in complex systems. Helping businesses to reduce total cost of ownership, improve system availability and productivity.

Once the problem determination tools and processes are implemented, enterprises will have the ability to analyze problems more quickly, often before they happen, reducing downtime and the associated revenue losses.

"As system and network complexity in IT infrastructures has grown it has become increasingly apparent that this trend cannot continue without some major change in the way the infrastructures are managed," said Alan Ganek, vice president, IBM Autonomic Computing. "IT professionals from medium and large businesses have told us that 25-50 percent of their IT resource is spent on problem determination. Given the pressures on budgets, time, and skills, our work on standards based technologies for problem determination will make it faster and easier to improve availability and reduce downtime in their IT infrastructure."

"Today's IT environment is becoming increasingly complex for enterprises to manage," said Greg Akers, senior vice president, Cisco Systems. "Recognizing this trend, Cisco and IBM are collaborating on technologies and standards that will form the foundation for an interoperable, extensible, and systemically developed adaptive networking and services architecture. We hope others in the industry will adapt the proposed standards and help enterprises realize the benefits of an autonomic, or self-managing, IT infrastructure."

Both companies are working across the industry to develop the technologies in an open standards approach. IBM has submitted a Common Base Event (CBE) format, which is envisioned as the basis for standardized exchange of problem determination data via web services, to the OASIS Standards Body.

Appreciating the "self-healing" computing systems and networks, Akira Bannai, Senior Fellow, Toshiba Solutions Corporation quoted "Toshiba has been working with IBM to accelerate practical autonomic computing, such as the combination of Toshiba ClusterPerfect and IBM Director,Now, by adopting common base event technology into Toshiba's products and system integration services, Toshiba will deploy more powerful solutions to reduce the complexity of today's heterogeneous enterprise environments."