Company Announces General Availability of Version 9 of its Flagship Automation Platform
LONDON, UK – March 15, 2011 – UC4, the world’s largest, independent IT automation software company, today announced ONE Automation, a breakthrough in how companies deploy, manage and extend automation technology across the enterprise. Simultaneously, UC4 announced general availability of the UC4 Automation Platform™ version 9. The UC4 Automation Platform supports the most databases, applications and operating systems in the industry making it a clear choice for companies requiring end-to-end enterprise automation.
Because current automation tools are limited in functionality and can’t address more than one area of infrastructure automation, enterprises are forced to purchase multiple tools and are left with no way to easily orchestrate application process requirements with infrastructure availability. UC4 unifies enterprise application and infrastructure automation functionality onto a single platform. With UC4, users first architect and control the execution of application process flows, then orchestrate the underlying infrastructure to meet required service levels. ONE Automation eliminates the cost and complexity of managing multiple tools, frees staff for more productive work and improves service delivery by creating more agile and responsive IT infrastructure.
“Gartner’s 2011 CIO survey indicates that developing or managing flexible infrastructure, delivering application and growth projects and reducing cost are the top three strategic priorities for the CIOs,” said Milind Govekar, Research Vice President for Gartner. “These priorities are unachievable without automation. In an increasingly complex and heterogonous infrastructure, automation enables IT to lower cost, improve agility, reduce complexity, mitigate risks and generally provide the ability to ‘do more with less.'”
The UC4 Automation Platform version 9 sets a new standard for end-to-end enterprise automation. With the latest release, UC4 has extended the capability of the platform to include a broad range of Run Book and Application Release Automation functions, enhancements to Managed File Transfer as well as intuitive ease of use features to quickly create or modify automation process flows. The UC4 Automation Platform now ships standard with purpose built solutions for the most critical areas of enterprise automation; Job Scheduling, Application Process Automation, Run Book, Virtualisation Management, Managed File Transfer and Application Release Automation.
“To get the same rich functionality included in UC4 Automation Platform, enterprises would need to purchase up to 10-15 different tools,” said Jason Liu, CEO of UC4. “ONE Automation dramatically lowers cost and improves performance. It is a smarter and simpler way to orchestrate your business processes, applications and infrastructure.”
“The UC4 Automation Platform will greatly simplify our automation road map through its ability to accomplish all areas of IT automation with one tool,” said Eric Gauthier, IT Systems Administrator, BECU (formerly known as Boeing Employees’ Credit Union). “As a financial services provider, we must ensure accurate and timely processing to enable a laser focus on member transactions and service. Version 9’s stability and exceedingly robust toolset is invaluable in this regard. We also look to leverage the platform to improve Business Unit efficiencies and launch new applications and features to our members all via resource savings afforded by automation.”
Also shipping standard with the UC4 Automaton Platform are a highly scalable policy engine and powerful and intuitive analytical tools. Enterprises can now build and schedule work flows then monitor and govern their performance by identifying patterns in events that could affect service delivery against established policies and rules. For example, if changes in conditions threaten the completion of a critical business process, UC4 can predictively reschedule workloads or provision additional resources to ensure the process is executed on time and without manual intervention.
“We have entrusted the UC4 Automation Platform to automate a laundry list of core business processes from ERP application automation to business intelligence-based reporting,” said Eric Leacox, IT Applications Infrastructure professional for HNI Corporation. “We’re in beta with the ninth version and can already see how powerful it is. One area in particular is its scalability and also its ability to automate all areas of the data centre across all systems and platforms with just one tool. This will allow us to continue scaling our automation strategy, while reducing overall complexity.”
Included in the UC4 Automation Platform:
Quality of Service control – context aware automation with event sensing, pattern mapping and policy-based management
Decision support – root cause analysis, workload analysis and reporting
Job Scheduling – support for more than 19 different operating systems and hypervisors
Application Process Automation – rapid implementation with standardised process templates for leading ERP and industry applications
Run Book – broad range of pre-packaged functions for the most critical data center operations
Virtualisation Management – capacity provisioning and integration to System Center and vCenter
Application Release Automation – process flows, packaging, release and patch deployment
Managed File Transfer – high performance transfer from any platform with encryption, compression, and check point restart
To learn more about UC4’s vision and offering, click on the following links: ONE Automation or UC4 Automation Platform version 9.
For conversations surrounding this news on Twitter, please use hashtag #ONEAutomation.