Welcome to 1M 2003, the eighth in a series of the premier international
technical conference in this field. As IT management has become mission
critical to the economies of the developed world, our technical program
has grown in relevance, strength and quality. Over the next few years,
leading IT organizations will gradually move from identifying
infrastructure problems to providing business services via automated,
intelligent management systems. To be successful, these future
management systems must provide global scalability, for instance, to
support Grid computing and large numbers of pervasive devices. In Grid
environments, organizations can pool desktops and servers, dynamically
creating a virtual environment with huge processing power, and new
management challenges. As the number, type, and criticality of devices
connected to the Internet grows, new innovative solutions are required
to address this unprecedented scale and management complexity. The
growing penetration of technologies, such as WLANs, introduces new
management challenges, particularly for performance and security.
Management systems must also support the management of business
processes and their supporting technology infrastructure as integrated
entities. They will need to significantly reduce the amount of
adventitious, bootless data thrown at consoles, delivering instead a
cogent view of the system state, while leaving the handling of lower
level events to self-managed, multifarious systems and devices. There is
a new emphasis on "autonomic" computing, building systems that can
perform routine tasks without administrator intervention and take
prescient actions to rapidly recover from potential software or hardware
failures.
