This has to be the dream of every system administrator: computers that diagnose themselves and even prevent problems from arising.

Well you can stop dreaming, because IBM has made another step towards fully automated system infrastructures as the company announced new services, software, standards adoption, and a partner program to help enterprises design and implement self-managing autonomic computing environments that can yield a 30-50 percent time savings on IT tasks.

The new services from IBM Global Services will help organizations identify and remedy problems in their multi-vendor IT environments and create systems that automatically diagnose the root causes of problems, thereby reducing the cost of downtime.

Since IBM introduced the concept of autonomic computing in 2001, the company has woven more than 475 autonomic features into 75 IBM products, making it the broadest portfolio of autonomic-enabled products, services and solutions in the industry.

"As autonomic problem determination tools and processes are implemented through the new services, enterprises have the ability to diagnose problems more quickly and often prevent more serious issues from arising, reducing downtime and the associated revenue losses," said Alan Ganek, IBM vice president of Autonomic Computing and chief technology officer, Tivoli software.

The new offerings that will help clients adopt autonomic computing are:

- IBM Accelerator for Service Management for Problem Determination enables clients to combine, analyze and correlate event information across heterogeneous systems.

- Dynamic Infrastructure for my SAP Business Suite provides a flexible solution that enhances clients' ability to share resources between different SAP applications, speed up the deployment of new SAP solutions, improve systems utilization and lower their total cost of ownership