Business-Critical Benefits of Workload Automation, by EMA

Business-Critical Benefits of
Workload Automation Solutions®An ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMAT) White Paper Prepared for ASG Software SolutionsNovember 2009
IT MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,INDUSTRY ANALYSIS AND CONSULTINGIT MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,INDUSTRY ANALYSIS AND CONSULTING
Executive Summary..............................................................................................................................................1
Introduction...........................................................................................................................................................1
The Critical Business Impact of Workload Automation...............................................................................1
Workload Automation Scenarios........................................................................................................................3
Example: Healthcare organization...............................................................................................................3
Example: Retail................................................................................................................................................4
Key Elements for Success...................................................................................................................................5
ASG Solutions for Multi-Platform Workload Automation..........................................................................5
EMA Perspective...................................................................................................................................................6
About ASG.............................................................................................................................................................7
Business-Critical Benefits of Workload Automation Solutions©2009 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.IT MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,INDUSTRY ANALYSIS AND CONSULTING
Executive SummaryFor those who have automated job scheduling for a given platform or, better yet, consolidated job scheduling across multiple platforms and application software suites, the benefits are obvious - staffing efficiencies, error reduction, and simplicity. However, consolidated job scheduling is NOT Workload Automation (WLA) and, to be competitive in tomorrow's IT landscape, enterprises must advance to WLA. Why? Because the components of a workload and the workload itself are only truly meaningful when related to a business requirement. Through this relationship, we understand priorities, business impact, and topological dependencies. WLA, by adding business awareness and ITSM integration to consolidated job scheduling, brings another level of customer-oriented efficiency and cost savings to the enterprise while enabling, through integration, other areas of IT to improve service.Until recently, enterprises have struggled with WLA implementation because of its complexities, dependencies, and costs. These obstacles existed primarily because WLA was simply not a mature technology. Today, however, WLA solutions are accessible, practical, and achievable for a broad spec-trum of enterprises. This paper explores the current WLA landscape and an innovative solution that addresses historical obstacles to implementation.
IntroductionCompanies with significant IT workloads have known for decades the futility of manually submitting, tracking, and responding to complex application transaction processing in real time. This labor-inten-sive and error-prone manual approach leads to poor service, higher operational costs, and increased risk. Long ago, job scheduling software rode to the rescue with the ability to collect multiple applica-tion transactions into batches and process them all at a pre-determined time. This was more efficient, reduced the load on online application servers, and eliminated many manual labor costs and risks. In fact, this base level of automation is still a critical part of most major IT environments for banking, insurance, government, healthcare, manufacturing, telecommunications, and more.However, as the speed and complexity of business has increased, job scheduling has had to evolve. Workload Automation (WLA) is a mature evolution of job scheduling that enables much more com-plex workloads with intelligent, event-... [download for more]