UC4 Unifies Enterprise Automation

Automation is the most desired function in IT right now. With an ever-multiplying pile of data pouring into the world’s data containers, IT managers need all the help they can get to maintain control over it all.

Thus, the more IT can do on autopilot to get workloads processed in a timely manner, the better it is for everybody in the enterprise.

UC4, which claims to be the “world’s largest independent IT automation software company,” sees itself as coming to the rescue. The Vienna-based company on 15 March started shipping ONE Automation, a unified approach to deploying and managing automation software across an enterprise.

Single console

UC4 joins enterprise application and infrastructure automation functionality onto a single console that eliminates the complexity of managing multiple tools, frees staff for more productive work and improves service delivery by creating more responsive IT infrastructure, UC4 chief executive Jason Liu told eWEEK.

Conventional automation tool sets are limited in functionality and can’t address more than one area of infrastructure automation, Liu said. As a result, enterprises are forced to purchase multiple tools which are complicated to use without sacrificing infrastructure availability, Liu said.

To frame its ONE Automation software, UC4 announced the release of Automation Platform v.9, which supports most databases, applications and operating systems and provides an alternative to other end-to-end data centre automation packages provided by general systems vendors.

The UC4 Automation Platform now ships standard with purpose-built components for key areas of enterprise automation, such as job scheduling, application process automation, run book, virtualisation management, managed file transfer and application release automation, Liu said.

Details of these functions, according to UC4, include:

• 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 prepackaged functions for the most important data centre operations
• Virtualisation Management: capacity provisioning and integration to System Centre and vCentre
• 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