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©2012 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
EMA Radar™ for Workload Automation (WLA): Q2 2012
Report Summary
Introduction
In today’s age of cloud and IT-as-a-Service, the importance of Workload Automation (WLA) as
the evolution of job scheduling, and its sister discipline IT Process Automation (ITPA), has grown
tremendously. As a new chapter opens in enterprise IT, where business-unaware technology silos no longer
count as a valid excuse for SLA violations1, the ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES®
(EMA™) team regards automation – WLA and ITPA – as the glue that keeps business processes tightly
integrated. Operating systems, middleware, databases, applications, and business services are simply
technical necessities that must be orchestrated to support and streamline these business processes in the
most efficient manner.
While this EMA Radar™® Report is focused on WLA solutions, the integration of these individual
software packages with ITPA constitutes an important evaluation criterion, as the separation of both
disciplines –WLA and ITPA– is an artificial one. To truly automate entire business processes, WLA and
ITPA have to work together harmonically.
a) WLA is commonly considered an activity that takes place deep in the data center, controlled
by an inner circle of aging mainframe wizards, also often referred to by business stakeholders
as “the data center mafia.” The data center mafia usually knows very little about the business
impact of WLA and is notorious for only contacting business stakeholders to let them know
why a certain request cannot be fulfilled in a timely manner.
b) ITPA, often also referred to as run book automation, can be described as the automated
execution of a set of tasks to address a specific planned or unplanned situation. All the
various steps that have to be taken for processes such as staff onboarding, application release
management, or weekly backups fall under ITPA.
Since the previous EMA Workload Automation Radar Report in 2010, most vendors have recognized
the above requirement to integrate WLA and ITPA in order to effectively support business processes.
Research Methodology
The major challenge of this type of market evaluation is to avoid creating a simple feature comparison.
EMA is aware that in order to be valuable for the end customer, any analyst report must thoroughly
research and consider the client perspective. Enterprise IT is generally about solving actual customer
challenges. Therefore, each software feature is only relevant for this report, if it solves a specific and
important business problem.
To remain entirely objective, this EMA Radar Report is based on a comprehensive survey with over
600 data points that can, for the most part, be measured unambiguously. All survey questions were
founded on customer feedback and vendor responses, and thoroughly verified by a sequence of product
demonstrations and end customer interviews.
EMA acknowledges that in WLA, as well as in most other arenas of enterprise IT, there is no one best
solution for every customer. Therefore, EMA has evaluated each product along five dimensions:
1. Functionality
4. Cost
2. Architecture & Integration
5. Vendor Strength
3. Deployment & Administration
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Service Level Agreement - For more detail on the importance of SLAs, please take a look at the following article:
http:⁄⁄www.enterprisemanagement.com⁄web⁄ema_ac0312.php
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©2012 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
EMA Radar™ for Workload Automation (WLA): Q2 2012
Report Summary
Based on these five dimensions, a potential client might select a solution that offers only average scores
in terms of functionality, but is easily deployed, requires minimal maintenance, and costs significantly
less than some of the functionality leaders.
Providing guidance along these five dimensions will enable potential clients to determine which
solutions to look at more closely. This can mean narrowing down the field to only three vendors, or it
could mean to also include lower cost alternatives into the RFP process. This report will have achieved
its purpose, if EMA has provided the potential WLA customer with the background knowledge and guidance
necessary to confidently make this pre-selection decision.
What Changed Since the Q1 2010 Workload
Automation Radar
The previous EMA Workload Automation Radar Report was released in the first quarter of 2010 –
based on data gathered throughout Q4 of 2009 – and revealed the following key findings:
State of the Discipline in 2010
Many vendors had achieved excellent job scheduling capabilities, but only few were able to offer
even basic ITPA and business integration capabilities.2 No vendor was able to include advanced
SLA-capabilities that were driven by predictive analytics algorithms and able to autonomously manage
the critical path (see Figure 1).
2
Business integration is referred to as the ability to link IT services to business requirements (Business Impact Analysis).
EMA Radar™ for Workload Automation (WLA): Q2 2012
Report Summary
Figure 1: 2010 WLA Radar Findings
As Figure 1 shows, WLA in 2010 was still a long way away from being able to truly automate entire
processes. Technology silos, a lack of awareness of a workload’s business impact, and a lack of predictive
analytics capabilities did not allow customers to achieve their ultimate goal of resource optimization
and agile IT services delivery.
Progress since 2010
When reevaluating the marketplace over two years later, significant progress can be seen compared to
the 2010 WLA Radar Report (see Figure 2). Cloud and the concept of service-driven IT were the main
catalysts for this progress.
• Resource optimization: It is the main goal of any organization to receive the best possible ROI
from its IT investments. To realize this ROI, each physical resource has to be utilized to its optimal
degree and waste has to be eliminated. To achieve optimal usage, all storage, network, compute, and
software resources have to be pooled. Through pooling, these resources are abstracted from their
underlying physical infrastructure and therefore can be dynamically assigned to users almost in real
time. This ability to rapidly distribute enterprise IT resources based on near real-time requirements
brings the data center one important step closer to resource optimization.
• IT Process Automation: Automatically provisioning, managing, and decommissioning hardware
and software resources, based on end user requests issued through a service portal ensures the
ultimate degree of IT agility. This agility allows the organization to turn IT into a true business
differentiator, by enabling end users to proactively utilize IT resources to the company’s advantage.
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©2012 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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©2012 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
EMA Radar™ for Workload Automation (WLA): Q2 2012
Report Summary
• Business Integration: Since the 2010 Radar, there has been significant progress in terms of
integrating WLA products with the overall business management environment. Most vendors now
offer connectors for service management solutions, CMDBs, BI & Big Data packages, systems
management software, as well as for VMware vSphere and for the Amazon EC2 cloud. WLA
has come a long way from being an isolated discipline to becoming a “good citizen” that is well
integrated with its neighbors in the data center and in the cloud.
• Predictive Analytics: The fact that five out of this year’s six “Value Leaders” either offer their own
predictive analytics engine or integrate with Terma Software Labs’ JAWS3 analytics solution shows
the tremendous progress that was made in workload analytics since the last Radar Report. Vendors
have recognized that offering predictive analytics is a true differentiator for their products, as it is a
critical precondition for making WLA business process-aware.
• Job Scheduling: Job scheduling already was mature at the time of the previous Radar Report.
However, EMA can still report minor improvements in terms of job triggers, alerting, and API
comprehensiveness this time around.
Figure 2: WLA Maturity in 2012
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See page 14 for more detail on JAWS.
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