IBM on Friday introduced three new software products with enhanced "self-healing" capabilities to help systems automatically find and fix problems. The move expands the company's on-going autonomic computing initiative.

"We are taking out the labor intensiveness of keeping old existing systems up and running, and allowing customers to direct more of their IT dollars to new systems rather than just maintaining and managing existing systems," says Ric Telford, VP of autonomic computing for IBM.

"Many people see the term autonomic and believe it is something futuristic. But the reality is that everyday there is more and more product in the industry delivering on these self-managing capabilities," he says.

IBM is adding three new software products to its Tivoli portfolio with enhanced self-healing properties, Telford says.

Tivoli Monitoring 6.1 lets users manage online applications such as E-mail or bill-paying systems and correct IT service problems like "hung" applications before they affect users, he says. The software detects the need for specific procedures, such as bringing on additional servers when a capacity overload approaches, and automatically initiates a corrective action.

Tivoli Composite Application Manager speeds up access to information on the Internet by predicting and fixing bottlenecks as systems are connected within a service-oriented architecture. The software can locate where problems lie, identify a cause, and take steps to solve the issue.

Tivoli System Automation for Mutliplatforms can pinpoint the status of complex applications running on multiple platforms and operating systems, and using pre-set instructions or policies, automatically bring them back online if the system fails because of a power outage or other cause.