Autonomic Computing

The Emergence of the E-Business on Demand Enterprise

Since the earliest days of business, it has been possible to boil the process down to a few fundamental elements:

• Identifying or creating a market for an offering.

• Creating the offering.

• Supplying it to the customer.

• Getting paid for it, and managing the customer relationship.

• Repeating the process.

These fundamental business principles haven't changed in hundreds of years—not even recently with the false dawn of the dot-com era and the so called “new economy”—and those companies that remain focused on them will survive through all market conditions.

Over the past decade, however, the changing economic perspective has had a profound effect on how companies do business and how they compete. Among ...