The 20th edition of HOT this week has achieved a record attendance: almost 300 participants from all over Europe: Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, France, Denmark, Israel (I personally spoke with participants from these countries, and there were likely representatives from even more countries.).
This visitor record can be easily explained: The organizer, HORIZONT IT GmbH (Website: www.horizont-it.com), consistently promotes the event as the largest conference for workload automation in Europe. However, discussions with various participants reveal that HOT is essentially the only symposium on WLA in Europe. It is the gathering place for the WLA community: The largest software manufacturers, including Beta Systems, BMC, Broadcom CA, IBM, Stonebranch, HCL, and others, have been using HOT as a platform for their products and new features for years.
The variety of lectures is extensive, with up to three speaker tracks running concurrently. As a result, I couldn’t attend all the presentations. However, I would like to share some exciting insights from two presentations that stood out as highlights of the event for me.
Beyond Workload Automation: Orchestrating the Future of Cloud-Driven IT
The President and COO of the analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), Dan Twing, (LinkedIn profile: CLICK HERE), gives an overview of trends and changes in the workload automation market.
Dan Twing first highlights, similar to several other speakers, some changes in the framework conditions for workload automation: The complexity in the data centers is increasing (different platforms, hybrid cloud, increasing importance of containerization, …), heightended compliance and security requirements, opportunities presented by AI, and the growing use of various automation tools (e.g., RPA). Additionally, companies are undergoing a process of digital transformation.
That’s the initial context. The last point, in particular—the “digital transformation” of many companies—is significantly altering the requirements for workload automation. To illustrate these changes more clearly, EMA employs a classification system for the “Digital Transformation Maturity” of companies. Based on a sample of 264 companies, the distribution of this “Digital Transformation Maturity Level” is as follows:
As the degree of digitization increases, for example, “traditional batch” jobs in the data center are becoming less important – not because the volume of batch jobs is declining, but because tasks such as “event-driven automation”, “background support for online interactive applications”, “big data managing data pipelines” or “workflow automation and orchestration” are increasing sharply.
The differences are significant: For the lowest maturity level in “Digital Transformation” (not yet started), the share of traditional “batch jobs” is still around 23%, while this share has fallen to less than 10% in the category “Gen 2.0 / Digital Leadership”. For example, the proportion of jobs in the “Workflow automation and orchestration”, “On-premises infrastructure configuration” or “public cloud infrastructure configuration” type is around twice as high for companies of the type “Gen 2.0 / Digital Leadership” compared to companies with the least progress in digital transformation.
As companies implement various automation tools during their “digital transformation,” the demand for a central orchestration tool for these diverse automation processes is rising. NextGen workload automation tools are increasingly viewed as the solution—serving as a meta-orchestrator that coordinates across different tools. Consequently, NextGen WLA tools need to integrate with popular technologies, including APIs, ITSM tools, and RPA applications.
Companies in the “Gen2.0 / Digital Leadership” category predominantly (80%!) consider workload automation tools as the most suitable for achieving this orchestration. The distinction between automation and orchestration can be described as follows:
(Traditional) Automation:It is evident that during the “digital transformation” process and with the evolving role of WLA, the likelihood of changing the WLA software in use also increases. In other words, as the requirements for orchestration capabilities evolve, existing applications are being reevaluated and new tools are being considered. The speaker anticipates changes in the WLA market in the foreseeable future, particularly in Asia, where this digital transformation process began later than in the United States.
In this context, Dan Twing refers to the findings of the EMA Radar from October 2023, which also reflect these requirements for future-proof WLA tools:
Last but not least, Dan Twing presents some conclusions for workload automation from his recently published study: “Data in Motion: Orchestrating File Transfers and Data Pipelines in the Cloud Era” (from May 2024)
The data and graphs from this study essentially speak for themselves:
And:
Next-Generation Log Management
Dan Twing also identified 4 key trends for WLA, including: “Drive to increase Observability”.
Modern WLA solutions, such as ANOW!, have integrated extensive observability capabilities. However, the possibilities and requirements for observability in the data center extend beyond this, and the software industry is beginning to respond to these needs.
A promising tool for meeting these growing observability requirements is the product logNOW, which is presented by Christian Vaters, Senior Product Manager at HORIZONT Software GmbH (LinkedIn profile: CLICK HERE).
Observability is seen here as the evolution of monitoring or next-gen monitoring. Unlike traditional monitoring, which focuses on identifying known issues, observability aims to uncover unknown problems as well. It involves anomaly detection, providing deeper insights into the causes and interrelationships of systems, offering action recommendations, and (automated) documentation of errors/problems in ticket systems—all combined with an audit-proof archive.
The product logNOW provides a comprehensive view of processes, applications, and infrastructure:
The tool for NextGen Observability provides powerful interfaces to a wide range of applications, databases, and platforms for this holistic view … as well as an audit-proof archive:< /p>
One of the foundations for observability understood in this way is OpenTelemetry, an open source project designed to instrument, generate, and collect metrics, traces, and logs in cloud-native environments.
The speaker Christian Vaters presented a prototype, and a product release is planned for January 2025.
