This is an exhilarating time in the world of DevOps. A technological revolution is taking place, and driving the practice forward with tremendous speed.

As advances in application workflow orchestration ease the burden on Dev and Ops professionals, the IT department at large gains the ability to positively impact the business more holistically, through innovation and enhancing customer experiences.

We recently had the opportunity to speak with a variety of industry leaders and influential voices who shared their perspectives on what’s coming next and how organizations can get ahead of the curve to take advantage of new opportunities.

The Future of DevOps, According to Industry Experts

Reaching the next level of enterprise technology maturity requires focus and investment across five key initiatives, which we explore in our new guide, FULLY OPERATIONAL: How Application Workflow Orchestration Unlocks IT Agility and Innovation:

• Empowering IT by relieving the burden of manual tasks and complex workflows that can be automated.
• Positioning your operational framework to thrive in increasingly cloud-based and hybrid environment
• Embracing new innovation to accelerate the speed of business, rapidly testing and deploying novel ways to create better customer experiences.
• Rallying around reliability and developing predictive processes that help guard against downtime or failures.
• Integrating these technical underpinnings throughout the organization, making automation and orchestration a cornerstone of the business strategy.

Here’s where top experts are setting their sights.

Driving Innovation through IT

Ronald van Loon, Principal Analyst at Intelligent World, believes that pressures on IT departments “have shifted their role from a peripheral back-office function to an active orchestrator of adoption and strategic innovation.” Though this may present new challenges, it also presents significant opportunity.

“While Ops has consistently evolved in recent years alongside emerging technologies and the increasing focus on digitalization, the pandemic-induced acceleration of digital transformation has rapidly redefined the role of Ops to coincide with the evolving context of the current digital age,” he says. “Future-facing IT departments must be powerful advocates for digital leadership and accelerate digital transformation by acting as partners to other internal departments and assume greater responsibility for improving business performance.”

This means not only rethinking organizational dynamics, but also investing in tech professionals so they are fully enabled to seize these opportunities, according to Jayne Groll, who focuses on helping develop skills and talent as CEO of the DevOps Institute:

“Human transformation drives digital transformation and successful human transformation is nurtured through a culture of continuous learning and innovation. IT leadership should therefore ensure that there is sufficient time and resources allocated for DevOps professionals to learn or groom new human, process and technical skills – whether in formal training, peer to peer mentorship or intelligent experimentation.”

Embracing the Flexibility of a New Environment

The new era of business is defined largely by agility. Not only does an unburdened IT department provide more bandwidth for Dev and Ops to stay innovative and adaptive in a fast-changing environment, but the emergence of cloud-based technology and SaaS delivery further enables a nimble enterprise.

As TMC CEO Rich Tehrani points out, adopting and optimizing around these solutions is proving to be a vital differentiator in our current times.

“Cloud and as-a-Service solutions allow all organizations to become even more agile and efficient,” he says. “COVID-19’s forced work-from-home lockdowns showed us the difference between agile companies and those stuck in the virtual dark ages. Cloud-based companies were able to adapt literally overnight while others struggled to figure out how to make home workers productive.”

For his part, 7wData Yves Mulkers envisions a complete paradigm shift driven by these capabilities, declaring that, “It’s time for a new type of flexible modular enterprise. One that is resilient and agile enough to swiftly adapt to changing markets and economic situations.”

Dev and Ops Redefining the Customer Experience

The trends cited above — empowering IT to play a bigger role, and taking advantage of cloud computing’s transformative potential — are all leading to a point where Dev and Ops can more directly impact innovation, driving enhanced customer experiences. And while the operational efficiencies stemming from the rise of automation and orchestration are certainly welcome, it’s here where the greatest promise for competitive advantage lies in this technological revolution.

