EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

Earlier today I presented findings from my recent EMA Radar for Workload Automation (WLA): Q1 2016 report. The recording for the webinar is now live here.

Cloud computing can speed up deployment, reduce costs, and increase efficiency and connectivity. It can open up new ways to get computing work done, but more importantly, the inherent connectivity can change the way employees interact with each other and with customers. It can also change the way companies interact with suppliers and partners. The ease of standing up new apps and connecting with users through mobile devices, as well as the minimal capital investment, can spur innovation.

What does Big Data mean to traditional enterprise IT? Organizations of any size and industry are becoming more and more aware of the incredible importance of capturing, managing and analyzing the data available to them. The more comprehensively companies are able to tap structured and unstructured data sources, the quicker they can refresh this data and the more successfully they make this body of data available to all business units, the better they can develop advantages in the market place. Today’s business units are demanding the rapid implementation of these big data use cases, as well as optimal resiliency, cost efficiency, security and performance.

Of course, I always encourage practitioners to carefully study the full EMA research report on the “Obstacles and Priorities on the Journey to the Software-Defined Data Center” or at least read the research study summary or at the very least join the EMA SDDC Research webinar on February 18, but I still want to briefly summarize the key findings here.

With all of the negative attention that the NSA – RSA relationship (or deal) has been getting, many are fired up.  If the deal went down anything like it has been reported by Reuters, then rightfully so.  However, the last minute boycotts of the RSA event to show disapproval are a bit much.

Discovering, capturing and making sense of complex interdependencies is central to running IT organizations more effectively, and it is also a critical part of running the businesses IT serves. Whether it’s optimizing a network, or an application infrastructure, managing change, or providing more effective security-related access—more often than not these problems involve a complex set [...]

With its roots in mainframe job scheduling, workload automation is often seen as a relic in today's age of cloud, Big Data, mobile management and DevOps. Do we even still need workload automation as a separate discipline or should we simply roll the management of batch jobs into other automation disciplines, such as IT process automation? Is the market for workload automation software stagnating or is there still potential for growth?

Cloud is still a rapidly evolving discipline, with currently many organizations thinking about how to get started or how to take their limited cloud environment to the next level. These organizations are faced with two general challenges. They have to a) get their own house – data center – in order and b) identify a shortlist of vendors that best fit their individual requirements.

Cloud is still a rapidly evolving discipline, with currently many organizations thinking about how to get started or how to take their limited cloud environment to the next level. These organizations are faced with two general challenges. They have to a) get their own house - data center – in order and b) identify a shortlist of vendors that best fit their individual requirements.

During this year's research for the 2012 EMA Workload Automation (WLA) Radar Report, we encountered a number of very interesting core findings. These research results mostly originated from dozens of conversations with end customers, who have been using WLA software for many years and sometimes even for decades. WLA, by definition, is a mature discipline, as it started during the beginning of mainframe times, then became more complex when organizations adopted distributed computing, and today is faced with a new challenge: the cloud. Please take a look at what our research showed as the most important aspects of a modern WLA solution. The following vendors were included in the report: Arcana, ASCI, ASG, BMC, CA Technologies, Cisco, Flux, MVP Systems, Network Automation, ORSYP, Stonebranch, UC4.