Chris Boos on Automation

After blogging some months about automation, I thought it might be a good idea to talk about the definition of automation. Nearly everyone seems to have an “Automation solution” in place. So what is that Automation-hype all about?

The word Automation is derived from the ancient Greek language and means that something is operating or moving self dictated, which gives quite a good idea about what we are looking at.

Automation might have started with the invention of the wheel decades ago, is omnipresent in many branches and industries and a substancial factor for producing any kind of goods and services today.  Robots and Automated Manufacturing systems and During my journey through the world of IT Service Management, I encountered various kinds of Automation. From my point of view most vendors will agree to the following categorization:

Automated IT-Service Management / ITSM Process Automation

This is a umbrella term for solutions focused on supporting Service Management workflow, usually based on best practices and standards like ITIL or Cobit. Subordinated terms are Support Automation or Run-Book-Automation.

Support Automation

Support Automation refers to software packages are focused on supporting the routine work of help desk personnel. Think of it as a kind of script integration in existing Service desk, CRM application or even in Knowledge Base Applications for Automated Self Service. Examples for this category are products like CA SupportBridge or mValent Integrity, which is focused on Change Management Automation.

Run-Book-Automation

Products belonging to this category are very popular nowadays. They allow to define a set of ITSM-Workflows through a Graphical user interface. Good products offer a multitude of connectors and interfaces to existing ITSM suites like OpenView, Tivoli or Unicenter. Examples for this kind of products are Opalis Integration Server, BMC Realops or HP/Opsware/IConclude Opsforce.

IT-Workload Automation

These concepts stem from early (mainframe) days of computing, where batch processing or job Scheduling were a big improvement, allowing operator to “automate” recurring tasks. Though modern products are highly evolutionized through offering multi platform compatibility, event-triggering, policy-based execution and configured to smart coloured visual GUIs. These products are gaining ground in modern service oriented environments and are represented through products from big vendors like CA/Cybermation and IBM Tivoli or smaller competitors like ASG and UC4

Data Center Automation

This is the hottest topic today, as companies have started to deploy myriad of servers into an extremely fast growing number of data centers all over the world, bringing high demand for automated tools to provision, change and manage vast numbers of components. Any of the large vendor offers such a tool or suite and - you guessed it - here is place, where the bucks go. HP know that story. Products in this category are former Opsware Server Automation System, BMC BladeLogic, IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager and to bring in some cloudy haze modern and cool products/players like Elastra or 3Tera/Applogic which allow to mix data center and cloud offerings.

Roland

Everyone knows the big four auditors (Deloitte, Ernst&Young, KPMG, PWC) for a long time. In recent times, while our favourite topic becomes more important from week to week, there are the IT Service management big four aka BMC, CA, HP and IBM (alphabetical order!).

As Erin Joyce on enterprisestorageforum.com describes <here> EMC is integrating two solutions they acquired in recent years (Smarts in 2005 and Voyence 2007). Voyence Control is a solution for Automated Configuration and Change Management, while EMC Smarts is a solution for fault isolation and root cause analysis. In combination with the in 2006 acquired nLayers solution for Application Discovery, which is now labelled as EMCs ADM (Application Discovery Manager), it looks like they added ITSM and BSM (Business Service Management) to their interesting product portfolio.

So if I were Cisco and had 45bn$ to spend, I definitly would take a deep look into EMC. I guess together with Cisco, we would see the Big Five.

Roland

As we have learned in a previous post of my valued collegue Chris, automation is a very easy thing -

It is the execution of actions based on conditions.

From the technical standpoint this simple explanation sums it up. But for me, working on productmanagement and marketing issues, I can tell you, that there are loads of other aspects of our featured subject Automation.

Today it’s possible to automate almost everything, starting from doors to production plants and - to switch over to the IT world - from simple applications to system run books even whole datacenters. All in common is the goal to make life easier and to prevent the “user” from doing unnecessary, repeating tasks, like opening doors, pressing knobs, typing commands into a shell window or even executing restart scripts.

I’m sure the potentials of Automation becoming the “next big thing” seems to be huge. So is the number of vendors offering offering products. The wheels are turning and the M&A guys have already started earning money. HP bought Opsware in summer last year for $1.6 billion and BMC Software by that time acquired RealOps, the so called “Run Book Automation pioneer” for $52.5 million and in March this year BladeLogic for an impressing price of more than $800 million. The latest news is CA signing an OEM agreement with Opalis, which leaves plenty of room for rumors. Happy merging.

The answer to the question “why companies are spending these huge amounts of money for Automation technology?” gives Bob Beauchamp, president and CEO of BMC, who said

“Organizations around the world will spend more than $140 billion this year running data centers, Automation is the only way IT can bring this spending under control and still meet the requirements of their businesses.”

Just a last word to think about: How much are companies spending for all the other stuff outside of datacenters?