EMA Radar for Workload Automation (WLA): Q2 2012

Transcription

1 EMA Radar for Workload Automation (WLA): Q By Torsten Volk, Senior Analyst Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) June 2012

2 Table of Contents Introduction... 1 Research Methodology... 1 What Changed Since the Q Workload Automation Radar... 2 State of the Discipline in Progress since Customer Perspective: Real Life Workload Automation... 5 Shifting WLA Business Requirements... 7 Workload Automation and Cloud... 7 Core Capabilities in 2012: It s all about the Business Service... 8 Architecture & Integration... 8 Architecture... 8 Integration... 8 Functionality... 9 Deployment & Administration... 9 Deployment... 9 Administration... 9 Cost Advantage... 9 Vendor Strength... 9 Vendors Included in this Report Traditional WLA Vendors Challengers Specific Solution Vendors Workload Analytics Evaluation Criteria EMA 2012 Workload Automation Radar Results Key Changes Compared to the 2010 WLA Radar Report Value Leader: ORSYP Special Award ORSYP: Most Scalable and Resilient Architecture ORSYP Profile I

3 Introduction In today s age of cloud and IT-as-a-Service, the importance of Workload Automation (WLA) as the evolution of job scheduling, and its sister discipline IT Process Automation (ITPA), has grown tremendously. As a new chapter opens in enterprise IT, where business-unaware technology silos no longer count as a valid excuse for SLA violations 1, the ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES (EMA ) team regards automation WLA and ITPA as the glue that keeps business processes tightly integrated. Operating systems, middleware, databases, applications, and business services are simply technical necessities that must be orchestrated to support and streamline these business processes in the most efficient manner. While this EMA Radar Report is focused on WLA solutions, the integration of these individual software packages with ITPA constitutes an important evaluation criterion, as the separation of both disciplines WLA and ITPA is an artificial one. To truly automate entire business processes, WLA and ITPA have to work together harmonically. a) WLA is commonly considered an activity that takes place deep in the data center, controlled by an inner circle of aging mainframe wizards, also often referred to by business stakeholders as the data center mafia. The data center mafia usually knows very little about the business impact of WLA and is notorious for only contacting business stakeholders to let them know why a certain request cannot be fulfilled in a timely manner. b) ITPA, often also referred to as run book automation, can be described as the automated execution of a set of tasks to address a specific planned or unplanned situation. All the various steps that have to be taken for processes such as staff onboarding, application release management, or weekly backups fall under ITPA. Since the previous EMA Workload Automation Radar Report in 2010, most vendors have recognized the above requirement to integrate WLA and ITPA in order to effectively support business processes. Research Methodology The major challenge of this type of market evaluation is to avoid creating a simple feature comparison. EMA is aware that in order to be valuable for the end customer, any analyst report must thoroughly research and consider the client perspective. Enterprise IT is generally about solving actual customer challenges. Therefore, each software feature is only relevant for this report, if it solves a specific and important business problem. To remain entirely objective, this EMA Radar Report is based on a comprehensive survey with over 600 data points that can, for the most part, be measured unambiguously. All survey questions were founded on customer feedback and vendor responses, and thoroughly verified by a sequence of product demonstrations and end customer interviews. EMA acknowledges that in WLA, as well as in most other arenas of enterprise IT, there is no one best solution for every customer. Therefore, EMA has evaluated each product along five dimensions: 1. Functionality 2. Architecture & Integration 3. Deployment & Administration 4. Cost 5. Vendor Strength 1 Service Level Agreement - For more detail on the importance of SLAs, please take a look at the following article: 1

4 Based on these five dimensions, a potential client might select a solution that offers only average scores in terms of functionality, but is easily deployed, requires minimal maintenance, and costs significantly less than some of the functionality leaders. Providing guidance along these five dimensions will enable potential clients to determine which solutions to look at more closely. This can mean narrowing down the field to only three vendors, or it could mean to also include lower cost alternatives into the RFP process. This report will have achieved its purpose, if EMA has provided the potential WLA customer with the background knowledge and guidance necessary to confidently make this pre-selection decision. What Changed Since the Q Workload Automation Radar The previous EMA Workload Automation Radar Report was released in the first quarter of 2010 based on data gathered throughout Q4 of 2009 and revealed the following key findings: State of the Discipline in 2010 Many vendors had achieved excellent job scheduling capabilities, but only few were able to offer even basic ITPA and business integration capabilities. 2 No vendor was able to include advanced SLA-capabilities that were driven by predictive analytics algorithms and able to autonomously manage the critical path (see Figure 1). 2 Business integration is referred to as the ability to link IT services to business requirements (Business Impact Analysis). 2

