IBM pushes for greater IT automation

ORLANDO -- IBM intends to transform how data centers operate for customers looking to reduce manual labor, cut costs and put in place a more energy-efficient infrastructure. Industry watchers say Big Blue could have the right technology to turn those plans into reality but needs to better clarify its value to customers.

At its inaugural Pulse Conference in Orlando this week, IBM laid out a vision for IT operations that rely heavily on automation to reduce the cost of manual labor and inefficient computing, and the company provided details around management software products that could support such improvements in enterprise IT shops. The show drew more than 4,000 attendees and focused hands-on labs, tutorials and sessions on management software IBM acquired over the years with Tivoli, Micromuse and MRO Software.

"For all we have accomplished, we are still challenged with the issues of visibility, control and automation," says Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of IBM Software Group. "We are now in a position to create a common control environment as we evolve toward full automation. IT will be the vehicle to take the labor problem out of the challenge of controlling the world’s infrastructure. It’s a simple idea, but it’s not easy to do." (Read our Q&A with Mills.)

IT managers agree IBM’s message, dubbed the industrialization of IT, is on target as they look to automate processes such as service request, asset management and disaster recovery tasks.

"We’d have to hire 15 people to do the bare minimum of what we are using IBM software to do now," says Matthew Elston, a technical manager at pharmacy benefits manager HealthTrans in Greenwood Village, Colo. "With virtualization, transaction-based applications and the need to scale business fast, you just can’t have five people working in IT, supporting it all manually. People need to sleep."

Elston is part of a team at HealthTrans working with IBM Tivoli’s Workload Scheduler and Dynamic Workload Broker applications to transition hundreds of homegrown scripts into process templates so the company can more quickly add clients without having to add head count.

"Our applications need to process in subseconds, and we need to keep transaction response time at a minimum without having to grow IT staff as the business grows," says Brian Frantz, operations manager at HealthTrans. "Before these products, our processes couldn’t scale, the scripts were 10 years old. Now it’s a case of being able to constantly evolve our environment without overhauling everything."

The case for automation at HealthTrans is not unique. The push to incorporate automation technology is becoming more common across all types of businesses as the need for IT to expand operations and provide more services with the same resources grows. The technology has shifted from a nice-to-have to a must-have in the past 18 months, industry watchers say, and its relevance to data center operations will only continue to grow in importance.