“In 2021, IT overall and DevOps teams in particular have a major opportunity to have the largest impact on customer experience and downstream outcomes that they’ve ever had,” says Dion Hinchcliffe, VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research. Inc. He calls out three key opportunities:

1. Comprehensive integration of touchpoints and applications for a consistent view of the customer
2. Enterprise-wide analytics to provide real-time insights for personalization and more
3. An organizational emphasis on building trust by keeping the entire customer journey safe, secure, and reliable

The path to making these ambitions a reality? According to Kirk Borne, Principal Data Scientist and Executive Advisor for Booz Allen Hamilton, automation and orchestration of workflows will separate successful modern enterprises from non-successful ones.

“Workflow automation and orchestration is the way to drive greater business value from deep and wide data sources: smarter data-informed business decisions, innovative and faster responses to events, and serving customers with the right solutions at the right time in the right context.”

Activating your people, data, and operations to accomplish more in 2021 and beyond? It’s all about identifying the right tools and knowing how to maximize them.

To find a wealth of additional insight from these and many other leading thinkers, plus practical guidance and eye-opening stats, download FULLY OPERATIONAL: How Application Workflow Orchestration Unlocks IT Agility and Innovation now! You can also check out the infographic below for more context around the current state of business and where to focus next:

The difference between a journey and a trip is that a trip generally has a pre-defined start and end date. But a journey is an adventure filled with many new possibilities. Today, I’m excited to invite you to join us on the BMC Helix Control-M journey!

BMC Helix Control-M was announced by our CEO, Ayman Sayed, at BMC’s global virtual Exchange event back on October 20^th. We committed then that we’d launch BMC’s newest SaaS solution December 1, 2020. Let the journey begin!

What is BMC Helix Control-M?

BMC Helix Control-M is a new SaaS platform for application workflow orchestration that is hosted and delivered through AWS. Built upon BMC’s industry leading Control-M, the SaaS offering integrates, automates, and orchestrates application and data workflows across complex and ever evolving technology ecosystems.

By simplifying application workflow complexity, BMC Helix Control-M makes it easy to build, run, manage and monitor business-critical applications and digital service workflows with a single end-to-end view.  From on-premises to cloud, DevOps and enterprise agility is now a reality with user interfaces specifically designed for developers, IT operations, and line-of-business people and how they like to work.

There are many advantages to BMC Helix Control-M. One of the biggest is how SaaS accessibility gives IT leaders the power to deliver a unified automation and orchestration platform to their the highly decentralized, self-service oriented, Dev and Ops teams. This makes it possible to go fast with agility, while ensuring teams can build their applications and data pipelines with deep production-ready operational governance, scalability and security. After all, until new digital products and services are in production, nobody is making any money.

Why now?

Digital transformation and adoption of cloud technologies aren’t breaking news. Many companies are well invested, working every day on new digital business innovations to take their growth to the next level. We’ve been collaborating very closely with our most innovative customers for a couple years to understand their desires, input and vision for a SaaS platform in their future. With that teamwork, launching BMC Helix Control-M became the imperative.

This has been our journey up to now. We have been very fortunate to work with some of the most creative and demanding companies to get this right. That makes the timing of BMC Helix Control-M ideal because we know it is right for our customers and will be for the many new prospects we hope to serve as well.

“It is great to see BMC build on the strength of their market-leading application workflow orchestration product to deliver a SaaS offering with the new BMC Helix Control-M”, said Dan Twing, President and COO at Enterprise Management Associates. “As enterprises expand use of cloud infrastructure, there is an increasing need for a comprehensive end-to-end view to manage the complexity of modern IT infrastructures. BMC Helix Control-M empowers IT teams to manage the complexity while increasing agility to more quickly deliver data-intensive digital business services.”

Learn More about BMC Helix Control-M

There are many places to learn more about BMC Helix Control-M. To make it easier for you, start with the BMC Helix Control-M web experience. We’ve included information on everything from capabilities and integrations, to use cases that will help you see how BMC Helix Control-M can support your business.

What’s next?