5 Figure 1: 2010 WLA Radar Findings As Figure 1 shows, WLA in 2010 was still a long way away from being able to truly automate entire processes. Technology silos, a lack of awareness of a workload s business impact, and a lack of predictive analytics capabilities did not allow customers to achieve their ultimate goal of resource optimization and agile IT services delivery. Progress since 2010 When reevaluating the marketplace over two years later, significant progress can be seen compared to the 2010 WLA Radar Report (see Figure 2). Cloud and the concept of service-driven IT were the main catalysts for this progress. Resource optimization: It is the main goal of any organization to receive the best possible ROI from its IT investments. To realize this ROI, each physical resource has to be utilized to its optimal degree and waste has to be eliminated. To achieve optimal usage, all storage, network, compute, and software resources have to be pooled. Through pooling, these resources are abstracted from their underlying physical infrastructure and therefore can be dynamically assigned to users almost in real time. This ability to rapidly distribute enterprise IT resources based on near real-time requirements brings the data center one important step closer to resource optimization. IT Process Automation: Automatically provisioning, managing, and decommissioning hardware and software resources, based on end user requests issued through a service portal ensures the ultimate degree of IT agility. This agility allows the organization to turn IT into a true business differentiator, by enabling end users to proactively utilize IT resources to the company s advantage. 3

6 Business Integration: Since the 2010 Radar, there has been significant progress in terms of integrating WLA products with the overall business management environment. Most vendors now offer connectors for service management solutions, CMDBs, BI & Big Data packages, systems management software, as well as for VMware vsphere and for the Amazon EC2 cloud. WLA has come a long way from being an isolated discipline to becoming a good citizen that is well integrated with its neighbors in the data center and in the cloud. Predictive Analytics: The fact that five out of this year s six Value Leaders either offer their own predictive analytics engine or integrate with Terma Software Labs JAWS 3 analytics solution shows the tremendous progress that was made in workload analytics since the last Radar Report. Vendors have recognized that offering predictive analytics is a true differentiator for their products, as it is a critical precondition for making WLA business process-aware. Job Scheduling: Job scheduling already was mature at the time of the previous Radar Report. However, EMA can still report minor improvements in terms of job triggers, alerting, and API comprehensiveness this time around. Figure 2: WLA Maturity in See page 14 for more detail on JAWS. 4

7 Customer Perspective: Real Life Workload Automation There often is a significant gap between what analysts and vendors claim is important in WLA and what customers actually ask for. During the course of creating this research report, EMA has talked to countless vendor representatives, but even more importantly, to numerous actual customers. The gap between where customers currently are in their IT evolution and where analysts and vendors think they should be, is best described by taking a brief look at EMA s maturity model for WLA (see Figure 3). Figure 3: EMA WLA Maturity Model Most of today s enterprise customers have achieved a state of consolidated job scheduling where most or all batch jobs are centrally managed, dynamically triggered based on various types of events, and able to manage the transfer of files. Faced with user demand for IT-as-a-Service, more and more businesses are starting the journey to a more proactive and connected approach, also referred to as journey to the cloud. This journey 5

8 includes the addition of ITPA components, a business portal (dashboard), the ability to prioritize WLA issues based on their business impact 4, intelligent event correlation to identify events that are relevant to a specific problem, and finally, some form of CMDB. 5 Dynamic Automation (heuristic thresholds, SOA, ease-of-use) and Resource Optimization (Resource Pools, Automated Provisioning, Load Balancing) at the very top of the maturity model, can be considered as the ultimate goals of workload automation and enterprise IT in general. The growing education around and adoption of cloud has contributed to a rapidly rising awareness of the importance of data center automation and resource optimization. When talking to WLA customers, EMA has found that there is no such thing as a general homogenous state of the discipline. In many cases, even some of the largest WLA deployments have not even considered the adoption of any advanced WLA technologies that go beyond simple batch scheduler consolidation. In other instances, EMA found that advanced analytical capabilities are deployed and end users are able to monitor relevant workflows through a business portal. Due to this heterogeneity of user requirements, there can be no one best WLA solution for everyone. EMA encourages readers to keep in mind their organization s workload history, maturity, and specific requirements, when looking at the various evaluation charts and vendor profiles that are featured in this report (see Figure 4). Figure 4: Formula for WLA Requirements Profile The sobering fact that a majority of organizations still refers to WLA as job scheduling demonstrates the importance of considering this formula, before committing significant funds to acquiring a WLA package. 4 Business Impact Analysis 5 EMA is aware of the controversy around the term CMDB; however, in order to effectively manage change within a large enterprise IT environment, there must be a system in place that automatically tracks these changes and issues alerts, when vital dependencies are in the process of being violated. 6

