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.