RBA: Business Process Management for IT?

This week BMC announced the acquisition of RealOps, a leading Run Book Automation (RBA) vendor.  I'm very excited about this addition to BMC.  I've known Sean McDermott and his team at RealOps for a few years, and this is one of those technologies that makes you scratch your head and ask "Why didn't we think of this sooner?"

IT groups have been creating automation to run their environments forever (at least since the early days of mainframe console automation) and the vast majority of this automation was accomplished through arcane rules defintions or piles of (usually undocumented) scripts (Perl, Rexx, Shell, etc.).  RBA offerings have taken a page from the Business Process Management (BPM) tool sets and introduced the idea of graphical design for process and task workflows, robust run-time engines and libraries of integration adaptors.  The result is faster automation (especially of complex workflows) and process documentation.  I truly believe every IT shop will adopt this technology relatively quickly - the payback period is short, the time-to-value is short and organizations gain a general-purpose "swiss army knife" sort of product that is going to be used a variety of valuable ways.

While the core capabilities will be useful to all customers to design custom process flows, many will look for the workflow applications that can also be provided on top of the run-time environment. This wll be a boon to vendors and service providers alike.  While still an emerging market, I think RBA solutions are going to have one of the fastest adoption rates of anything we've seen in the IT operational realm in quite a while.

(written 07/20/07)