IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,

INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING

Executive Summary

In an era when IT services and business competitiveness are increasingly intertwined, and when Cloud

Computing and the move to virtualization are taking center stage in IT priorities, the need for higher

levels of automation is becoming increasingly self-evident. Automation in all of its various forms,

whether IT self-service, or dynamic provisioning, or disaster recovery, or fault remediation response,

has become a top priority for many IT organizations in recent years with good reason. These adoptions

have been spurred in part by increasing levels of organizational

This report provides an introduction to key automation options, and introduces iWave Software as a

leading innovator in IT Process Automation (ITPA) (often referred to as “Run-Book Automation”)

and Private Cloud Management. With its versatile platform, prebuilt workflows and 50+ third-party

adapters, iWave is well positioned to provide the “mission critical” ITPA for uniting most existing and

planned automation investments, across multiple brands and complex data center processes.

Market Context

ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) analysts divide automation into three

logical categories: people-to-people, people-to-machine, and machine-to-machine. The most typical example of

people-to-people is service desk workflow. Machine-to-machine automation is classically associated with data

center automation functions such as job scheduling and disaster recovery, but it can also be important

in root cause diagnostics and cross-domain event management response with an eye to service impact.

People-to-machine automation often requires a mixture of the above, and automation tasks most closely

associated with self-service provisioning and change and configuration management usually involve

these combinations.

Automation is becoming increasingly required as more unified approaches to change, configuration,

event, performance and other types of management through CMDB Systems require automation to

minimize administrative overhead. On the other hand, IT organizations moving to Cloud and virtualized

environments cannot effectively monitor and manage changes without at least run-time currency.

IT Process Automation

The ability to automate and integrate the workflow of complex, multi-discipline IT management pro-

cesses is the glue that binds the entire Data Center Automation stack. Data Center operations are full

of complex multi-disciplinary workflows – such as business requests for new systems, processes for

approving and managing security changes, or recovery from the loss of a system or device. Without

ITPA, every task in these processes stands alone, and the problems of manual processing and latency

creep back into the Data Center.

iWave Software’s Orchestrator Brings Multi-Brand Process Automation to Enterprises, Service Providers, and Cloud

©2010 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

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maturity, ITIL standards adoption and an ever more exacting set

of business pressures for delivering more value with constrained,

and sometimes diminishing, resources. It has also been accelerated

by the advent of cloud computing driven through IT self-service

and virtualized infrastructures which demand far more currency

in monitoring and managing change than more traditional, physi-

cal infrastructures.

Automation in all of its various

forms has become a top priority

for many IT organizations in

recent years with good reason.

IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,

INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING

Operators have to take requests and data from one system (e.g., an end-user request for a new system,

a synchronize incidents, or a security action request), and enter them in another system (e.g., a provi-

sioning system, a data transformation tool, or an access approval system) – a workflow that continues

through multiple systems, people, organizations and locations. Moreover, it all needs to be managed

cohesively across operations and in the service desk with consistent policies, frames of reference and

trusted sources of information.

With ITPA, these management processes can be integrated and automated, resulting in reduced error

rates, more strategic operations, faster request turnaround, and higher productivity – all with lower

operational and resource costs.

Indeed, automation has many separate, albeit interrelated benefits. These include:

• Reduction of errors by minimizing exposure to manual dependencies.

• Minimizing risks through error reduction, as well as by hardening or standardizing approved ways

of working.

• Superior capabilities for compliance and audits, as processes are more consistent, more defined,

and more risk free.

• Minimal errors and risk also reduce downtime for critical applications.

• Minimizing delays by accelerating time to implement and validate changes.

• Reducing costs through improved operational efficiencies.

• Enabling staff to be leveraged more strategically versus reactively or, where needed, supporting

staff consolidation.

EMA data in Figure 1 shows strong financial impact from the adoption of ITPA in data center envi-

ronments. Not surprisingly, reduction in human errors and reductions in security issues and other risks

are fairly aligned with 15% and 14% improvements over data center initiatives where ITPA was not in

place. Embedding processes into repeatable, reusable automation can all but eliminate accidents, and

codifies or “hardens” processes so that there is no chance of for-

getting steps or incurring risk from employee departures. ITPA

can also provide a form of access control by targeting predefined

“owners” for predefined tasks, such as approvals, review or

diagnostics. All this can lead to far more effective audits, as both

human and machine dependent tasks become more standardized,

consistent, repeatable and measurable. And finally, by allowing

more professionals to spend more time on strategic decision

making and planning rather than routine tasks, IT organizations

have shown improved employee retention and job satisfaction,

along with the more obvious gains in operational efficiency.

Embedding processes into

repeatable, reusable automation

can all but eliminate accidents,

and codifies or “hardens”

processes so that there

is no chance of forgetting

steps or incurring risk from

employee departures.

iWave Software’s Orchestrator Brings Multi-Brand Process Automation to Enterprises, Service Providers, and Cloud

©2010 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com

Page 2