As we at Ivanti engage with more and more customers—explaining and educating them about our Unified IT story and journey—there is a common theme that appears.

This theme is around automation.

Automation is the fabric of digital transformation, or Unified IT. Without automation, your transformation will fail. This much has become apparent to me over the last 12 months since Ivanti acquired RES for their automation technology.

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation today for customers is about delivering a service with an exceptional user experience, including being self-service driven, available 24/7, and instantly gratifying. When you tick these boxes, then typically users and customers will be drawn to your service.

Great examples today are the Ubers, AirBnbs, and Purplebricks, where they have taken technology to a new level of integration into their business, and where the model is based around the technology.

For businesses it really about delivering an efficient, AUTOMATED service, which delivers an experience the same (if not better) to their customers. It’s also about being able to track analytics within that service to give customers indicators of success, failure, as well as the ability to forecast.

Today you will see banks and governments also start embracing digital transformation of some form. From doing your car tax online to managing your bank accounts and cards online, every business isn’t in the race unless they have an app to support selling and providing services to consumers.

The Need for Automation

Within the middle of this embrace of technology is the need for automation. It provides, as I said earlier, the “fabric” of transformation. It allows all those business systems which have amassed over a period of time to begin to communication with each other and have workflows and processes drive their interaction with each other. Without the fabric of automation, making these systems talk to each other in different languages and API’s is painful.

Automation within a digital transformation scenario allows all the different API’s and languages to come together, pass parameters via different systems, and seamlessly provide an outcome. Overcoming operational bottlenecks with automation is key to moving into a phase of digital transformation within your business.

Digital transformation is now upon us in various guises, from full implementation of driving a business and its interaction with customers like Uber, to the initial steps of adding the ability to onboard and offboard employees in and our of your business.

Ivanti is not the only vendor to recognise this. Citrix only recently acquired an automation company as well, Sapho. VMWare also offers automation as part of their product offerings. Watch this space as other major vendors begin to realise that for them to be more relevant to customers, automation becomes critical.

Ivanti recognised this with its acquisition of RES over 12 months ago. Now, automation is the key component of our Unified IT journey. It not only allows us to provide tools that can support IT and business end to end, but it also allows our products to integrate with our competitors to ensure that we are part of your journey towards digital transformation.