In a new study by BMC Software, an IT solutions for the digital enterprise company, 73% of IT decision makers believed businesses that do not embrace IT automation to achieve the larger digital business strategy – within the next five years – will cease to exist in 10 years.
92% of respondents agreed that the demands for new sources of revenue, unique competitive advantage, and operational excellence have created enormous pressure to compete digitally in order to earn the trust of customers, trading partners, and employees.
BMC suggests these results will act as a catalyst for the new adaptive approach to IT automation – digital business automation – that simplifies managing hybrid multi-cloud environments.
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The BMC study of over 650 IT decision makers across 12 countries further found that by 2020, 94% of IT decision makers expect automation to spread from IT departments into all areas of business in order to keep pace with the accelerated digital business innovation race sweeping every industry and region worldwide. The top 3 areas of investment priority in the next 24 months are containerisation, workload automation/scheduling and DevOps.
“As companies continue to incorporate hybrid cloud capabilities across the digital enterprise, they are challenged by the complexity of managing workloads across on premises, public and private clouds,” said Gur Steif, president, digital business automation at BMC.
“IT teams must be able to manage the customer value chain in spite of decentralised usage of cloud services. This is requiring a new level of IT automation to adapt to the challenges posed by increasingly diverse infrastructure, disparate data, and accelerated applications – the critical components of digital business.”
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Almost nine in ten (89% of) global IT decision makers agreed that IT automation must be used in new ways to achieve their desired digital business objectives. Enterprise architects, in particular, cite various obstacles preventing them from achieving their digital business objectives, including a lack of the necessary budget (67%), skills (44%) and time (51%).
Steif added, “BMC believes that without taking a new approach to IT automation, companies will not be able to overcome the budget, skills, and time constraint challenges identified by the survey respondents. Only through new digital-first technologies with automation solutions that support hybrid multi-clouds, will CIOs enable their companies to innovate, transform, and accelerate growth by aggressively pursuing a digital agenda that differentiates them from their competitors.”
>See also: How to start thinking about automation for your business
The research also suggested that businesses face other digital transformation challenges in ensuring objectives are aligned. Of CIOs surveyed, 42% believed that conflicting objectives remain between business units, with 32% of CIOs expressing the need for tighter internal organisational alignment.
Despite the new challenges and opportunities associated with digital business automation, the BMC study found that 88% of IT decision makers believed they are empowered to deliver the required IT innovation to drive digital business transformation and bridge this gap, and 77% of respondents believed that businesses are doing enough to prepare and train the workforce with greater automation skills. Respondents in the USA (97%), Mexico (98%), and Spain (94%) felt the most empowered to deliver IT innovation.
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