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Jan 17 2008   7:14PM GMT

What are the most desired features in IT Process Orchestration (e.g. RBA)?



Posted by: Ryan Shopp
BMC, DataCenter, Enigmatec, HP Software, IBM Tivoli, IT Process Automation, LANDesk, NetIQ, Opalis, OpTier, Optinuity, RBA, RealOps, Run Book Automation, Scapa Technologies, Stratavia

Alright, looking for feedback on this one. After talking about the players in the IT Process Orchestration space, I’m wondering what are the primary capabilities people are looking for?

Here are my top five, please feel free to throw down yours in the comments below:

  1. Drag/Drop graphical interface for designing process workflows
  2. Common, normalized Data Model of common/primary attributes
  3. Library of pre-defined, re-usable actions/triggers/processes for usage out-of-the-box (bigger the better – even a community that shares is a plus)
  4. Policy/Desired-state engine driving things
  5. Sandbox, simulator to help test workflows without impacting actual resources/instances within the production enterprise.

Beyond these five core capabilities, depending on the processes you wish to automate you need to verify what interaction/communications protocols are supported (e.g., SNMP, WMI, JMX, ODBC, Telnet/SSH/FTP to CLI, XML/Web Services). Make sure they have what you need to communicate with.

Of course, it also goes without saying (just like with any commercial product) table stakes require RBAC security, reporting, logging, appropriate hardware/software requirements.

Bottom line, I guarantee if your a medium to large enterprise you have current manual processes that these products can automate for you! Reducing errors due to the mundane nature of that task, freeing up people currently doing the task for other projects or tasks and also the intangible benefit of it’s simply faster which provides better customer service depending on the process that is automated. Make this a priority in 2008 and get one of these vendors in there to help out!

Disclosure: I have no relationships with any of the vendors in this space. The comments are all made based on my personal experiences and perspectives.

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Ccrouchman  |   Jan 23, 2008  2:12 AM (GMT)

First my own disclosure. I am the CTO for one of the IT Process Automation Vendors listed above (Opalis) so please take my comments as being skewed to my particular view of the universe. Having said that I believe that these attributes are broad market needs, not just shameless self promotion of my product (I leave that to the Marketing folks).

First I’ll add a few more attributes that I think are important.

1. A set of out of the box integrations with infrastructure and management products that is both deep (i.e. engineered, not scripted) and broad (i.e. support for most tools you have in your environment from multiple vendors).
2. An integrated data bus for passing information within the workflow (eg. using the attributes entered in a Remedy form as parameters for provisioning a virtual machine) that doesn’t require scripted variable substitution.
3. Integrated rules-based decision making capabilities that (guess what comes next) doesn’t require scripting.

Without these things you’ll find that in order to make the product work in your unique environment you’ll be writing a lot of scripts, which is what you’re supposed to be eliminating with these tools.

I’d also alter your statement about out of the box processes from “more is better” to “make sure that the vendor offers a broad and deep library of high value processes that solve real world problems”. In this area while quantity matters, quality matters more (do you really need 50 variants of “open a help desk ticket based on an alert”?).

Thanks for writing this blog. I enjoy it very much.


 

Ryan Shopp  |   Jan 31, 2008  4:50 PM (GMT)

Thanks, great feedback and insight! Any customers out there using these products that could give us their perspective on which of these were the most important in their decision.


 

Aveitch  |   Feb 4, 2008  2:22 PM (GMT)

Another vendor comment I’m afraid (Scapa Technologies). We’ve found that the big challenge in this space is to integrate with the vast number of products that are installed, particularly problematic are the legacy, home-grown applications and infrastructure. Taking the approach of writing an integration module for all of these systems would be impossible but if you can’t integrate easily with the systems that you are automating then you are back to scripting.

Our solution (and my vote for a required feature) is capture/replay, ideally both for the Windows GUI and http. It’s a really useful tool to have the in box when you need to integrate with something unusual. It also has the benefit for helpdesks or diagnostics that by going through the same UI a human would use, the automation will experience exactly the same behavior that customers are seeing avoiding the problem that an API will behave differently to a user interface in some cases.


 

Ryan Shopp  |   Feb 5, 2008  3:48 PM (GMT)

Great feedback and input. Vendors are always welcome. This blog is an open opportunity to get your thoughts out there and differentiators heard etc. So please, never be shy. Just write away.

As for your key feature. If I’m hearing you correctly is having a connector “studio” versus simply having a SDK (API, Documentation & Examples). I completely agree, any way you can automate a process, saving time and making it easier is fantastic.

I would encourage also having the SDK/API since some complicated interactions may not work (or be an option) through a recording process (also, even through more complicated, some people just prefer scripting). Another thing this made me wonder is do you offer a community where your customers can share these “connectors” they build? Do any IT Process Orchestration vendors offer this?


 

Jkumbhani  |   Mar 4, 2009  4:19 AM (GMT)

Where do you think JMX and WMI used in specific RBA ?