Most of you who read this post will have already thought about the key issues related to - how to integrate the cloud into your daily business and IT operations, that being:
Businesses and consumers experience today’s digital world through their fingertips – as they navigate applications, news and digital life through smartphones and tablets. To the IT industry, this new age is reflected in the buzz words of the moment – whether that be cloud computing, Big Data or Something-as-a-Service.
What can sometimes be forgotten, however, is that real technology underlies the applications and services that fuel our digital lives – not buzz words.
I just read an article in CIO Online Magazine (German edition), about Scott McDermott, the co-CEO of SAP. The article concluded that SAP needs to reduce cost in several areas, one of those being automation.
In the last blog post, I explained why the creation of a SAP system copy is not trivial and should be done with an automation solution, such as UC4‘s Automated System Copy for SAP. In this blog post, I address some data security issues with SAP system copies, that can be addressed with an add-on to the UC4 solution , involving: masking, scrambling and data reduction.
For enterprise IT organizations, nothing is as constant as change. But from IT‘s perspective, change to current production systems can be a significant challenge.
For developers, change is caused by many things, from new functional requirements, to the desire to increase the performance of systems. Many change management procedures are performed according to the principle of "trial and error", especially for SAP systems. And it is unthinkable that changes can be made to production hardware or software, or without extensive testing, before it goes back into production.
Business process runs, such as a financial close or supply chain logistics, are not seamless if they rely on many resources, tools and manual steps. If more business processes require more resources (hardware, cluster, people), process management problems will grow out of control.
Business Process Automation, better known as BPA, is the technical use of components to execute manual business processes automatically within an organization to lower costs, reduce risk, and increase consistency.
Can people really go hungry because of a failed deployment?
Growing complexity of enterprise applications is a fact. The more innovation we develop and the more services we provide to users, the more complex our applications and infrastructure become.
The 21st of December 2012 – the day that apocalypse comes and the world ends. Or so we thought the Mayans predicted. What we’ve come to realise is that the Mayans were actually predicting the end of a cycle and that, while the world as we know would be destroyed, we would also see a new world created.
2012 could easily be referred to as the year of the software glitch. While the Royal Bank Of Scotland (RBS) and Knight Capital Group are top of mind, they were certainly not the only victims of notable glitches. In fact, they were kept in good company throughout the year with major failures at United Airlines, Lloyds TSB, RIM, Amazon web services, Google Mail and many more.
The world that businesses now operate in is almost unrecognisable to that of just a decade ago. The reputation of a brand and how easily that reputation can be changed has been radically transformed by the rapid development of social media and mobile technology. These days, companies have both a great opportunity to boost their brand perception through social channels, but also are at constant risk of seeing their reputations quickly tarnished.
Complex architectures mean complex deployments. As applications become more distributed, a growing complexity is created in deploying partial and complete versions of the application. Each component requires its own deployment and configuration procedure with specifically ordered multiple dependencies. Successful execution is dependent on the knowledge of the developers and often fails to be followed correctly resulting in failures and delays.
The goals of development teams and IT operations are often at odds. Development is primarily concerned with creating new applications or features as rapidly as possible. Their objective is change. IT Operations is concerned with stability, and perceives change as high risk that often introduces unpredictability. Agile techniques can exacerbate this disconnect by increasing the frequency of change. Understanding the difference between Deployment and Release is key for you in order to develop a strategy that will enable both stability and agility.
Today I am pleased to announce our partnership with CollabNet, the global leader for enterprise cloud development and agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). Together with Collabnet we are making a commitment to enterprise DevOps that scales.
The business owner is now driving the requirements of IT and business applications such as SAP. And, you’re being asked to deliver more value from these investments with a high level of reliability and confidence.
So why are deployments still hard? What is DevOps?
With all the advancements in Java based application servers you’d think deployment is a non-issue by now.
Attending Oracle Open World this month was a great way to find out the latest advancements and future directions of Oracle Corporation and its product offerings. Oracle has been busy creating the Engineered Systems offering of Exadata, Exalogic, and Exalytics. The main advantage to the Engineered Systems offering is that they have been optimized to run Oracle applications.
Many SAP processes, such as financial month-end-close or retail process orders, require other non-SAP solutions and thus integration. As a result, it’s challenging to obtain a central view and unique control for these integrated solutions. SAP Automation tools alone will not address the dependencies between SAP and non-SAP applications.
SAP® is one of the best ERP tools on the market and you decided to use it as a strategic tool for your company. The business user requests actual copies of the SAP systems to develop better modules and programs for the business. Line of Business users just want the SAP system to run better and more profitably. In the end, the SAP Basis administrator receives a request for system copies from the business units. The SAP Basis admin addresses a number of manual, error-prone tasks and by the time the tasks are complete, it’s too late to make a positive business impact.
This year UC4 participated in Oracle Retail CrossTalk June 26-28, 2012 at the Swissôtel as a Bronze level sponsor. We like this event because it brings together an exclusive gathering of retail executives who share insights and exchange ideas. The executive community that gathers at CrossTalk includes business and IT leaders from the most innovative retailers in the world.
Agility has become essential in today’s connected and competitive world. Many IT organizations have adopted agile development methods in an effort to deliver better software quicker, however without solid release management processes and tools, missed deadlines and failed deployment are inevitable.
Working with many Oracle E-Business Suite customers, I often get asked why UC4 is a better solution than BPEL for automation. This is a common question because Oracle often times recommends BPEL as the solution for automating processing and integrating across applications. But is BPEL the right tool for automation? Let’s look at some of the challenges that come with BPEL implementation.
Global DevOps teams are being mandated to reduce the time, cost, complexity, and risk associated with continuous delivery of customer-facing, revenue generating applications. In the financial services industry this process is being made more challenging by intense competition and regulatory compliance acts such as Dodd Frank.
SunGard Higher Education Banner applications are helpful for aligning IT operations with your academic institutions’ requirements, but they can also create major challenges for your IT staff, including manual interventions for report generation, financial aid processing, and lack of visibility across your IT environment.
Today concludes the 11th annual UC4 Innovate user conference in Europe, and we were thrilled by the number of customers and partners that participated in this milestone. UC4 has experienced many exciting developments over the past year including being named by Forrester as the leading IT Process Automation vendor, launching our ONE Automation platform, and adding over 100 new customers. This year’s conference put a strong emphasis on innovation in automation up and across the software stack—the full UC4 ONE Automation solution set.