Published:
February 14 2011, 07:35 AM
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by
Mike Odusami
The 5th and final installment in the Go Beyond Job Scheduling Webcast series by Jim Anderson, VP of Product Management, CA Technologies, painted a very fascinating picture of the business challenges driving the current transformation in IT and the role of workload automation as one of the key enablers of that transformation.
The emerging reality of IT as a revenue driver in most industries is without a doubt. But current economic and budgetary constraints are forcing a rethink on IT investments with many organizations undergoing zero or paltry budget increase. As demand on IT outpaces its resources, the mantra to do more with less has never been more apt. Thanks to innovations in virtualization and cloud computing the savvy IT organization finally has an opportunity to align its data center operations with ever growing business demands. Innovations in data center automation by vendors like CA Technologies are helping 100s of customers today transform their environments from IT-centric operations to a service-oriented, dynamic data center where resources are pooled and allocated on the fly in response to demands.
Workload automation is a central pillar of that transformation journey and as Jim discussed in this and previous sessions, CA Technologies has been busy helping customers evolve from multiple batch-oriented job scheduling tools to a consolidated, scalable and multi-platform enterprise workload automation solution with 360 degree insight into running workloads.
The session highlighted new capabilities in the solution, including extensive orchestration to automate many workload processes and to reduce error-prone manual interventions and, workload service optimization, which offers cloud bursting to enable workload provisioning on the most efficient private or public cloud environments as determined by business policies; and workload service assurance capabilities, which offer service quality monitoring (SLAs), analytics for service predictability and root-cause analysis to lower the cost and time spent trouble shooting workload issues.
I have attempted to capture some of the key areas discussed at this event, but Jim also touched on how CA Technologies is delivering new capabilities in some of the areas covered in previous webcasts such as application workload automation for modern n-tier applications with pre-built workload components (Webcast #3) through service-oriented automation and event-driven services based approach amongst others. If you missed this or any of the previous live events, a replay is available here. It will be well worth your while.
CA Technologies unique perspective on workload automation comes through in the depth and breadth of functionalities offered, while preserving legacy functions that customers still use today (such as batch job scheduling). Additionally, customers don't have to roll-out the entire solution all at once because it is built on an architecture that supports modular deployment according to immediate workload needs. Lastly, CA Workload Automation is part of CA Automation Suite for Data Centers, a broad solution for data center and cloud automation with individual components for process orchestration, server automation and configuration automation.
In closing, we would like to thank all the attendees for their time and for providing great feedback to Jim and his team throughout the Webcast series. And finally congratulations to Ezra Carroll of TransUnion, the lucky winner of the iPad drawing that we had for attendees.