Real-time Intelligence Combined with Automation is Key

Last week, JP Garbani at Forrester posted a blog on Complex Event Processing and Automation. It’s a nascent segment of the market, but over the last couple of years, we’ve seen more and more customers needing to sense and respond to business events in real-time. (And that’s why we acquired CEP technology last year and created UC4 Decision and UC4 Insight.) They are leading indicators — to ensure successful business and IT automation, exceed SLAs and manage the IT environment on demand.

The power of process automation in combination with CEP enables customers to fully leverage the elasticity the cloud and virtualization offers. You need the intelligence to interpret (we call it “context-awareness”) business indicators and IT events, but you also need the end-to-end view of the automated process to know which process-steps are coming next.  The combination gives you the patterns and ability to predict what action is required/needed (essentially, to do the right thing at the right time.)

The bottom line is: IT needs to fulfill business needs on time at the lowest costs. And for the IT guys: You don’t have to wake up in the middle of the night anymore to solve a problem and search logfiles for hours and hours to find the failure.  CEP frees up your time to do new, more strategic things.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll blog more about specific use cases where the combo of CEP and Automation (and UC4’s Decision and Insight products) is helping customers — we’re seeing it deployed in a range of industries from e-commerce to utilities to financial services.

OSCON: Peder Ulander and Barton George on the Cloud

At the Cloud Summit during OSCON in Portland. It’s where “open” is meeting cloud. (And where shorts and sandals were the couture du jour).

Much of the debate, as you might guess, centers on what role open source software and the concept of open API’s or standards will play in cloud computing going forward.

The jury is still out on that topic but the idea that there could be a standard API, Rackspace is trying to be first mover in this space, between you and a service provider in the cloud is intriguing, as it would facilitate interoperability. And choice.

You could source your infrastructure or software from any provider subscribing to the API. That means you could purchase services tailored to meet your SLA’s. In some instances it would be guaranteed up time, network capacity and completion of workload processing. Other times it could be based on price/performance. And you could move the same workload between these sources dependent on changes to the attached SLAs. Still more to go in this space – but promising discussions.

In between sessions, I had a chance to catch up with Barton George, Dell’s cloud computing evangelist.

And Peder Ulander, CMO for cloud.com.

It’s great to see this level of innovation, debate and excitement in the industry again. History tells us that means you are about to reap the benefits of the collective wisdom of a whole bunch of smart people.

How to Make Your Virtual World Smarter

Back from the Gartner ITOM Summit – attendance was up year-over-year and the subject du jour was virtualization.

It’s great.  With virtualization you can extract incredible utilization efficiencies from your server infrastructure. And save a houseful of cash on power, space and cooling costs.  Hard to argue with that. But there’s one little problem.  Well, maybe two.

1. How do you manage those virtual environments?  Looks like VMWare and a host of smaller companies are setting off to build the tools and utilities to let your gain control of your virtual infrastructure.  Bravo.  We welcome that innovation and are looking forward to integrating into that ecosystem as it develops.
2. Who’s making sure the right process runs at the right time? Every time. Automatically.  In your brand new virtual environment?  Not so easy.  In fact – there’s not a whole lot of discussion of the fact that these virtual worlds don’t have the application or process awareness to facilitate that dynamic provisioning of your enterprise processing. Well, that’s where we come in.

UC4 has two new Rapid Automation packages that enable you to make your virtual world smarter. (Read what Forrester’s Jean-Pierre Garbani has to say about these new virtualization RA Packages here.)  Our Automation Engine, agents and rapid start templates let you seamlessly transport your application and processing requirements from your physical infrastructure to your virtual environments.  Now you can run your mission critical workloads in virtual environments with the confidence you’ll meet your SLA’s.  Now you can increase the utilization rates on your virtual machines because you know what process requires what resources.  Before you start.

And now you can bring your virtual machines into your housekeeping strategy using UC4’s Automation Engine to schedule routine maintenance, administrative and management tasks.  We’ve got you covered from snapping off virtual machines to maintaining them to decommissioning them.  All based on your process requirements.  Not how many VM’s you can cram into a blade.  That’s how UC4 is innovating – we’re enabling your business processes to drive new technology.  Not the other way round.

Rethink Automation

When we changed our corporate identity in March we did so with a purpose.

We wanted to signal that we’re on the move and revv’ing up the innovation engine to address the automation challenges of today and tomorrow.  There are fundamental, tectonic shifts underway in the IT landscape.  What’s a job to be scheduled today is a rented service to be scheduled tomorrow.  What’s a physical server hosting one application is a virtualized rack of blades that is hosting 10’s of applications.  On someone else’s infrastructure.

And what used to be nicely coordinated, rigidly scheduled and eminently predictable world is now on-line, real-time, all the time. It’s all about exploding connectivity and exponential increases in events and data.  It’s virtualization, Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Software as a Service and everything in between.

But while everyone’s rushed to provide the compute infrastructure as a service – who’s figuring out how to automate your business processes across your physical, virtual and cloud infrastructure?

What we need is Automation as a Service.  So that’s what we’re building at UC4.  An Intelligent Service Automation platform that bridges your on-premise, virtual and cloud computing infrastructure, treats them as one resource pool and the right job gets run at the right time. Everytime. Automatically.

In the last two quarters we’ve introduced a Web Services agent, Informatica and Business Objects agents, and two new Rapid Automation solutions to improve the utilization and capability of your VMware and Hyper-V virtual infrastructure.  And there’s more coming.

We’re the right company to take on the challenge of propelling automation technology forward.  We’ve been a trusted innovator in this space for the last 25 years.  In fact today, we are the largest independent software automation company in the world.  I figure, when you want to tackle the tough problem – go to someone who’s passionate about it.