Staying in front of change is the new normal. Your organisation now needs to adapt at lightning pace, innovating new solutions that deliver a rich, rewarding customer experience, open new revenue streams and grow the business. Broadcom reveals how a modern, unified workload automation strategy automates your complex and diverse landscape of applications, platforms and technologies to deliver services in an ultra-competitive digital business environment.
Business change is fast, unpredictable and catches out the unwary. Few could have predicted that trade would be grounded by a global virus; that the automotive sector would so quickly be up-ended by electronic vehicles; that retailing would be rapidly reinvented by online services; or that telcos would see a seismic shift from voice to data.
In today’s lightning fast, volatile market, it’s the nimble, responsive enterprises that thrive: the ones that react most quickly to change by delivering on innovative digital transformation strategies that expose new revenue streams, enhance the customer experience and drive efficiency. And most of that innovation is happening in the cloud – either as new cloud services or the migration of major legacy production systems and workloads moving to the cloud.
It falls to the shoulders of developers and IT operations to achieve this transformation at the speed of business. For a long time, they have relied on automation technologies such as release automation to manage software changes and workload automation (WLA) to schedule, monitor, and manage the IT workloads supporting digital processes.
However, these traditional WLA technologies are struggling to cope with the agility demanded by today’s digital transformation. First, many WLA solutions are specific to a single cloud environment, adding complexity. Most large enterprises use multi-cloud solutions, which means there is no coordination between jobs or schedulers on other platforms. Moreover, job scheduling often requires manual intervention and change management, which requires new coding. And, with different schedulers in different environments, staff need to be trained on different user interfaces.
Second, digital transformation creates greater transparency into back office operations problems. Every bump in the road is exposed. For example, problems such as inventory systems not updating or shipping information not processing are immediately exposed to users. Collecting, processing, and sharing this data stresses an enterprise’s legacy infrastructure and IT management tools and exposes processing delays.
Recent research by leading industry analyst firm EMA validates this point. The study reveals that 74% of respondents ‘agree/strongly agree’ that digital transformation requires more from scheduling and automation solutions. Meanwhile, 61% ‘agree/strongly agree’ that the number of scheduling problems and outages directly affecting business outcomes is increasing.
The obvious solution is to deploy multiple WLA solutions – however this simply adds fuel to the flames and leads to the third problem: lack of visibility. The use of multiple WLA tools means that development and operation staff need to be trained on each automation environment. Best practice is harder to define owing to the lack of commonality between each tool. It’s also more difficult to manage dependencies and to ensure the success of the business outcomes is tied to the processing in the various systems managed by two or more tools.
Step forward Workload Automation
It doesn’t have to be this way. Unlike environment-specific point solutions, modern automation solutions centrally manage the execution of all business processes across platforms, ERP systems and business apps – from mainframe to microservices and the cloud. This gives your organisation the agility, speed, visibility and scalability it needs to respond to the constantly changing technological landscape.
This is automation in action. From a WLA perspective, your organisation can rapidly integrate all of its business processes into a single, comprehensive workload automation strategy that is shared from Dev to Ops. Using an agile methodology, you can then run all of these processes as one end-to-end process flow, and manage them through a single point of control.
You can also simplify the automation of your big data, enabling self-services for data scientists, for example, while providing massive scale and stronger governance on data flows. And you can make self-services available for Dev and Business users, thereby increasing the quality of service, reducing the number of service-desk tickets and integrating with your service catalogue.
The bottom line? Workload Automation centrally delivers the WLA, big data automation and self-service automation capabilities you need to drive growth and accelerate your digital transformation – all from a single unified platform.
You can explore this topic in more depth now by reading the EMA Research report, “IT Infrastructure Tools’ Disruption in the Wake of Digital Transformation and Application Modernization”.