Predictions for IT spending indicate 2009 will be a turning point in enterprise IT. In this economy, IT organizations must radically reduce costs while expanding support for always escalating business demands.
Data center automation, also known as Service Automation, is unique in its ability to deliver against both mandates. BMC Software (NYSE: BMC) today released new versions of its Service Automation portfolio. In addition to significantly expanded functionality, the enhanced solutions are more tightly integrated to support a systematic approach to Business Service Management (BSM) coupled with fast cash ROI at each step.
According to a recent IDC survey, 84 percent of IT organizations see automation as a top investment priority that will help deliver on critical business outcomes. Automation can improve change management, reduce cost, and increase the availability of IT services. This is particularly relevant as the same survey found that 77 percent of IT organizations expect the number of changes made to their infrastructure to increase by at least 10 percent in 2009.
“BMC Service Automation gives us sophisticated data center automation capabilities that significantly reduce variability in our production systems and cut the time to complete administrative tasks,” said Kenny Sexton, Systems Operations Lead for Edmunds.com. “Since deploying the BMC Service Automation solution, we can easily manage 10 times more changes than we could before. This capability is important because our business requirements continue to grow exponentially. BMC enables our Systems Operations team to provide rapid deployments of new server environments and efficiently manage the constantly changing configurations of those environments.”
With BMC Service Automation, customers also have the power to immediately deploy services or applications across a customer’s often highly siloed IT infrastructures. This helps raise the customer’s IT responsiveness while reducing change-associated risk.
BMC Service Automation also enables customers to realize the full potential of virtualization without increasing risk or operational costs. BMC uses a unified and consistent policy-based approach for planning, controlling and managing both physical and virtual environments. This approach provides full visibility to changes across the IT organization and requires just one skill set to manage both types of environments. In addition, the BMC solution allows customers to control and automate virtual machine provisioning from a structured and standardized Service Desk request process.
“Virtualization is attractive to organizations seeking a seamless synchronization of IT resources based on business need. The improvements to BMC’s Service Automation solutions make it easier to provision and manage virtual environments to assure cost-effective, highly available services,” said Andi Mann, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates. “With the ability to dynamically provision appropriate server resources for applications, organizations are able to achieve high availability and fast performance, while improving their adaptability to changing business requirements with greater efficiency and lower cost.”
BMC Service Automation also delivers a service-oriented, real-time view of their operational infrastructure. Through integration with BMC Atrium CMDB and BMC Remedy IT Service Management Suite, BMC’s Service Automation components can correlate and map IT decisions directly to the impact they will have on the business. Potential changes to services can easily be assessed for risk and impact to the business, and systems can be prioritized according to business service criticality and interdependencies. The results allow IT to become a business enabler by reducing time to deploy new services and allowing the IT organization to quickly react to and evolve with business demands.
Visit the following link for more information about specific Service Automation solutions:
www.bmc.com/serviceautomation