Agility, ability and velocity became the new success necessities of organizations in the past few years, especially in just gone by 2011, driven largely by recession realities and unpredictable business environment.

Recession, viewed positively, boosted innovation and increased the pace of new process development and its adoption. The IT customer is increasingly global, the realm of the IT services grows larger every day and the sprawling, distributed IT components demand intelligent ways to manage and monitor this infrastructure.

The administrative burden for managing this burgeoning infrastructure will only increase for IT departments, unless they adopt processes and software to automate most of the burden.

To automate processes, you need to integrate the different workflows seamlessly, which requires the software products to have flexible APIs. The order entry, provisioning, monitoring & billing workflows are all candidates for integration and automation. There have been significant advances even within the monitoring and management solutions to reduce the administrative burden with the use of templates, threshold baselining and creating of service models.

The other innovation has been in the field of data analytics. The IT customer's demands have always been dynamic, and IT departments have reacted by provisioning for the peak demand, resulting in wasted idle compute resources. Even the usage of application resources is dynamic by the hour and day of week, and it is increasingly important for IT departments to understand the behavior pattern of their network and applications in addition to the computing resources.

The number of users, the response times, the queued messages, the database query rate -- all vary by time of day and understanding the usage pattern and deviations from it helps isolate the root cause of IT service performance degradation much faster, and ultimately, higher customer satisfaction. More importantly, using APM behavior patterns greatly reduces the amount of false alarms for IT Operations, and lower TCO.

Automation and analytics are smart product features focusing on reducing the administrative burden in today's distributed Cloud environments. Keeping business necessities in mind, these innovative features are pragmatically relevant and a must for all IT departments in today's business environment.

Vikas Aggarwal is CEO of Zyrion.