Many organisations on Digital Transformation journeys are struggling with the automation of supporting business workloads. This is primarily due to increased complexity and the need to operate across multiple applications and platforms such as mainframes, distributed systems plus multiple cloud providers.
“Improving automation maturity is essential to the success of these business transformations and it starts with operationalising business workloads for better insights and predictability,” said Ryan Lawlor, Sales Specialist at CASA Software.
“Companies need real time single point-of-view visibility across all schedulers and business critical applications to be able to track the performance and predicted outcome of a specific workload across multiple platforms. This is how they achieve the level of maturity and service level assurances needed to support the business requirements in an increasingly complex IT environment.”
How do organisations reduce the complexity of having multiple schedulers and workload automation tools?
Lawlor says that more than 50% of organisations would like to standardise on one workload automation tool but very few ever get there. “Most organisations have more than two schedulers and this continues to grow as they move to the cloud. The reason for this is there is too much risk involved and existing investments must be written down and staff retrained,” he adds.
This is where Broadcom’s Automation Analytics and Intelligence (AAI) solution comes in. AAI is a platform that is deployed on top of all workload automation tools. It provides a single pane-of-glass across multiple vendors and business applications yielding enterprise visibility into business critical applications as well as an improved understanding of batch impact due to failures, latency and operator error.
AAI also provides the visibility needed to improve efficiencies and reduce costs. It helps transform the customer experience by using advanced analytics to prevent issues occurring but in the event they do occur, detection and resolution is much faster.
A case study compiled by EMA Research shows that AAI was able to reduce job-failure incidents by 60% for a Top 10 global financial institution with this reduction subsequently continuing at a rate of 50% per year.
“Overall, AAI drives improvements in IT operations, the digital transformation journey, and the success of the business as a whole. It enables IT departments to move beyond an operational mindset to one that is service oriented establishing its role as a business enabler.”
AAI’s combination of workload automation analytics and intelligence were investigated by Forrester. This case study indicated that a global financial services firm realised time savings and improved productivity, as well as business insights from workload analytics data. The firm also avoided revenue loss associated with downtime and there was better IT-business collaboration.
As always, return on investment is important. Forrester’s study revealed this company realised benefits of US$2,801,733 over three years versus costs of US$932,295—showing a net present value of US$1,869,438 and a stunning return on investment of 201%.
“Improving automation maturity is essential to the success of any Digital Transformation journey by providing real time, single point-of-view visibility of all workloads across schedulers. Business critical applications will allow companies to optimise costs, better align IT delivery to business strategy, and improve customer experience,” concludes Lawlor.