9 Shifting WLA Business Requirements The reasons for many organizations to move up the WLA maturity model described in the previous paragraph result from increased business stakeholder demands: Shorter batch windows: As most IT organizations are required to provide 24x7 access to real-time data-driven enterprise applications, batch windows are constantly decreasing. It is no longer acceptable to restrict access to entire business applications during off-peak hours, while the necessary background processing happens. Immediate processing requests: In the early mainframe days, batch jobs were often only processed once per week, month, or even quarter. In modern enterprise IT environments, users often expect instant or near instant results, when they submit service requests. Transparency: Today, it is often no longer acceptable for business stakeholders to learn of workload problems when business critical applications fail, due to a lack of input from the WLA system. In many organizations business service management (BSM) dashboards still turn a blind eye toward WLA. This often leads to unanticipated application failures, as missed job processing windows are not monitored. Service Level Management: When SLAs are missed, there mostly is a direct cost to the organization, as well as an opportunity cost. The direct cost can usually be translated into a dollar value, while the opportunity cost is often expressed in terms of customer dissatisfaction. Regulatory requirements: PCI DSS 6, HIPAA 7, and SOX 8 are three common types of regulations that modern organizations are routinely audited for. Therefore, it is essential for WLA solutions to provide comprehensive audit trails of all job streams. Documentation: In reality and despite all the talk about true WLA as opposed to job scheduling, scripts Perl, Cron, Windows and application and operating system specific schedulers are still around in most companies. This often leads to documentation nightmares, resulting in serious business challenges when staff members leave the organization. These business demands all go in line with today s trend toward IT-as-a-Service or cloud, where resources are available instantaneously, for example through Amazon EC2 or Salesforce.com. Workload Automation and Cloud The term cloud can be described as a new IT paradigm, making data center resources available to developers and business users, in a near real-time manner. This almost instantaneous availability of resources and applications allows business stakeholders to harness IT to quickly implement solutions that translate into strategic differentiators for the organization. In order to implement a private or hybrid cloud, the following core components are needed: a) Virtualization b) ITPA and WLA c) Self-service portal 6 Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards 7 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of Sarbanes-Oxley Act of

10 A virtualization layer is introduced to pool the data center s compute, network, storage, and software resources. Pooling these resources makes them granular and portable, so that they can be easily combined and provisioned based on specific end-user requests. In a nutshell, introducing the cloud to the organization results in the elimination of technical and technological excuses for why a business critical IT project may not be feasible. Considering the criticality of many of these IT projects within today s business environment, eliminating project barriers often has a direct impact on the corporate bottom line. The corporate cloud consists of numerous point solutions service catalog, charge back, provisioning, monitoring, lifecycle management, patch management, asset management, configuration management, compliance management that are tied together into one consistent self-service offering by WLA and its sister discipline ITPA. In the ideal case, most end-user requests can be fulfilled in a self-service manner and in near real-time. Core Capabilities in 2012: It s all about the Business Service During this year s WLA Radar research, EMA has determined a balance between current WLA requirements as they are perceived by end users and requirements guided by recent developments in enterprise IT, such as the rise of the cloud and advanced business service management. Please keep in mind that these categories were weighed differently, depending on their importance to a businessdriven WLA solution. Architecture & Integration Architecture Disaster protection Process automation capabilities Workload virtualization and distribution System interfaces: GUI, web service, mobile application, command line, Windows client Scalability, performance and reliability Integration Platform support BI and Big Data support Cloud support Enterprise application integration Comprehensive API Cloud and virtualization platform integration Managed file transfer 8

