Application Automation in Enterprise Workload Automation

Application Automation in Enterprise Workload Automation Introduction Most applications, databases, and tools still rely heavily on background (batch) processing to support their intended outcomes or maintenance. Over 50% of all application processing still occurs in IT operations using background processing. Application automation provides your organization standardized, stable, and repeatable integrations to any new application, database, or tool that is introduced. The addition of new applications, databases, and tools results in constant change that presents many challenges to enterprise automation goals. A methodology and associated application automation platform to facilitate rapid integration of these new applications, databases, and tools is a critical component of workload automation. Providing the agility to meet the integration needs of both large and small organizations, a rapid application automation tool is critical. With the addition of UC4 proven integrations and standardized business process templates for many applications, workload and application automation can assist in expediting implementations and the associated testing of these new applications, databases, and tools. These process templates are easy to customize to your business processes and help to reduce the risk associated with the introduction of new applications to your core business processes. Executive Overview.................................................. 2 Application Landscape .............................................. 2 What Happened to the Command Line Interface?......... 3 Rapid Automation: A Better Way................................ 4 Is My Business Process Like Everyone Else's? .............. 5 Conclusion .............................................................. 6 Copyright 2009 UC4 Software GmbH (UC4), all rights reserved. The materials in this publication are protected by copyright and/or other intellectual property laws. Any unauthorized use of the materials in this publication can result in an infringement of these laws. Unless expressly permitted, the copying of information or documents from this publication, in any form, without the prior written permission of UC4 is prohibited.
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Executive Overview One of the challenges constantly faced by business is to reduce cost and often this means doing more with less. This is nothing new for IT departments; they have always had mandates to provide the highest quality of service at the lowest possible cost. One of the most commonly adopted strategies is the automation of your business and IT processes. Business processes span multiple people, departments, applications and servers. This results in a very complex, heterogeneous environment. Implementing end to end automation of your business application processes across this landscape can be very difficult. If your organization is like most you might run hundreds or even thousands of applications in your IT landscape. Complexity due to many types of applications further increases your challenges. Each of these of applications may have their own distinct attributes, resulting in the use of different tools to perform automation. Multiple tools create "islands of automation" and prevent the enablement of complete end to end processing. From the business perspective, it is becoming more and more important to integrate all of these applications into one common automation platform. Your IT processes are critical in supporting your operational infrastructure. The operating system Figure 1: Islands of Automation administration, database administration, and IT operations groups are responsible for all IT housekeeping. Your IT infrastructure most likely consists of a significant number of heterogeneous servers and databases. All platforms and databases need management and backup routines run on a daily basis. These are often supported by different tools based on the operating system and database vendor. The tools used to accomplish these maintenance and backup tasks must be incorporated into the automation platform. Time to market is critical to success. Whether your application and IT landscape grows organically or through merger and acquisition, you need to be able to rapidly integrate applications, databases, servers, and tools into your automation strategy. Inside the UC4 Workload Automation Suite, we provide an offering, UC4 Rapid Automation, which allows for fast, relia... [download for more]