At the start of this post, I said a journey is an adventure with exposure to many new possibilities. It’s true, our BMC Helix Control-M journey started some time ago for us here at BMC. Today we are more than excited to show you BMC Helix Control-M, and to take this opportunity to invite you to join us. Let’s travel together on this great digital transformation adventure and realize many new possibilities along the way.

Whether you’re part of an IT ops team or an application developer, you’ve certainly heard about automation as a way to improve the software development lifecycle, lower IT costs, and save money.
If automation means setting up a single task to run on its own, then orchestration means automating a lot of things at once: multiple automated tasks involving multiple systems.

For most organizations, orchestration is vitally important to advancing technologically. And IT departments use application workflow orchestration tools to improve system and application performance in several critical areas:

• Ensuring application reliability
• Realizing significant efficiencies in monitoring applications and digital services
• Delivering more innovative applications
• Accelerating the application development lifecycle
• Achieving better business results

However, not all application workflow orchestration tools are alike. To get an in-depth look at how Control-M, BMC’s application workflow orchestration solution, steps up to today’s DevOps challenges, IDC recently conducted a formal, comprehensive review of the technology.

The resulting white paper, titled The Business Value of Application Workflow Orchestration with Control-M by BMC, is based on interviews with seven IT leaders from large, enterprise-level organizations. The participating firms come from several vertical sectors, have an average workforce of more than 19,000 employees and produce annual revenues totaling around $7.5 billion on average. Each interviewee reported having direct “experience and knowledge about Control-M’s benefits.”

Here’s what IDC learned:

Control-M handily addresses the complexity of large agile environments

Organizations today are rapidly deploying digital business applications for their most important customer-facing services, such as e-commerce.

“Many digital applications are built from a complex set of components deployed across multiple environments,” the report states. “This type of deployment architecture often requires navigation of intricate workflows for successful operation.”

Control-M streamlines complex application workflows by making it easier to define, schedule, manage and monitor workflows across on-premises, private, and public cloud environments. According to those interviewed by IDC, Control-M offers organizations these and other powerful features:

• Core automation functions and capabilities that allow IT teams to replace manual scripting with automated application workflow orchestration and data integration.
• Self-service web-based or mobile access which allows users to monitor and manage their own workflows at a granular level.
• Jobs-as-Code support with Automation API, a feature that enables developers and DevOps engineers to code jobs within the agile application release process for greater consistency within development, test, and production processes.
• Data pipelines that deliver consistent service levels by orchestrating and automating complex workflows across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
• Better managed file transfers aligned with related application workflows.

Control-M also supports SLA management with automated alerts, archiving for problem analysis, audit compliance, and integrated reporting.

These robust capabilities make Control-M an essential resource for organizations that deploy it. In fact, of the organizations participating in the study, the platform undergirds around 73 percent of total company revenue on average. Plus, interviewed organizations reported having “an average of more than 400 users who rely on Control-M to do their jobs,” including DevOps and application development teams, with an average of 200 team members using it “on a regular basis.”

Control-M quickly pays for itself

Organizations using Control-M:

• Get an average annual benefit of $10.38 million
• Achieve ROI in eight months
• Earn a 539% ROI In three years

Study participants attribute these cost savings to four key Control-M benefits: significant efficiencies in monitoring applications and digital services, the ability of development teams to expedite the delivery of new applications, increased revenues due to better customer service, and the ability to more efficiently handle risk, including auditing for compliance.

As one participant reported, “We did a value assessment last year and compared Control-M against four other vendors. No one came close to touching Control-M. On a yearly basis, we’re probably seeing a 400 to 600 percent return on our investment.”

Application monitoring is simplified

IDC reports that Control-M allows IT teams to “shift away from manual and resource-intensive monitoring activities and instead… work more efficiently, monitor more applications, and deliver higher-performing applications to employees and customers.”