11 Functionality Critical path monitoring Predictive analytics and forecasting Service level management and business awareness Self-service portal Triggering and conditional logic Alerting Security model What-if scenarios Auto remediation Logging and auditability Ease-of-use Mobile device support Help resources Root cause analysis Deployment & Administration Deployment Ease-of-implementation Conversion tools Job stream discovery Training requirements Administration Console ease-of-use Upgrade process Lifecycle management Automation of management Cost Advantage Flexibility of cost model Transparency of cost model Cost for various scenarios Administration cost Implementation cost Integration cost Vendor Strength Vision Strategy Financial strength Research and development Channel and partnerships Market credibility 9

12 Vendors Included in this Report Today s WLA marketplace can be divided into three major segments: Traditional WLA Vendors These vendors conceived their WLA products during the mainframe days in the 1970s and 1980s. Over time, each one of them acquired capabilities to provide WLA for distributed environments. All traditional WLA vendors also offer a full portfolio of business service management solutions. At the time of EMA s evaluation, numerous critical updates to the IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler were pending release. As the platform was still evolving, IBM declined to participate in the product comparison. Members of this group: ASG, BMC, CA Technologies Challengers These are newer solutions that lack the deep experience and massive legacy deployments of the four traditional vendors, but often bring disruptive new elements to the table, such as lifecycle management, advanced analytics, easy-to-use Web-based user interfaces, or agents that can be combined with multiple scheduling servers. Members of this group: ASCI, Cisco, MVP, ORSYP, Stonebranch, UC4 Specific Solution Vendors Members of this group offer attractively priced solutions that apply to more specific problem sets, such as Windows-only scheduling, advanced file transfer, and advanced business workflows. Members of this group: Arcana, Flux, Network Automation Workload Analytics Terma Software Labs (Terma) plays a distinct role within this EMA Radar, as Terma s software provides real-time predictive analytics and service level monitoring for three of the above vendors: CA Technologies, Cisco, and Stonebranch. Terma JAWS can be seen as an add-on, transforming these three WLA solutions, into truly business aware automation tools. Evaluation Criteria Each product feature had to fulfill the following three criteria to be credited with a capability score: General availability: The features needed to be generally available with the solution set at the time of the evaluation. Features that were in beta testing or were scheduled to be included in later releases of the management suite were not eligible for consideration. Included in Cost: All features that were part of the evaluation had to also be priced into the total product cost. For example, if one vendor included connectors for BI and Big Data with the standard product package, while another vendor offered these connectors at an extra cost, EMA added this extra cost to the pricing for this report. Documentation: All reported features had to be clearly documented in publicly available resources, such as user manuals or technical papers, for verification. 10

13 EMA 2012 Workload Automation Radar Results The total product value is defined by comparing the overall product strength of each WLA solution (y-axis of Figure 5) with its cost efficiency (x-axis of Figure 5). Product Strength combines evaluation scores for Functionality and Architecture & Integration, Cost Efficiency is calculated from the scores achieved from the Cost Advantage and Deployment & Administration categories. The size of each vendor s bubble indicates the vendor strength as identified in the individual reviews. Figure 5: WLA Bubble Chart Key Changes Compared to the 2010 WLA Radar Report When comparing the new chart with the previous one that was compiled in 2010, EMA can make the following observations: This time, EMA included four additional vendors: MVP, Flux, and Network Automation. Stonebranch and Opswise merged. CA Technologies and Cisco are now Value Leaders. ASCI has jumped from its old location close to Selective Value to its new location, bordering the Value Leader category. 11

14 Value Leader: ORSYP ORSYP: Combining UniJob for cost effectively centralizing and controlling the execution of local server scripts and Dollar Universe for advanced workload automation tasks allows the customer to obtain an outstanding WLA solution at a very interesting price point. ORSYP s peer-to-peer architecture makes the software easy-to-deploy, without a single point of failure. An intuitive user-interface, strong conversion features, and outstanding lifecycle management capabilities are further aspects cementing ORSYP s status as a Value Leader. Special Award ORSYP: Most Scalable and Resilient Architecture ORSYP s peer-to-peer architecture does not depend on master servers to reliably execute workloads. Each individual processing node owns a full copy of the scheduling database and is therefore able to complete its assigned workloads independently. ORSYP must be credited for keeping its peer-to-peer software sufficiently lightweight to ensure the performance of the corporate server and network infrastructure. Central servers are only required for configuring general system parameters and for reporting. Especially in today s cloud age, ORSYP s resilient infrastructure is a significant advantage, as network connectivity and performance is often the weakest link, specifically in hybrid cloud environments. 12

