IT management has become mission critical to the economies of the developed world. Over the first decade of the 21st century leading IT organizations will gradually move from identifying infrastructure problems to providing business services via automated, intelligent management systems. These future management systems must provide global scalability, for instance, to support Grid computing and large numbers of pervasive devices. Management systems must also support the management of business processes and their supporting technology infrastructure as integrated entities. They will need to significantly reduce the amount of adventitious, bootless data thrown at consoles, delivering instead a cogent view of the system state, while leaving the handling of lower level events to self-managed, multifarious systems and devices. An emphasis is emerging on "autonomic" computing, building systems that can perform routine tasks without administrator intervention and take prescient actions to rapidly recover from potential software or hardware failures.Web services, with public interfaces and bindings described using XML, are often proposed as the latest model for interaction between management systems and applications. These are some of the large background issues that provide a setting for the specific topics that are covered by the papers from the eighth IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM 2003), which was jointly sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and the IEEE Communications Society. The conference convened in Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA in March 2003. With contributions from researchers and practitioners from Europe, America and Asia, this volume provides a comprehensive snapshot of the current state of the art in network and systems management.