Of note, the white paper states that Control-M delivers “significant” efficiencies in the areas of workflow management, file transfer processes and SLA management, all of which translate into higher productivity. IDC data shows that on average organizations require the “equivalent of almost 37 fewer staff members’ time” for monitoring responsibilities, allowing team members to instead shift their focus to more innovative pursuits that align with business strategies.

According to a study participant, “In a worst-case scenario, we’d need to hire hundreds of people without Control-M because it is particularly good at SLA management for workflows and provides visibility in terms of time perspective and workflow status.”

DevOps processes are streamlined as well

For organizations in the study, Control-M has proven critical to their organizational shift into a DevOps approach and their ability to achieve a continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) model.

Control-M benefits developers in vitally important ways, including reducing the complexity of delivering “timely and robust application functionality to users and customers.” As a result, study participants reported the ability to develop 50 percent more applications while “improving the velocity of application delivery by 32 percent with Control-M.”

One IDC interviewee added, “Control-M allows us to tear down and build up development processes without having to upgrade every time there’s something new. It’s all automated. . . The number of development errors is much lower now. Ten percent of releases go back with errors compared with probably 40 to 50 percent before Control-M.”

The power of data is unleashed

With Control-M implemented, study participants have been able to achieve the 360-degree view of data pipelines needed to extract the kind of business insights that improve customer experiences. This expanded visibility and data access allow for more precise and timely queries, the white paper reports, which in turn have allowed study participants to gain business benefits from their data faster.

As one organization in the study reported, “[Our] data scientists are probably around 75 percent more efficient [using Control-M] because they did not have access to all of the data before, but now automatically have it.”

Businesses are digitally transformed

According to IDC, organizations today need “rapid and efficient definition, execution and monitoring of application workflows” to keep pace with innovation and meet the ever-advancing digital expectations of the consumers they serve.

Ultimately, IDC research shows that automation and orchestration solutions designed to perform at speed and scale are important “enablers” of complex distributed applications, “bringing efficiency, stability and visibility for stakeholders that include IT ops, DevOps, development, and line-of-business users.”

Control-M delivers on the promise of end-to-end application workflow orchestration by allowing IT organizations to optimize both their human and technological resources. When Control-M is deployed across complex agile environments, development processes are expedited, IT ops teams are freed up to focus on strategic initiatives, and user experiences are infused with all the speedy, seamless utility today’s digital-first consumers expect.

Digital disruption is impacting virtually every industry. Companies are under threat from new ‘digital native’ companies and from 100+ year old household names that have jumped onto the digital business wave. If you are a company in-between these competitors, look out. Transforming your company to embrace the digital business future comes at a time when infrastructure complexity, data disparity, volume, volatility, and agile application deployment pressures are increasing at exponential rates. These challenges are real and they are here now. Given the amazing pace of technology innovation, we believe companies that attack these challenges by rethinking IT automation at the intersection of these three technology platforms – infrastructure, data and applications – will emerge as the digital business leaders in their industry.

The rise of digital business models is touching every aspect of business today – from organizational structures, to corporate investment agendas, to core business processes such as supply chain, order to cash management, payroll, etc. Nowhere in a company is this impact more pronounced than in IT. CIO’s are now the center point of their company’s digital transformation, because only the IT team can deliver the linkage – the bridges from existing IT platforms that run the company today – to the new modern digital customer experience required by line-of-business leadership.

We believe this requires CIO’s to consider a completely new approach to IT automation. One that is highly adaptable and enables the delivery of digital business services, regardless of existing IT platforms or the desires of the LOB to use any new, modern technology to engage their customers. The traditional IT automation category at the center of delivering these business application services was known as Workload Automation. However, the rise of new technologies – from software-defined infrastructures, containerization, hybrid-cloud environments, Hadoop, Spark, IoT, and DevOps practices with the open source continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) automation tool chain – has changed everything. The goal is no longer workload automation – we believe the new adaptable fourth wave of IT automation is Digital Business Automation.