15 ORSYP Profile Introduction Established in 1986 in Paris, France, ORSYP launched Dollar Universe, its flagship WLA product, in ORSYP opened its first U.S. Office in Boston, MA in In 2007, Argos Soditic, a private equity firm best known in Europe, acquired ORSYP as part of a leveraged management buy-out. In 2008, ORSYP released UniJob, a simple solution for managing Cron and Windows Task Scheduler jobs. Purchasing systems management company Sysload in 2009, ORSYP extended its IT Operations Management portfolio to include focus on data center performance and capacity management, completing the integration of the Sysload suite of tools with Dollar Universe V6 in ORSYP is well known for its uniquely resilient and scalable peer-to-peer architecture, as well as for its ease of use. Architecture & Integration Reliability and scalability through peer-to-peer architecture (see Figure 17), resource abstraction, and critical path monitoring are often mentioned by ORSYP customers when asked about the strength of the solution. Sysload, now integrated with Dollar Universe on the backend, ensures the dynamic distribution of workloads across the data center, in an SLA-compliant and efficient way. User interface integration with Sysload is on the ORSYP development roadmap and is scheduled for launch in

16 ORSYP Profile Figure 17: ORSYP peer-to-peer architecture (right) vs. conventional architecture (left) UniJob and Dollar Universe are both controlled from one common Java interface, UniViewer, hosted on the central management server. This central server also handles user credential and system configuration management, as well as lifecycle management. Customers can combine UniJob and Dollar Universe throughout their environment, depending on automation needs (see Figure 18). The deployment of UniJob is recommended for servers running Cron or Windows Task Scheduler jobs. Installing UniJob to this type of server allows the administrator to view job performance, receive audit trails, and most importantly, manage all scripted jobs from one central dashboard. If more advanced functionality, such as scalability, dynamic workload distribution, enterprise application integration, Web services, virtualization control or managed file transfer are needed, Dollar Universe is the right choice. Dollar Universe integrates with most hypervisors Hyper-V, ESX/i, and PowerVM as well as with Amazon EC2 and Rackspace cloud offerings for dynamic resource provisioning and management. 14

17 ORSYP Profile Figure 18: Dollar Universe ($U) and UniJob (uj) in a combined environment The scheduling database is present on each agent for fully autonomous job execution. Despite containing a full database copy, the size of each agent is only approximately 100 MB. The autonomous agents require less than 1% of the server CPU. Dollar Universe automatically provides four autonomous scheduling environments on each client, for safely testing jobs under production conditions on production hardware. Functionality The ORSYP job stream designer visualizes entire business processes and facilitates easy configuration. The monitoring capabilities offered by ORSYP UniViewer are complete and the inclusion of existing Cron and Windows Scheduling Agent jobs via UniJob are more than just an added bonus. Centralizing the entire workload environment within one control panel is the ultimate basis for visibility. Only if each and every scheduled job within the data center and in the cloud is visible from one place, is the organization able to draw the connections from these jobs to the corresponding business process that rely on them. ORSYP offers numerous excellent reports and an easy-to-use report designer to transform monitoring data into attractive and easy-to-read real-time reports. This ability is the pre-condition for SLA management and resource optimization. ORSYP s exceptional monitoring and reporting abilities are not fully matched by the software s analytics capabilities. Predictive analytics and service level management could build upon this real-time monitoring data. However, Dollar Universe does not include either capability at this point in time. While the majority of customers will be happy with ORSYP s monitoring data and reports, in order to achieve true resource optimization, SLA management and predictive analytics are required. Logging, root-cause analysis, complex conditional logic, and issue auto-remediation are additional strong points of ORSYP. All aspects of Dollar Universe and UniJob seem very well thought out and intuitive from a usability point of view. This impression is confirmed by customer testimonials, praising Dollar Universe and UniJob as easy-to-use work horses. 15

