Another prerequisite to use ECM as a service is the examination of services/grid technology in order to flexibly and dynamically adapt ECM system power to current workloads and, thereby, considerably increase overall efficiency.

On the way to achieve this goal, two existing assets can be leveraged. The first asset is the earlier CAS project "Enabling Enterprise Content Management Systems for 'On Demand' computing by exploiting 3rd generation Grid Technology" has provided a distributed ECM architecture (for the domain of email archiving), a corresponding prototype as well as empirical examinations proving the potential of efficiency gains which can be achieved by distributed solutions.

The second asset is the IBM Dynamic Infrastructure project, which combines the provisioning of complex IT infrastructures with the capability of managing them as service. The IBM Dynamic Infrastructure can be used to instantiate and manage this distributed ECM architecture services dynamically on an IT infrastructure.

This new project starts from the results of these both projects. It aims at an autonomic ECM services management infrastructure which can dynamically adapt to varying workloads (amounts of business data to be archived and further processed) and is exposed as a Utility by leveraging IBM Dynamic Infrastructure's provisioning and service enablement technologies. Such an infrastructure needs to feature new mechanisms for dynamic services provisioning (according to given service level agreements - SLA) as well appropriate workload management facilities effectively exploiting the respective, currently available service power. This, in turn, additionally requires real-time system monitoring and analysis capabilities being the prerequisite of the autonomic system management means, considered as being especially beneficial in the ECM area.