Technology: Workload Automation, Leveling the Ebb and Flow of Resource Utilization

Businesses are pushing hard on their business applications, big data, business analytics, cloud computing and mobile projects  to help them run their businesses better.  Companies are trying to improve both efficiency and accuracy.  New business software tool features are increasingly crunching more numbers and taking more compute cycles than in the past.  There are more background jobs, automated tasks, and business rules firing off high-compute processes.  But the problem is that the combination of many scheduled and dynamic automated jobs combined with the normal ebb and flow of users working on IT systems can make for a very complex problem of how to optimally use computing resources.

As new software is rolled out, increasingly there is the potential for conflicts and collisions between applications, users and automated tasks becomes greater.  The study from BMC suggests that companies using multiple automation run into some kind of problem, like file loss, job failures and the frequent manual intervention in automation processes.  As amny as 90 percent of companies using multiple automation tools have run into these kinds of problems.

Workload automation job schedulers try to address these problems by reacting to and rescheduling work in real-time based on dynamic demands coming from all applications and processes, all system platforms used, and all system operating systems.  Major vendors of Workload Automation software include companies like IBM, BMC and CA.

Businesses understand and value benefits which they derive from implementations of workload automation.  Some of the benefits which users cite in the BMC study include:

• 76 percent say that workload automation helps them reduce their manual efforts and errors
• 73 percent say that workload automation helps them to achieve higher customer and user satisfaction
• 70 percent say that workload automation has freed up time of over ten people, saving an equivalent of more time than two full-time employees
• 63 percent say that they’re happy with the results that they’ve had with workload automation and plan to seek out and adopt additional new automation technologies
• 55 percent say that workload automation projects ultimately give greater control of projects to business units rather than to IT
• 50 percent say that workload automation helps them innovate new IT and business service offerings