Three-fourths (73 percent) of IT decision makers believe businesses that do not embrace IT automation to achieve the larger digital business strategy within the next five years will cease to exist in 10 years, according to a new study by BMC Software.

92 percent of respondents agree that the demands for new sources of revenue, unique competitive advantage, and operational excellence have created enormous pressure to compete digitally in order to earn the trust of customers, trading partners, and employees.

BMC believes these results are a catalyst for the new adaptive approach to IT automation – Digital Business Automation – that simplifies managing hybrid multi-cloud environments.

The BMC study of over 650 IT decision makers across 12 countries found that by 2020, 94 percent of IT decision makers expect automation to spread from IT departments into all areas of business in order to keep pace with the accelerated digital business innovation race sweeping every industry and region worldwide. The Top 3 areas of investment priority in the next 24 months are containerization, workload automation/scheduling and DevOps.

"As companies continue to incorporate hybrid cloud capabilities across the digital enterprise, they are challenged by the complexity of managing workloads across on premises, public and private clouds," said Gur Steif, president, digital business automation at BMC. "IT teams must be able to manage the customer value chain in spite of decentralized usage of cloud services. This is requiring a new level of IT automation to adapt to the challenges posed by increasingly diverse infrastructure, disparate data, and accelerated applications – the critical components of digital business."

Almost 9 in 10 (89% of) global IT decision makers agree that IT automation must be used in new ways to achieve their desired digital business objectives. Enterprise architects, in particular, cite various obstacles preventing them from achieving their digital business objectives, including a lack of the necessary budget (67 percent), skills (44 percent) and time (51 percent.)

Gur Steif added, "BMC believes that without taking a new approach to IT automation, companies will not be able to overcome the budget, skills, and time constraint challenges identified by the survey respondents. Only through new digital-first technologies with automation solutions that support hybrid multi-clouds, will CIOs enable their companies to innovate, transform, and accelerate growth by aggressively pursuing a digital agenda that differentiates them from their competitors."

The research also suggests that businesses face other digital transformation challenges in ensuring objectives are aligned. Of CIOs surveyed, 42 percent believed that conflicting objectives remain between business units, with 32 percent of CIOs expressing the need for tighter internal organizational alignment.

Despite the new challenges and opportunities associated with digital business automation, the BMC study found that 88 percent of IT decision makers believe they are empowered to deliver the required IT innovation to drive digital business transformation and bridge this gap, and 77 percent of respondents believe that businesses are doing enough to prepare and train the workforce with greater automation skills. Respondents in the USA (97 percent), Mexico (98 percent), and Spain (94 percent) feel the most empowered to deliver IT innovation.

Seventy-six percent of global respondents consider themselves excellent or very good at using data to deliver tangible business outcomes for a competitive advantage (88 percent in North America, 80 percent in South America, 75 percent in Europe, and 64 percent in APAC.)

Methodology: 654 respondents were surveyed online between the 3rd and 12th of April 2017. The sample was split across Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Mexico, Singapore, Spain, the UK, and the USA. All of the markets had a minimum of 50 respondents with 100 in the USA alone. The data was weighted to 600 respondents globally with equal contributions for each market. Respondents were eligible if employed either full or part-time at companies with at least 250 employees, and they identified themselves as having one of the following job titles (base size shown in brackets): CIO (237), VP IT Operations or above (214), VP Application Development or above (131), Enterprise Architect (98). Respondents were sourced through pre-recruited online B2B research panels by opinion.life, a sub-division of delineate.

Bill Berutti is President, Enterprise Solutions at BMC.