EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

There is a reason orchestras have a single conductor. Can you imagine the cacophony that would result if a horn section performed out of sync with a string section? Or if the percussions played a faster beat then the woodwinds?  But in IT management, it’s all too common for organizations to have separate automation platforms conducting individual software elements. In fact, this is often the cause of an increased IT complexity that results in degraded performance and reliability. For instance, SAP’s popular customer relationship management (CRM) software includes a built-in job scheduler – the Computing Center Management System (CCMS) – with some limited capabilities specifically designed to support its unique platform (such as to analyze and distribute client workloads). But this is an independent tool requiring administration and monitoring tasks separate from any other automated solutions. An average IT organization will need to manage dozens of similar management platforms, each with its own unique interface and operating parameters.

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?