Automate 8 software automates tasks in Amazon Cloud Services application and VMware environments
The need for business process automation (BPA) doesn’t start and stop within an enterprise’s premises any longer.
“There needs to be automation now in an orchestrated way across a wide range of flexible IT assets, be they physical, virtual or cloud-based servers,” says Gary Bishop, chief strategy officer at Network Automation, a leading BPA software provider. (See also: Taking the next step in business process automation)
Network Automation is hearing this message from a significant portion of its installed base – some 9,000 clients in 40 countries, Bishop says – as well as witnessing it in general market movement, he says. “These are telling us that automation needs to be able to scale for both on- and off-premises IT processing resources,” he says.
As such, Network Automation today rolled out Automate 8 and Automate BPA Server 8, which offers support for automation in virtualization and cloud computing environments. It has started with the most-used infrastructure-as-a-service cloud and virtualization environments – Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware, respectively, Bishop says.
In the cloud, Automate 8 enables automation via AWS actions including Simple Storage Service, Elastic Compute Cloud, Relational Database Service, SimpleDB and Simple Queue Service. Likewise in VMware environments, the software enables proactive automation of guest and host operations for virtual machines.
“Both AWS and VMware provide operator consoles for doing things like provisioning, snapshotting and deleting servers and things of that nature. What our automation is doing is allowing our customers to put those kinds of actions into workflows so those become unattended processing capabilities and they can deploy based on bus requirements in their organizations,” Bishop says.
In other words, Automate 8 provides the ability to automate operations that typically get done by a human being sitting at a console, says Dustin Snell, CEO of Network Automation. That automation is much-needed, he contends. “We’re bringing our no-code/no-limits philosophy from the on-premises world to various AWS applications and VMware.”
The new software is available for purchase now or for a 30-day, 100% free trial.
Schultz is a longtime IT journalist. You can e-mail her or find her here.