To understand why Digital Business Automation is a distinct and different wave of IT automation, it is instructive to look back at the way enterprises have managed their application job workflows, the various stages of technology development, and how these automation solutions served the core IT platforms – infrastructure, data, and applications – as they developed over time.

The graphic above traces how automation has evolved from its roots in mainframe oriented, simple batch processing, through successive eras of innovation in infrastructure (X-axis), data and applications (Y-axis). In each era, the IT automation solution or category was required to schedule and run the applications across each of these three omnipresent and integral technology platforms. Control-M began its life in the early days of the mainframe era. As these platforms evolved, so too did the requirements for scheduling and managing the delivery of application job services at the heart of every company. Additionally, each successive era has emerged in roughly half the time it took the prior era. Today, we are moving from a category known as Workload Automation (WLA) that has been the dominant description for the delivery of highly flexible automation across the three technology platforms for about the last 10 years. We believe the next wave of IT of automation, extending beyond traditional workload automation, must be highly adaptable and is here today. To achieve true digital transformation, companies must meet the challenges of automating rapidly evolving software-defined infrastructures, massive and highly volatile data streams, and the demands of CI/CD automation in a highly adaptive way. The ability to bridge from today’s existing platforms – essentially building on them and adapting to the new modern, digital first, future infrastructure, data and application technologies – is the crux of the matter. This is Digital Business Automation.

We’re not the only ones to see the critical need for Digital Business Automation. Gartner predicts 80% of current products and services will be digitized, eliminated, or otherwise reinvented by 2020¹. The analyst firm, Enterprise Management Associates describes why workload automation practices need to change in a recent EMA Radar report:

“Modern IT means multiple cloud environments, big data, advanced analytics, and an increased rate of change to existing and new applications. More workloads are focused on collecting a variety of data types. All that data must be moved, stored in big data environments, and processed through analytics tools. The digital transformation that is overtaking enterprises in all industries is further complicating the task of managing the changing workload landscape.”

At BMC, we have seen and led every transition in the waves of automation above with Control-M. And today, we are leading with innovations and capabilities to help our customers realize their digital business transformation outcomes. With its ability to build on and bridge from existing infrastructure, data and application platforms and adapt to these new modern technologies and DevOps processes, Control-M is uniquely equipped to help customers deliver new digital business application services with improved agility and scale, operationalize and manage their application services across the highly heterogeneous and evolving enterprise platform environment.

We say bridge because organizations can’t abandon their existing systems while preparing for their future needs. Fifty-five percent of enterprise operations still touch the mainframe. At the same time, organizations are putting more workloads and data into the cloud and providing most customer interfaces on mobile platforms, so automation has to be adaptable across the maze of highly heterogeneous environments. The nature of data itself is also changing as enterprises have to simultaneously support structured and unstructured data; accommodate input from social media; machine-to-machine (M2M); Internet of Things (IoT) systems; and mission critical core capabilities like file transfer management. Now you have the picture. Lastly, take agile application delivery. Somehow even with new DevOps methods, companies are failing to take advantage to shift their jobs left, into the earliest stages of development, so at the end of the CI/CD automation process their jobs are baked into the application, built, debugged, tested and deployed just like every other code element. We call this shift-left methodology Jobs-as-Code. We believe this is the best-practice to put operational quality into the application when it costs the least to do it, and avoids time, money and effort to fix later in production.

Businesses can’t slow down while they figure out how to automate from current to new IT technologies and environments – they have to go faster. Only by taking a fresh new view of IT automation – one that embraces the adaptive goals and approach of Digital Business Automation – and utilizing the right automation solutions, can companies make the jump to digital business transformation. The new wave of IT automation is here – this is Digital Business Automation.

¹ “Gartner Predicts Three Big Data Trends for Business Intelligence” Forbes online February 12, 2015. Accessed March 13, 2017 at http://www.forbes.com/sites/gartnergroup/2015/02/12/gartner-predicts-three-big-data-trends-for-business-intelligence/#6b9944de66a2↩