What is Adaptive IT?


The large organisation of today typically has a raft of isolated systems - a myriad of particular applications, each with their own database, running on a specific server, with directly-attached storage - all provided by different vendors. These isolated legacy systems are no longer viable - rarely do legacy systems understand the variable needs of the business, determined by the changing business objectives. Rarely are they able to adapt to the vulnerabilities of a business. Sound familiar?

That's where Adaptive IT comes in. Adaptive IT is a suite of tools and services that are groundbreaking for the IT industry. They include new methodologies for designing and uniting applications and network architectures to support today's constantly changing business needs. Adaptive IT includes technology advances to 'virtualise' server and storage environments... to optimise real-time resources based on business priorities. The result? Technology and knowledge working together to make business more efficient and vastly more agile.

Adaptive IT is also known as 'on demand' business. On demand business allows you to lower costs, increase revenue and respond quickly to the pressures your industry is facing right now. It requires changes in the way your company deals with technology, strategy, business practices and corporate culture. The potential rewards - both short - and long-term are enormous.

In Adaptive IT, all hardware resources, such as storage and servers, need to be shared as a common resource by any number of business applications. This allows IT resources to be allocated more efficiently, ensuring the more demanding applications have access to resources that might otherwise be idle if they were dedicated to lower priority applications.

We also need to draw upon virtualised resources (Web Services) allowing them to call upon elements of standard business applications. A sales order system, for example, could access a warehouse system to ensure there is enough stock to fulfil the order, removing the need for both systems to store and handle the information separately, therefore making their use of the information and their demands on resources more efficient.

We further need business processes to determine what Web Services are deployed and for what purpose. A business process will direct the activity of various Web Services so a customer order would lead automatically to adjustments in the warehouse system, the purchase order system and even a suppliers order processing system.

Bring the three together and you start to create the Adaptive IT environment, but the concept can still be confusing. eema's 17th Annual Conference will clarify and explain each of the component parts of an Adaptive IT strategy, and show you how they fit together to enhance your business processes. The conference will be divided into two tracks: Strategic Management and Technical Architecture, to cater for your specific information needs.

	Find out why Adaptive IT is necessary, and has not just been devised by a creative consultant to improve revenues. What is different about it?
	Discover how Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) provides the bridge between any type of business application and the enterprise.
	Learn from case studies demonstrating how to develop a networked virtual organisation.
	Understand how grid computing co-ordinates the use of a large number of servers and storage acting as one computer.
	Ascertain what the risks are and how to contain them.
	Debate the issues with experts and peers so you can implement Adaptive IT in your own company.