Automic’s Long History of Innovation from UC4 to Automation for the Cloud

Automic Automation has been around for a long time. From the days of UC4 and through acquisitions by CA and then Broadcom, Automic has been helping organizations automate and orchestrate workloads for over 25 years. Dave Kellermanns, Automation by Broadcom solution architect has been working with Automic for almost as long. Following is an excerpt of our conversation with him about Automic’s history and role in today’s cloud-first world.

How long have you been working with Automic Automation (Automic)?

I joined a company called SBB in 1999 in Austria. At that time, the company had about 35 employees and was predominately in the DACH region which includes Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Automic’s precursor, UC4 was released in 1996. It was developed in Austria by some smart people who saw the need for a unified view across siloed solutions scheduling workloads at that time.

In 2000, I went to the U.S. to start up the U.S. operations and show the market what UC4 had to offer. At that time, enterprise automation was mostly greenfield such as Cron, Windows scheduler, homegrown to fit individual customer needs, or one of the few commercial products (CA AutoSys being one of the major ones). UC4 had distinguishing features such as managed file transfer, sophisticated calendaring, notifications, and runtime management. Customers appreciated being able to get everything from one product versus having to piece everything together on the backend.

What were the major milestones in product feature development?

As UC4 was growing successfully around the world, we started to get customers who needed better scalability and redundancy. That’s when we renamed from UC4 to UC4:global and created a multi-threaded approach (2002) which was an important redesign.

One of the features for those customers is zero-downtime upgrade which allows customers to run two versions concurrently to test features available in the latest release and make sure business continues to run while testing, which helped us provide scalability for customers that run millions of processes a day and cannot have downtime due to a system failure or having to apply a patch.

The other one is central agent upgrade (CAU) which enables customers to manage thousands of agents centrally from the product and apply hotfixes centrally without missing a beat.

Over the 25 years, we also moved from a .NET UI to a Java UI to a modern WebUI which was an interesting journey. The WebUI is so much more flexible, providing customers with different views, critical paths, dashboards, and other features we added over the years.

Finally, I would be amiss to not mention our move from on-premises and cloud servers to also providing the Automic Automation Kubernetes Edition which enables our customers to host Automic on Kubernetes clusters with the benefits that Kubernetes brings, such as automatic pod restarts or scalability through replica sets.

How has IT changed over the last years and what has been the impact on workload automation?

In the old days, IT was easy. You had your shell scripts, Python scripts, database queries, and ERP jobs. At that time, everything was batch scheduling which evolved into workload automation. Customers started looking at the benefits of workload automation such as reliability and auditability and what those benefits could provide to other areas of the business such as IT operations. At that time, Service Orchestration was born providing customers the ability to provision servers, create automated remediations, etc. to automate not only workload but also IT processes as a whole.

However, what we have seen in the recent past is a move away from these traditional workloads to API and REST call-driven integrations which is partially predicated by workload moving into the cloud.

Now it would be easy to learn every API and possible integration, but that would be against the idea of lowering the cost of operations and increasing speed to market. There would be a lot less time to innovate as you are learning and developing your integrations before you can put them into production.

We created the Automation Marketplace which features Broadcom and customer-driven integrations which our customers can now download and start using in their environment. This has become even more important in today’s cloud world where new technologies emerge daily with their APIs and technologies. Broadcom now has a whole team called the Integration Factory that creates these integrations for the Marketplace for our customers to adopt at the speed of the cloud providers. It includes integrations for all the major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud as well as integrations for ERP solutions like SAP and technologies such as Kubernetes). This has helped our customers to decrease development cycles and increase innovation.

What are some of the challenges modern applications in the cloud offer?

As our customers embark on their cloud journey, they meet a new world where applications are no longer installed on physical servers where licensing can be done on a credit card, and divisions and teams can procure their technology stack by swiping a card. While this can lead to faster development cycles, it also means that IT Ops meets the challenge of fragmented applications and siloed scheduling.

While I don’t see the new world going away, it means IT Ops has to find a way to embrace these new technologies and find a way to still provide the end-to-end business view that the business users have gotten accustomed to over the years. This is where enterprise automation with manager-of-manager capabilities can play a vital role and I think Automic with its history, multi-threaded nature, open integration, and scalability is uniquely positioned to help customers bridge traditional IT and the new challenges of IT in the cloud.

What’s next for Automic?

After 25 years of working with Automic, I still haven’t found the limits of the product and am excited about what product management has in the pipeline next. The trend (or maybe re-emergence) of the concept of automating everything in an organization that can be automated (aka Hyperautomation), GenAI, and its implications for user interaction, automation, code development, and so forth are all interesting topics we’ll see in the next years.