"A New Breed of Companies Asks the PC to Heal Itself"
March 24, 1998
By GENE KOPROWSKI
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
You arrive early at the office, hoping to make progress on that big
project before the workday starts. You flip on your personal computer,
and sip some coffee while it boots up. Then you click on the
spreadsheet icon on the desktop. Nothing happens -- you're glitched.
It's 7:30 in the morning, the help desk doesn't arrive for another hour,
and your phone system has a 900-number block, so you can't call the
software developer's customer-service number. All you're going to get
from this morning is a case of the jitters from all that extra coffee.
EVEN ROUTINE computer problems can raise office stress to
intolerable levels. But in the coming years such frustrating days may be less
common, thanks to the Internet and so-called "self-healing" PC software.
Self-healing software, which is beginning to make inroads in corporate
America, automatically diagnoses PC problems and repairs them, on-line, in
a matter of minutes. In theory, no help desk or live customer support is
required.
Demand for such services has been swiftly growing for the last 18 months
as corporate information-technology managers increasingly ask computers,
like physicians, to heal themselves. Reports from International Data Corp.
and the Gartner Group indicate sales should increase by about 30% per
year for the next several years. And an array of companies have jumped
into the emerging market, including Novadigm Inc., of Mahwah, N.J.,
SystemSoft Inc., of Natick, Mass., and CyberMedia Inc., of Santa Monica,
Calif.
"When the PC was first cobbled together, communications weren't even
included on the box. There were no serial ports," recalls Geoffrey Stilley,
vice president of government sales and marketing at CyberMedia. "There
was almost no instrumentation, or ability to monitor itself. We have gone
from that ignoble beginning to a point where the PC is now highly
instrumented -- where it knows about its own voltage, its own temperature,
and has extensive internal control systems built into it."
The result, Mr. Stilley says, is that "we've reached a point where we have all
of this capability built into the device, and it is time to start harvesting the
capabilities which were originally built into the device."
A Practical Vision
A grand vision of the potential capabilities of PCs wasn't what drove the
growth of the market for self-healing software, however -- more practical
considerations did that. Companies hope that such software will help them
use their workers more efficiently. Help desks could be freed from having to
struggle with routine PC-maintenance problems, letting them focus on more
important tasks, such as training users to use new systems and software. In
a similar vein, computer jocks wouldn't have to worry that their knowledge
of PC arcana could consign them to a working lifetime of Windows system
files: They could focus on more advanced programming tasks.
Couple the longing for more workplace productivity with the emergence of
the Internet as a far superior way to deliver software solutions, and the
attraction of self-healing software is clear.
"Which consumer wants to spend hours on the phone with a
customer-service representative trying to diagnose a problem -- and which
company wants to keep paying for that?" asks Marie Presti, director of
computer marketing for SystemSoft, which sells SystemWizard software to
computer makers. "Often, the problems are pretty routine, like just making
a slight change to the Win95 registry. They can be handled automatically
on-line. This helps the customer diagnose the problem, and get under the
covers and fix it, whatever it may be."
How do these automated software surgeons operate? To heal, one must
first be able to ascertain the patient's state of health -- a statement that
applies to people as well as PCs. The idea of "optimal performance" is built
into self-healing programs, which scan a database of solutions and match
problems with those solutions in stock.
"After matching [the problem] with the appropriate repair script, it goes in
and repairs it on-line, and brings it back to a state of optimality," says
CyberMedia's Mr. Stilley.
The programs' algorithms not only recognize applications, but can also
identify configuration and network issues, evaluate problems inside a PC,
produce a report, and automatically repair any faults they find, notes John
Girard, an analyst at the Gartner Group.
Say, for example, Microsoft Excel fails to launch on your computer because
a crucial software component dynamic link library, or DLL, is missing -- a
not uncommon problem. Self-healing software can catch the problem, and
then automatically fix it. by finding the necessary DLL file and installing it in
the Windows registry. (The self-healing software developers have each
signed "knowledge partnerships" with larger firms, such as Microsoft Corp.,
to obtain the information for the repair databases.)
Cost of Ownership
CyberMedia has landed more than three million customers, helping its sales
grow 750% last year to $37 million. The company expects to reach $100
million in sales this year -- and its rivals are growing swiftly as well.
One interesting impact of the self-healing PC trend is that it has the potential
to reduce the cost of PC ownership, says Neil Greco, product-marketing
manager for Compaq Computer Corp. While it's too early to tell what the
effect of self-healing software might be on cost of ownership -- a burning
issue in the corporate world of late -- advocates of self-healing software
hope that the programs might shave $500 off that annual price tag.
But don't think these automated technologies can solve every computer
problem that might emerge. If the hardware fails, "you're out of luck," says
one self-healing software devotee -- and the same is true if the network
goes down while you're having problems.
Even on the software side, there's evidence that self-healing programs may
need a longer stint in cyberspace's version of med school. A survey by
Micron Electronics Inc. found that just 56% of users were able to solve
their PC problems with the "self-healing" software without calling customer
service, indicating that the time hasn't quite come for customer-support
clerks to ride off into the sunset.
Self-healing software's champions, for their part, note that the product and
the market is a brand-new one.
"Self-healing is a new term: A lot of people don't know about it yet," says
Ms. Presti. "There is some perception in the marketplace that it can cause
unforeseen problems for users. What we need to do is educate the market
about what self-healing is."
Mang |
