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.

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 the 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.

I would be remiss 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.

Lastly, Automic SaaS represents the logical evolution of these advancements, reducing the time spent on scheduler maintenance (including upgrades, housekeeping, and database maintenance). This enables automation teams to deliver more automation to their application teams and explore new use cases.

How does the launch of SaaS fit into Automic's evolution and benefit customers?

SaaS benefits our customers in a variety of ways. If we look at a traditional customer, they spend a lot of time maintaining the database, servers, and Automic as an application. With SaaS, all that goes away and we take over all that from them. They also receive new features more quickly and gain greater flexibility. For example, we provide business continuity with multiple data centers in the U.S. (as well as Europe for our European customers).

The Automic team recently released some new AI-powered features. How do you think these features will help Automic users?

I think we will see two main topics emerge - one is end-user guidance, where AI can help analyze scripts, executions, and error messages, and the other is the ASK_AI function, which can create more detailed alerts and even write scripts for customers. I think it’s crucial that our engineering team didn't just add an AI integration for AI's sake, but created an AI Service that can be connected to any LLM - whether public, like Gemini, private cloud-hosted LLMs, or even Ollama, which is self-hosted.

What’s next for Automic?

After over 26 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