One of the keynote speeches in the IEEE/IFIP Management Week 2009 which took place 26-30 October in Venice, Italy, was given by Prof. George Pavlou. The Management Week is the second key annual event in the area of network and service management and gathers together, among other events, the IFIP/IEEE Distributed Systems Operations and Management (DSOM) workshop, the IFIP/IEEE Management of Multimedia & Mobile Networks and Services (MMNS) conference, the IEEE IP Operations and Management (IPOM) workshop and the IEEE Modelling Autonomic Communications Environments workshop.

The keynote speech addressed a future self-managing Internet that will be able to adapt better to the requirements of demanding applications, protect itself better and offer better quality of experience to its users.

The precise abstract of the talk was the following.

Autonomic management is seen as the evolution of adaptive automated management, with a large part of the management intelligence being integrated within managed devices, resulting in self-management capabilities. Autonomic management leads us to radically rethink the way in which management functionality is provided and is seen as an important aspect of the emerging Internet, potentially coupled with radically redesigned control functionality. This presentation reviews the state-of-the-art in autonomic management, considers the management needs of the emerging Internet and provides an overview of the key fundamental challenges in order to make large-scale autonomic management a reality.