– Aleksey Lazaryev, Director of Product Management at Network Automation (www.networkautomation.com), says:

Why is automation technology useful in today’s enterprise data centers?

Automation technology has emerged as an enabling technology for organizations looking to provide a cost-effective and tangible way to expedite the processing of their IT and business assets. Today’s IT environment consists of multiple servers, both physical and virtual, platforms and a wide range of applications. Organizations continue to place high value in the ability to reduce costs and risk through IT and business process automation across heterogeneous tools and infrastructure that exist in every data center. Faced with pressures, demands and limitations, CIOs and IT executives need solutions that can streamline and automate time-consuming and costly IT processes. Developers need user-friendly tools to shorten the application development cycle. Business analysts need an understanding of the existing business process as well as the effectiveness of producing results.

The family of AutoMate products deliver an automation platform that streamlines and integrates IT and business processes across disparate systems and hybrid computing environments. AutoMate sets an entirely new standard for server and desktop automation. Built on the experience earned from delivering automation to more than 9,000 client across 40 countries, AutoMate gives users the power of VMware and Amazon Web Services cloud-based automation, integration with SharePoint, Exchange, and AS2, just to name a few. Whether you are provisioning Active Directory resources, processing batch files, managing dynamic job scheduling, transferring and manipulating files, AutoMate allows you to achieve these results from a unified, coherent automation platform.

With AutoMate, automation can be accomplished extremely quickly without the need for programming expertise. This makes a solution involving AutoMate very affordable. But AutoMate also provides the power and reliability that top-tier technology companies demand. Its client/server architecture allows for multiple-machine, cross-platform processing on anywhere from one to thousands of computers. Its centralized management tools provide a unified view of all automation across the computer network, and ensure reliable execution of all automation processes.

Benefits for the enterprise:

  • Eliminate Code, Reduce Errors – Reduce costs and hassles associated with developing and maintaining code, scripts, and batch files. Reduce machine and employee downtime stemming from process errors or delays and errors associated with maintaining code. 
  • Curb Limitations – Extend the capabilities and overcome the limitations imposed by legacy systems and applications as well as the knowledgebase of the individual(s) responsible for writing scripts whose core function may or may not be as a developer.
  • Accelerated Information Flows – Accelerate data flows, making information workers (i.e. business users and decision-makers) more effective and efficient by delivering real-time access to accurate data.
  • More Productive Employees – Eliminate time-consuming, labor-intensive, repetitive IT tasks; enabling employees to focus on strategic activities where human interaction and thought add the most value.
  • Centralize Resources – Improve security and control of IT processes by centralizing the management of the automation network.
  • Facilitate a Cohesive Organization – Improve collaboration between business users who benefit from automated processes and IT professionals responsible for delivering automation.

Good on the budget.

CIO’s are responsible for aligning a company’s technology with its strategy and business practices. They need software that can bridge the gap between the IT department’s resources and individual business unit requirements. They need software that is extremely flexible so they can tailor it to their business requirements as they are. Yet, at the same time, they need to deploy robust automation applications quickly without the hassles of managing an army of coders and developers. This translates into significant cost savings.

The AutoMate platform enables organizations to execute IT and business processes continuously without any productivity loss or fatigue, with minimal or no manual intervention. This implies that organizations can plan automation activities beyond the traditional eight-hour work shift, reducing the elapsed duration for execution.

The Shift to Dynamic, Intelligent Process Automation

The shift to dynamic, intelligent process automation stems from IT executives constantly grappling with rapidly changing business conditions and requirements. Current market conditions demand higher productivity, better customer service, and a tighter integration between the enterprise and its customers and partners. Complicating matters is that IT departments have a hard time understanding the language of business managers and users, so IT project delays are commonplace. This can be very frustrating in a competitive environment where the imperative to change along with business conditions is paramount.

Forrester Research Inc. states that the “evolutionary paths of automation will continue unabated” and that “performance tools can now act as triggers for task automation…” (The Shifting Sands of IT Compel a New Landscape for IT Automation Tools, Forrester Research, October 16, 2009). Thus, automation will bridge the gap between IT and Business units, enabling it to change the way IT departments deliver data and services to information workers, thereby adding new dimensions of flexibility and agility to their business. With automation, enterprises can quickly realize the benefits of IT process automation – driving down management and operation costs and increasing productivity – while enforcing compliant best practices aimed at improving performance and availability of critical business applications.