IT automation helps during slowdown

BANGALORE, INDIA: In an interview with CIOL, Gaurav Agarwal, country manager, Tivoli, IBM/South Asia talks about IT automation, how automated process in IT helps in business transformation and about technology trends in 2009.

Excerpts:

CIOL: Elaborate on the benefits of Visibility and Automation for better control in an IT environment?
GA: In today’s business scenario, one thing that is constant is change. As businesses grow, organizations need to be more agile. This means, having to change business processes, manage and leverage information at the right time and optimize existing IT infrastructure. Earlier, it was IT Automation which ensured optimal performance and an enterprise’s agility over time. But over the years, companies have moved from Business Automation to Business Optimization. Unlocking business innovation by optimizing IT infrastructure is known as Business Optimization. This helps to generate higher returns on the IT investment and yield greater business value from IT.

In today’s business arena, the urge is to increase efficiency of business needs and reduce costs. The challenges most organizations face is the ability to run IT in line with business objectives and the disconnect between business processes and applications. Business Optimization helps focus on IT and enables the organizations to achieve competitive advantage and grow the business. It helps in agility, flexibility, integrating standards and reduction of errors.

IBM’s Service Management software offerings helps to unlock innovation capabilities in an organization and bring in the required Visibility, Control and Automation necessary to align the company’s business goals.

Visibility helps to see and understand the workings of your business
Control to effectively manage business, protect and manage risk
Automation to optimize business, reduce cost of operations and deliver news services more rapidly.

CIOL:  Tell us How can automated process in IT for business transformation help during the slump?
Gaurav Agarwal: IT Automation process during the slump can actually help:
Reduced Operational expenditure – Research shows up to 80 percent of a company’s IT budgets can go towards daily operations and maintenance. Many of the low-level but critical operational processes that highly skilled IT personnel perform can be automated today. On Automation of these tasks, the valuable resources can be used for tasks which provide business value.

Increased Business agility – Businesses can respond faster to requests and can also ensure competitive advantage on automating the IT infrastructure in the company.
Risk reduction – There is no human intervention thus reducing manual errors.
Improvement in Compliance – Ensures that compliance objectives by the managers are always met. This saves time and ensures that systems are 100 percent compliant with company or legal policies.
Increases operational efficiency – Helps managers focus on business objectives rather than processes.

CIOL: Tell us about IBM's technology called 'Discovery' for server and application identification?
GA: Today’s CIOs  face  the problem of  outsourcing  as organizations have many computing elements, storage devices, servers, applications and security concerns. It is a huge task for managers to locate their assets and applications. In order to overcome this difficulty, IBM has introduced a technology called “Discovery” which actually helps to know which sever is running over which OS, servers, applications and keeps them connected.  This technology gives complete visibility of the surrounding IT environment and helps to attain control over them.

CIOL: What are the future trends and challenges in IT automation and emerging technologies for industry specific solutions?
GA: As we move forward, we see that what organizations have been doing do a service assurance stack. Traditionally, they were monitoring and managing a server and a network. At the end of the day, these are large elements to focus upon.

Going ahead, the biggest challenge for enterprises would be to start focusing on -  what is my threshold for  every teller transaction to happen at a branch? If they are not meeting this threshold, then where is the root cause of them not meeting it? Automated root cause alarms to fix those problems in saying whether you have missed the threshold in this transaction, and these are the impacts of missing the threshold and this may be the directive action to fix based on the deployment plan. The challenge will be to go and implement this. But the trend is definitely moving forward to do this as a service assurance rather than monitoring it as individual elements.

The challenge today in the context of the Indian market is that there are a lot of organizations which do not even have the tools to monitor the infrastructure. To build this kind of a stack you need to have tools and a server assurance layers on top of those tools.
This is very crucial to companies in the telecom space and emerging companies. Tool implementation on its own will not give any business value.

CIOL: Do you see a decline in the IT spend by enterprises during this slowdown?
GA: What's happening is that a lot of oragnisations are delaying their decisions to buy. They are not scrapping but are waiting for financial approvals. CIOs are finding it difficult to go and ask for money to spend. Though they are talking to you and the proposals are on table, they are not being able to close. Having said that, there are two to three sectors that are still buying significantly – one is obviously the government-led initiatives, those are happening as per plans and there is no slowdown there.  The telecom segment is also still continuing to buy with as much enthusiasm as it was ever. So, wherever there is a little bit of slowdown, there is delayed decision making – in manufacturing and  financial verticals. But the government and telecom spending is compensating for that. 

CIOL: What's the scene with SMBs? 
GA: Making a general statement that SMBs are not buying is not true. There are organizations which are going ahead with their plans and are still doing capital expenditure on implementing large applications and projects. It all depends on the vendors to be able to find a client who has reason enough to spend on a value-based proposition which is strong enough for his business to be justified. Anybody who is doing expenditure for just the heck of it will not find it easy to get his CFO to approve the project. Unless the business benefits are proved for any particular implementation, it is difficult for that project to go through.

CIOL: What are the top technology trends for enterprises (large and SMBs) in 2009?
GA: Anything that can help them 'deliver more with less'. Anybody who is going and selling to them should be able to articulate that his expectation of business delivery has not gone down.  One should realise the expense on everything is going to be questioned and challenged. So, tools/technologies that are able to help them deliver more with less is going to be the differentiation. Examples of such technologies are cloud computing, virtualization and green initiatives (where you want to cut costs on energy etc.)
So, these three are going to be the key technologies in which customers will show lot of interest - in trying to build green data centres and trying to implement virtualization/cloud computing. And, how do you mange these cloud/virtualized environments is what relatively comes in.