18 ORSYP Profile Deployment & Administration ORSYP s Migration Factory has the look and feel of a modern GUI, facilitating the controlled transfer of jobs and job streams from most legacy solutions, such as CA, BMC, IBM, Redwood, Cisco Tidal, and UC4. Because of ORSYP s peer-to-peer architecture, hardware requirements for the master server are minimal and do not significantly increase when more agents are added. UniJob allows system administrators to centrally manage Cron and Windows Task Scheduler workloads through a central administration panel. If more advanced functionality is required, customers can upgrade to Dollar Universe at any time. Therefore, it is a viable option for customers to start by deploying UniJob agents and gradually add on Dollar Universe agents as needed. Four separate scheduling environments are automatically created when Dollar Universe is deployed. The Dollar Universe management server orchestrates the promotion of job definitions between these environments in an excellent manner, allowing the customer to truly adhere to best practices and save significant time when it comes to job lifecycle management. In the event of server failure, even of the master server, each peer has its own autonomous engine that can keep executing all scheduled jobs. This often gives the administrator more time to fix hardware or software resources, as the impact of each failure is limited. ORSYP offers an elegant solution to patch deployment where all agents are displayed on a central dashboard with their operating system details, as well as with the currently deployed version of each ORSYP product. Cost Advantage ORSYP pricing is flexible as the customer can combine much lower priced UniJob agents, with more functional, but higher priced Dollar Universe ones, as required. UniJob could be seen as the cost efficient entry point for workload visibility, auditability, compliance and central access. The upgrade to Dollar Universe is necessary for enterprise application integration, FTP, Web service, workload virtualization, and virtualization management. This ability to mix and match UniJob and Dollar Universe licenses is attractive to customers, as they only pay for what they actually use. Licenses are offered per active job, per operating system instance, or enterprise wide. In combination with giving customers the choice between UniJob and Dollar Universe, this pricing model delivers an outstanding workload automation solution at a reasonable cost. Vendor Strength With 1,400 mostly enterprise sized customers, ORSYP is one of the larger companies in this field. ORSYP has leveraged its unique peer-to-peer architecture to truly take advantage of the cloud. For ultimate resilience, workloads can now be dynamically moved between in-house data centers and cloud resources. Enabling customers to tie together public cloud and in-house environments into one resource pool demonstrates ORSYP s understanding of where enterprise IT is headed. ORSYP s vision aims at providing the central backbone for data center automation, performance analysis and capacity management. EMA believes that ORSYP is on a promising track of achieving these goals, but needs to focus on building up predictive analytics capabilities. ORSYP s partnership with HP means that the software offers tight integration with HP s systems management products, such as Operations Manager and Operations Orchestrator. 16

19 ORSYP Profile Strengths & Limitations Strengths Scalability: ORSYP s peer-to-peer architecture is extremely scalable, as each individual server contains a full copy of engine and database. Resiliency: As the ORSYP peer-to-peer network does not rely on a master server for any of its key functionality only for reporting and maintenance any server failure has only limited impact on the overall workflow. Centralized user interface: The ability to combine the management of simple Cron and Windows Scheduling Agent jobs with managing more advanced enterprise software integration workflows ensures ultimate visibility of all workloads with the organization. Performance and capacity management: The acquisition and subsequent integration of Sysload with Dollar Universe has significantly advanced the software s performance and capacity management capabilities. Moving workloads to where they can be processed most efficiently is one of the most important goals within the data center. Basic and advanced scheduling: Offering two tiers of workload automation tools UniJob and Dollar Universe makes workload automation more accessible for customers. Limitations U.S. presence: While the quality of ORSYP s support is stellar and the company has achieved significant growth in North America, it needs to invest more in communicating with its U.S. customers to allow them to take advantage of new products and services it is bringing to the market. Critical path management: ORSYP offers excellent root cause analysis capabilities for administrators to quickly drill down to the root of an issue. However, ORSYP needs to implement the ability to automatically adjust critical path parameters based on SLAs, past performance, expected workload volume, and resource availability. Predictive analytics and SLA management: For ORSYP to truly connect the data center with the overarching business processes, the company needs to develop or acquire predictive analytics capabilities and create a service level management module that allows administrators and business users to manage SLAs separately from the underlying job streams. The acquisition of Sysload can be regarded as one step into the right direction, as it provides the core architecture for SLA-driven workload placement. 17

20 About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that provides deep insight across the full spectrum of IT and data management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices, and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help its clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research, analysis, and consulting services for enterprise line of business users, IT professionals and IT vendors at or blogs.enterprisemanagement.com. You can also follow EMA on Twitter or Facebook. This report in whole or in part may not be duplicated, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or retransmitted without prior written permission of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All opinions and estimates herein constitute our judgement as of this date and are subject to change without notice. Product names mentioned herein may be trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. EMA and Enterprise Management Associates are trademarks of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. in the United States and other countries. EMA, ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES, and the mobius symbol are registered trademarks or common-law trademarks of Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. Corporate Headquarters: 5777 Central Avenue, Suite 105 Boulder, CO Phone: Fax: _ORSYP