Automatic for the people

Luca Lazzaron of BMC Software on streamlining the business brain with IT service automation

As you read this article approximately 100 billion neurons within your body are processing the information you're absorbing and sending it to your cerebral cortex. The nervous system controls the body's conscious and subconscious activities - from the blink of an eye to the act of typing on the keyboard. And it does all this while operating in the background automatically. Like the nervous system, an organisation's IT infrastructure operates predominantly in the background. Whilst far less complex than the human brain, advanced technologies such as server virtualisation and distributed and mainframe computing mean an IT network is by no means a simple architecture.

IT professionals work in an environment in which any error can impact quality of service, revenues, or even the company's reputation. Additionally, new regulations demand tighter controls and accountability. IT under is under increasing pressure to reduce costs, despite its complexity. One way to meet these challenges is by deploying service automation as part of a Business Service Management (BSM) strategy - a management approach that ensures IT provides the business operation with the services it needs for growth.Service automation solutions automate many of the routine IT tasks in the same way your nervous system ensures you keep breathing. Automating these tasks improves operational efficiency offers greater control over service quality, security, compliance and business agility.

The benefits are compelling. Companies investing in innovative technologies like automation are better positioned to weather the economic downturn, according to a recent survey by BMC Software of more than 300 EMEA CXOs. Many of our customers are enjoying huge annual cost savings thanks to innovation. Companies that thrive, both in this environment and in future ones, appreciate the transformative potential of IT and so maintain a strong, consistent investment. Among the companies reaping the benefits of service automation is Virgin Media. Using BMC Software's BladeLogic automation technology, Virgin Media is shortening its release cycles, aligning the configuration of its applications and automating software updates across the company.

According to Matt Wills, Virgin Media's Build and Environment Manager for Mobile Delivery, BladeLogic has helped the company achieve a faster time to market for its web services. Virgin Media released 11 web services last year and deploying each of the configuration items for each service took only six minutes compared with 30 minutes that was originally estimated. By automating 201 software deployments, Virgin Media calculated it saved nearly eight days' IT management time.

BMC BladeLogic is also helping decrease application downtime, increase IT productivity, and reduce operating costs for Virgin Media's data centre. This is most apparent in the company's nine test and development environments, each containing approximately 20 servers. Collectively, the environments support nearly 53 bespoke applications, each with up to 30 sections that can be configured. Some components change only once per year while others once a week or more, making manual change and configuration management highly inefficient. Before BMC BladeLogic Wills' team relied on a paper-based change management system that was time consuming, lacked accountability and was vulnerable to errors. Adopting BMC BladeLogic has simplified this complexity, automating these processes and minimising the time, resources and costs involved. "There's no doubt that the BMC BladeLogic data centre automation solutions have made a fundamental difference to the way Virgin Media manages, controls, and enforces configuration changes," Wills said. "We do expect a lot from the solution, and here we use the phrase, 'It's not Blade magic, it's BladeLogic'." It also lets Wills sleep easier at night - along with his nervous system. To find out how BMC BladeLogic automation technology can help your IT department visit: www.bmc.com/solutions.

Luca Lazzaron is the VP and General Manager EMEA at BMC Software.