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As today’s corporate IT organizations seek to support growth while containing costs, the automation of repetitive and time consuming IT tasks is often viewed as a panacea. HP has delivered a suite of products for Business Service Automation that enables corporate IT to automate change across the entire business service to eliminate costly and error prone manual processes.
So how effective are these tools and what is the return from investing in automation?
HP Software commissioned King Research to interview customers who have purchased and deployed HP Business Service Automation solutions to get input on the actual benefits received. King Research conducted twelve indepth telephone interviews with existing HP customers using Business Service Automation products during the spring of 2008. This report is a summary of those conversations.
Introduction to HP Server and Network Automation
HP’s solutions for Server and Network Automation enable customers to automate the management of their infrastructure including servers and network devices. These solutions are specifically designed to meet the needs of large, heterogeneous, geographically distributed environments.
HP Server and Network Automation Customer Profile
King Research spoke with four customers currently using HP’s solutions for Server and Network Automation. Job responsibilities ranged from server management, automation, or service delivery to audit and compliance architecture. Participants worked for infrastructure teams or systems operations groups at companies ranging in size from 7,000 employees to over 100,000 employees.
Three of the four server and network automation customers interviewed for this report have been using these HP products since 2006 (originally purchased from Opsware which was acquired by HP in 2007), and one since 2007. Each participant’s organization is directly responsible for day-to-day management of provisioning, backups, monitoring, job scheduling, audit and compliance, and other systems operations tasks. Today, these customers automate management of 1200 to 6500 nodes with HP products. Three of the four participants were directly involved in the purchase and deployment of the HP tools.
Customers look to server and network automation to reduce costs and deliver compliance standards
Prior to purchasing automation solutions for server and network management tasks, all of these customers were using a mix of one-off tools and manual processes. One of the key pain points cited by all customers was the difficulty and expense of maintaining the point tools and manual processes for different types of server and network environments. These heterogeneous environments resulted in several different business motivations for purchasing server and network automation including:
1. Reduced Costs – All participants described inefficient and expensive processes for managing servers and networks prior to implementing the HP tools. This included: costs of different tools required for each type of server or device in a heterogeneous environment; headcount costs to perform tedious manual tasks that were not automated; and costs to develop and maintain in-house tools.
2. Audits and Compliance – Two participants specifically mentioned compliance as a key motivation for their purchase. A company that hosts client data had a particular pain point around the doubly challenging effort to maintain both corporate standards and customer-specific requirements. For another customer, manual processes were being used to ensure SOX compliance on 50 of their servers, but when asked to extend those same processes across thousands of servers, they knew they had to bring in automation.
3. Supportability – For one participant the key business goal was supportability of the overall environment. They had set a very specific target of automating as many internal processes as possible in order to reduce the sheer amount of manual work being spent to create an easily supported and consistent environment.
HP selected for providing comprehensive solution All participants described implementing a stringent evaluation process before making their purchase decision. There were detailed requirements outlined by each customer but all stressed the importance of having a global solution with cross-platform support. Other products evaluated in-depth by participants included BladeLogic, Altiris and Tripwire.
HP was chosen in each instance because of their comprehensive solution. For one customer the support for both network and server automation was important compared to a competitive solution that offered support only for server automation. Another customer with a particularly broad range of environments said it was important that only HP didn’t require independent resources or third-party add-ons. For another, the references customers provided gave the decision-maker confidence in choosing HP solutions.
One customer was particularly impressed with the evolution of the product demonstrated during the evaluation process. Several product enhancements were identified in order to meet requirements and the HP team put resources in place to gather more information, present mock-ups of the product enhancements and get feedback to ensure that they had understood the requirements correctly. Those features were incorporated into the next product release.
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