Rise of the machines

When Marvin Stone, CIO at New Century Title Insurance in San Diego, needed to improve the workflow for his company's residential refinance-transaction process, he turned to automation software from Opalis, which enabled his staff to stop writing code and start putting their service-oriented-architecture applications to use.

At New Century Title, each real estate transaction involves multiple parties that must compile financial, credit and property information in a limited time period. Stone's staff used Opalis Integration Server to build a "drag-and-drop" application, which the company prototyped without writing a single line of code. The new process sends incoming orders to personnel, updates the SQL Server database, alerts stakeholders and handles errors that occur -- all without human intervention.

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"I don't want to have a lot of handwritten code, so we have one platform that enables us to build applications and automate tasks. We saved between $10,000 and $15,000 prototyping that one application through Opalis," Stone says. "Our goal is to have zero-contact response on some issues that we can remediate within Opalis."

Stone uses Opalis in concert with VMware's GSX Server in a Windows 2003 environment. The software installs on a dedicated server and works with third-party management tools and virtualization products via APIs. This allows IT managers to create tasks that will be carried out based on predefined triggers. Stone says with the SOA and virtualization his environment supports, automation is a must-have. "Our environment is so fluid in terms of the applications that we support that we need to automate many parts of what we do," Stone says.

Automation isn't new, but the way it's being used in today's data centers is. Software tools once responsible for running batch jobs, pinging network devices for availability and monitoring server use are now being called upon to automate multistep processes across IT domains.

Enterprise IT managers are looking to automation to keep up with the constant change in their complex data-center environments. Automation represents one of the few ways IT managers can introduce operational efficiencies. And the growing popularity of best practice such frameworks as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) have network executives realizing that with standard processes in place, manual labor can be slashed when automation is added to the mix.

"IT automation has been promised forever, and in many cases, the technology has delivered, but only with basic, task-oriented functions," says David Williams, a research vice president at Gartner. "Today people regard automation as being more complex workflow automation based on cross-domain IT processes, something much more sophisticated than a bunch of scripts supporting a bunch of simple tasks."