Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2017
CA Technologies going into 2017 sent a strong signal that it intends to compete at a much higher level of the software stack by announcing its intent to acquire Automic, a provider of business process automation software, in a deal valued at roughly $636 million.
Ayman Sayed, president and chief product officer for CA Technologies, says CA Technologies views Automic as a strategic acquisition that will enable the company to finally unify all the elements of application software strewn across the enterprise. Rather than trying to automate each of those applications individually, Automic will enable CA Technologies to address the need for more business agility.
“We want to put an end to all the islands of automation that exist now,” says Sayed.
In the case of Automic, that means being able to automatically capture blueprints of business processes spanning multiple applications that can then be holistically managed.
In general, Sayed notes that the number of application workloads that IT organizations are expected to manage is growing exponentially. Automic enables IT organizations to address that issue by managing business processes spanning multiple application workloads in a way that lets the IT organization better focus on service level agreements (SLAs) attached to a specific process rather than individual application workload, says Sayed.
Trying to maximize the efforts of IT staffs by relying more on IT automation tools to eliminate the need to manually configure various pieces of IT infrastructure and software has been a major theme for 2016. Now it would appear that scaling those same concepts to address entire business processes will be a major theme of 2017, as well.
