Vision and Strategy

Agent-based, autonomic computing constitutes the technological foundation of Whitestein Technologies' vision and strategy.

Why this focus?

In the mid-nineties, the later founders of Whitestein Technologies realized that conventional business applications, based on traditional software technologies and engineering approaches, would not suffice anymore to cope with the dramatic increase of complexity and dynamics of the forthcoming globalized business world. They predicted that a continuous real-time approach would be needed, replacing the conventional plan-then-execute cycle in many areas of the forthcoming "real-time enterprise".

Conventional software engineering approaches follow a design-time defined scheme insofar as all the functionality of an application system needs to be fully defined at design-time. This results in well-defined, but hard-wired software systems whose future behavior ultimately depends on the developer's assumptions about the later run-time conditions. This approach works well in stable environments, but reveals its limits in rapidly changing set-ups, when future run-time conditions cannot be accurately predicted at design-time.

Whitestein's founders came to the conclusion that dynamic, complex, and largely unpredictable environments require a new kind of business applications and corresponding software systems – autonomic, self-managing systems, whose final behavior needs not be rigidly defined at design-time, but is determined at run-time by the dynamic interaction of autonomous, self-contained, and self-organizing software components, dependent on the current environmental conditions.

Autonomic computing and software agent technologies

Autonomic computing is the concept of enabling systems and applications to autonomously – i.e., without human intervention – adapt to changing run-time conditions. The term was coined by IBM in 2001, to describe their approach to enable data center infrastructures to react and reconfigure automatically to frequent changes in demand of processing power.

Autonomic computing uses so called autonomic managers – autonomous software components that are able to pursue specific goals, relentlessly monitoring their environments and taking the needed actions. Autonomic managers can also exchange data, and coordinate their actions, if needed or beneficial to achieve their goals. This way, a compound of interacting autonomic managers results in a self-organizing, self-controlled system with run-time determined behavior.

At its core, autonomic computing is based on the concepts of software agent technologies, i.e., concepts and base technologies that have been developed since the early nineties. Software agents are self-contained, autonomous, and distributed components that cooperatively fulfill role-oriented requirements to achieve defined business objectives. This new goal-oriented software engineering paradigm is a next evolutionary step that follows, and builds on, object-oriented technologies and current state-of-the-art architectures such as SOA.

Whitestin Technologies is a leading contributor to the software agent and autonomic computing communities. To download various publications that develop the company's conceptual and methodological framework, please consult our Document Library. 

Implementing the vision

As said before, the autonomic computing paradigm constitutes the foundation of Whistestein's vision and strategy. In order to exploit its conceptual and technological potential for value-gaining business solutions and thus customer benefits, the company pursues a well-focussed, integrated and balanced approach with activities in four interdependent fields:

• Technology Research: systematic exploration and analysis of concepts, technologies, and architectures; prototyping and proof of concepts; contributions to standardization bodies; patenting; research partnerships, international research projects; publishing.
• Technology Development: development of industry-agnostic (horizontal) products and solutions (platforms, components, tools, methodologies) and conceptual frameworks; industrial partnerships and joint projects/ventures with strategic partners.
• Technology Application: development of industry-specific (vertical) products and solutions, including the design, implementation, and integration of customer-specific applications.
• Technology Consulting: management consulting and professional services; know-how transfer to customers and partners; training and education, organization of conferences and events.

Vision and strategy – revisited

After several years of strictly implementing its technology vision, Whitestein Technologies is convinced, based on its real market success, that agent-based, autonomic information technologies actually do enable new, attractive opportunities for the design and the implementation of a next generation of self-managing and self-organizing information and communication systems. This holds in particular in combination with other leading edge technologies, such as (semantic) web services, service-oriented architectures, grid computing, mobile computing, and pervasive technologies like RFID smart tags and sensor networks.