and reporting tool. Once deployed, CoreFirst discovers how applications traverse the network and use the managed devices, and the agents monitor the transaction workloads on the servers.

For example, Metzger says he gives priority to the applications supporting TransUnion’s annual credit-report service for its customers. CoreFirst agents monitor the workload on the servers used by the prioritized applications; when transactions compete for compute resources, the agents allocate resources to the higher-priority applications.

“The complexity in the environment grows as you get more services. If the software can discover that rather than having someone defining it, then you can get ahead of the changes that may impact business,” he says.“We can automatically better tune our environment to deliver optimized services knowing the usage models and resource availability.”

Trend takes hold

As niche players take the data-center automation market by storm, expect to see veteran management vendors and established automation players revamp their offerings to address the growing customer demand.

Opsware acquired run-book automation innovator iConclude and plans to use its OpsForce platform to round out its network-and server-automation tools. BladeLogic, for its part, licenses RealOps software in its Orchestration Manager to help customers automate IT processes around change and configuration management. And industry watchers expect to see the big four management vendors -- BMC, CA, HP and IBM -- dip their toes into the market either through acquisition, partnerships or internal product development.

“If you look at the big four, they don’t offer that much automation around IT operations,” Forrester’s Hubbert says.“These automation vendors will challenge the big four in that customers will start asking them how their software can take work out of IT operations for them.”

For instance, CA recently hinted at plans to deliver what it called intelligent automation using XML across CA and third-party products. And IBM, which has long touted its autonomic computing initiative, is expected to start introducing operational automation technologies through integrations with Opalis.

Gartner estimates in 2007 about 35% of IT managers will start to invest in such automation technologies and that number

is expected to grow as existing implementations deliver incremental successes. But the promise of automation isn’t necessarily a human-less environment. Today’s IT automation tools promise to make supporting the business faster, more accurate and less expensive for many organizations.

“The thinking is that these technologies can drive a more agile infrastructure and enable IT to more easily align with the business,” says Stephen Elliot, a senior analyst at IDC.“Ultimately whether it’s your IT culture or your infrastructure, if you are static you are in trouble. You have to become flexible and agile, and automation can help do that by lowering costs and driving efficiencies into daily processes.”

 

“the complexity in the environment grows as you get more services.
If the software can discover that rather than having someone defining it,
then you can get ahead of the changes that may impact business.”

Scott Metzger, CTO, TransUnion Interactive