An autonomic computing architecture for business applications

Abstract

Though the vision of autonomic computing (AC) is highly ambitious, an objective analysis of autonomic computing and its growth in the last decade throw more incisive and decisive insights on its birth deformities and growth pains. Predominantly software-based solutions are being preferred to make IT infrastructures and platforms, adaptive and autonomic in their offerings, outputs, and outlooks. However the autonomic journey has not been as promising as originally envisaged by industry leaders and luminaries, and there are several reasons being quoted by professionals and pundits for that gap. Precisely speaking, there is a kind of slackness in articulating its unique characteristics, and the enormous potentials in business and IT acceleration. There are not many real-world applications to popularize the autonomic concept among the development community. Though, some inroads has been made into infrastructure areas like networking, load balancing etc., very few attempts has been exercised in application areas like ERP, SCM, or CRM. In this paper, we would like to dig and dive deeper to extract and explain where the pioneering and path-breaking autonomic computing stands today, and the varied opportunities and possibilities, which insists hot pursuit of the autonomic idea. A simplistic architecture for deployment of autonomic business applications is introduced and a sample implementation in an existing CRM system is described. This should form the basis of new start and ubiquitous application of AC concepts for business applications.