Workload Automation & SAP: better together

When we talk about operational efficiency and orchestration of IT and Business workflows, workload automation is Enterprise Resource Planning’s best friend.  
We see this every single day with our customers, especially those using SAP to run their critical business processes.  

By leveraging the power of Workload Automation and making the most out of its integration with SAP, we have seen our customers move their businesses to the next level of innovation and maturity. 

​Want to learn how? Let’s start from the beginning. ​

WORKLOAD AUTOMATION 101 

From a high-level, wherever there is a process to automate, there is the need for Workload Automation to manage it.   

• Workload Automation is the perfect platform to schedule, run and manage digital business processes from end to end, automatically.  And thanks to Workload Automation, business processing can take place without human intervention.  
• ​​The platform boosts a customer’s business by seamlessly orchestrating complex workflows across multiple platforms and applications. It acts as a meta-orchestrator for continuous automation, leveraging containerization and an intuitive user interface, while offering the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) on the market. Plus, it provides a single point of control for application developers, IT administrators and operators, providing them both autonomy and precise governance through centralized access control that includes auditing and versioning.  
• The solution is available on mainframe, virtualized (on-premise), and on cloud and hybrid environments.   
• Workload Automation is SAP S/4 HANA certified and is available on the SAP App Center.  

   
As recently stated (located here), by Alexandra Thurel, Director of Product Management at HCL Software: “Adopting the right workload automation solution is key for businesses. Customers need a flexible and powerful orchestrator that can achieve advanced integration and execution of business-critical processes, combining SAP and non-SAP workloads while ensuring full governance and compliance of their automation.”  

How can you make the most out of SAP by combining it with the power of Workload Automation?  

Here are a few examples of what Workload Automation will help you do… 

Standardization of Tools  

• Manage SAP and non-SAP integrated workflows so you can run all end-to-end business, infrastructure and automation processes using the same platform. 
• Securely monitor and manage all automated workflows from a single view reducing labor and redundant tool costs.
• Meet business critical SLAs to reduce fines and penalties. 
• Adhere to regulatory auditing requirements to reduce rework and possible fines and penalties.

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​Value for Investment  

• Consolidate your workload automation resources and tools under one platform to reduce resource and licensing costs. 
• Reduce error-prone manual processes that create delays in critical business processing. 
• Simply migrate your SAP workloads by importing them directly into Workload Automation from your SAP environments. 
• Create advanced solutions utilizing included feature-rich capabilities and future-proof your investment with free updates and plugins. 

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Ease of Use 

• Integrate with current IT management application landscapes using built-in features including no cost APIs and plugins to take control of your business. 
• Monitor using a state-of-the-art GUI with customizable dashboards that give you the view you need to effectively manage your workflows. 
• Streamline management with Workload Folders to securely organize work according to your business and organizational needs. 
• Containerize your workload automation agent and infrastructure deployments to reduce deployment and upgrade times. 

Cutting-Edge Innovation  

• Stay compliant with built-in auditing so you can understand and report on who did what, where and why and on which ticket.  
• Manage your workflows using built-in version control. You can even roll back to a previous version of a workflow. 
• Use What-If impact analysis and advanced analytics to determine exactly how your workflows will run and when they will be complete.  
• Use zero-downtime agent upgrades that allow you to upgrade an agent without causing an application batch outage during the upgrade window.  
• Use HCL Clara, our NLP L-1 automation bot, to answer Workload Automation questions and to provide a user-friendly window into your Workload Automation workflows, complete with secure access to a library of typical actions that can be executed.  
• Use HCL HERO (our WA infrastructure health-check monitor and recovery runbook optimizer) to monitor not only the Workload Automation application infrastructure but also to understand how your Workload Automation systems are performing using Machine Learning. The runbook optimizer provides a means to quickly recover from your WA environment from typical issues you may experience.  

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Cloud Adaptability  

• Manage workflows on mainframe, virtually (on premise), on cloud, or hybrid clouds allowing you to “run-from-anywhere”.  
• Use our “run-from-anywhere” philosophy to securely manage your application workflows across all platforms and clouds managed from a single point of control. 
• Speed your cloud evolution with Workload Automation on AWS®, MS Azure® and the SAP App Center. 
• Use Docker® images to deploy and manage agents and infrastructure components to quickly deploy and upgrade your Workload Automation environments. As part of our continuous-delivery strategy, new features are delivered regularly that can be used after each upgrade. 

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ARE YOU READY FOR THE FUTURE? 

Want to learn more?  

​Visit the Workload Automation website or drop an email to Bruce.Whitehead@hcl.com or emanuela.zaccone@hcl.com and let’s talk about how to move your SAP & automation game to the next level!

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AUTHOR’S BIOS

Bruce Whitehead, Tech Sales Workload Automation
Bruce has 23+ years of Workload Automation experience. He started working in the Workload Automation arena at Best Buy, a leading US electronics retailer. After 12 years there he spent 10 years at United Health (Optum) and helped them deploy and manage one of the largest workload automation environments in the world. Currently he is a Tech Sales Specialist and Architect working for HCL Software. ​

Emanuela Zaccone, Workload Automation Product Manager
15+ years of experience in Digital Marketing and, since 2016, in Product Management. She has a background as a digital entrepreneur, with her latest Silicon Valley-based start-up acquired in 2019. She strongly believes in a customer-centric and data-driven approach to product management. And she is now proud to rock the future of Automation at HCL. ​