Be Reasonable

  by Richard Muirhead | 11 Mar 2008 | Permalink | IT Management, Software, Software Engineering

Artificial intelligence (or AI) has had a bad rap for since the rise and fall of companies in the 1980’s such as Thinking Machines. Google’s mission to answer all questions posed by anyone at anytime around the world such as: “Where shall I go on holiday this Easter?” or “What should I do tomorrow?” is an AI freak’s dream. Google are not quite there yet but they have worked out how to monetize their ability to answer much simpler questions. If the flow of venture capital money is anything to go by, Google’s success, combined with the playground provided by the vast quantity of data generated in the Internet, and the vision of a web-with-meaning or the Semantic Web championed by Tim Berners-Lee is leading to the re-launch of AI as Web 3.0. [See World-Wise Web, Finally on the horizon are computers that can reason, Richard Waters, Financial Times, 5th March 2008.]

In many ways Tideway’s mission has been to provide a platform to which the IT professional can pose similarly ambitious questions: “Where can I safely consolidate some servers?” “Where are there software licenses being consumed unnecessarily?” and even questions as prosaic as “What should I do today?” are not out of the realms of possibility when you consider Tideway’s ability to view the news occurring in your IT environment through a business lens. Freebase, a company that has raised $50m from investors including Goldman Sachs is using a collaborative approach to building out a common database of meanings.

We started with Google for geeks: Indexing, Reporting and Mapping your Data Centre. Over the last five years we have learned how to capture our knowledge of the behavior of the applications in the data center in an open language and to share this ontology through a community, called Configipedia (www.configipedia.com), The Encyclopedia of IT knowledge. Tideway Foundation’s Reasoning Engine is the platform that allows our customers to leverage this collective wisdom. Our focus has been on the pragmatic application of a blend of AI technologies and new Internet technologies. Just as Danny Hillis, founder of Thinking Machines says he has “shifted over time from trying to make machines smarter to trying to get machines to make people smarter.”…the strategy at Tideway is to make the brainy guys in the IT group even brainier.