Opinion: The Dawning of the IT Automation Era

For many companies, offshoring has been a way to reduce IT costs by lowering the cost of labor and facilities. However, offshoring is demonstrating diminished returns as IT infrastructure grows in complexity and service levels become more demanding. The decline in offshoring is already happening. According to the BDO Seidman 2009 Technology Outlook Survey, an annual survey of CFOs conducted in January of 2009, only 42 percent of the 100 CFOs surveyed said they have operations outside the US, compared to 79 percent last year.
 
Despite this, cost problems are not going to go away and companies will still need a way to achieve cost savings in IT operations.
 
The answer to this problem will be IT automation. Automation technology will drive further optimisation and lower the cost of IT operations. In fact, automation technology not only drives significant cost savings, but also enables the better use of IT infrastructure and delivery of service.
 
Several factors are contributing to the coming age of IT automation, including cost reduction pressures and the need to align all business processes in a complex IT environment.
 
Cost Reduction

The first and most obvious reasons for IT automation are the opposing demands for cost reduction and improved service levels and capability. It is clear to everyone that this recession has forced IT professionals to squeeze every bit of extra cost out of their budgets, leaving them with a bare bones operating plan. At the same time, IT organisations continue to be asked to deliver more with less and to deliver business innovation with cost avoidance strategies. These pressures place severe time constraints on existing IT staff that are monopolised by manual tasks, leaving them little time to engage in strategic delivery of services and capability.

In a survey that UC4 conducted in April 2009, we found that an entire day out of the work week was dedicated solely to IT administrative tasks. That is a clear indication that we are wasting valuable staff cycles on well-defined, programmatic, repeatable tasks that could be handled by workload automation technology readily available today. According to a 2007 report by Enterprise Management Associates, without data center automation, the average company would have required eight additional staff, at a cost of £344,280. The survey also found that 77 percent of respondents reported that automation improved data center profitability.