UC4 AUTOMATION SAP

1. For more information about
UC4 products please visit
www.uc4.com.
ONE Automation
Dynamically Orchestrating Business Processes
and IT Infrastructure Across the Enterprise

2. Table of Contents
The Problem: Changing IT Landscape Creates Technology Silos .......................................3
The Answer: ONE Automation............................................................................................4
Automating Tasks...............................................................................................................5
Job Scheduling ...............................................................................................................1
Application Release Automation......................................................................................2
Run Book Automation .....................................................................................................3
Managed File Transfer ....................................................................................................4
Application Process Automation......................................................................................5
Virtualization Automation.................................................................................................5
Automating Decisions and Business Intelligence.................................................................7
UC4 Decision for CEP-based Automated Decision Making..............................................7
UC4 Insight for Business Intelligence and Analytics.........................................................8
Conclusion .........................................................................................................................9

3. The Problem: Changing IT Landscape Creates Technology Silos
The IT landscape is evolving, with major developments under way that are changing how we
think about IT infrastructure and services. And in the same way that application, database, and
server vendors are evolving from physical to virtual and cloud computing, automation
technology must also evolve to support business processes in the new IT landscape.
Today, business processes span multiple applications, people, and departments—and the
applications and servers they use can be located in physical, virtual, or cloud environments.
As IT infrastructure moves beyond the physical, on-premise world, it becomes ever more
dynamic, agile, and componentized.
Virtualization has its benefits, enabling IT departments to use their infrastructure more efficiently.
It lowers acquisition, space, and energy costs while driving up productivity and results. But
because so few elements in enterprise IT infrastructures are deliberately engineered to
operate in a transparent, unified manner, virtualization poses major problems for IT opera-
tions management. With no defined industry standards for integrating products across
hybrid environments, the multiple technologies, tools, and tasks involved cannot interact in
a cohesive, centralized fashion.
The advent of cloud computing poses similar challenges. On the plus side, as applications
evolve from packaged, store-bought solutions (or complex, home-grown ones) to light-
weight, utility-based services, businesses are saving money and becoming more agile. On
the downside, cloud computing is adding a whole new level of complexity for IT depart-
ments and is creating its own technology silos.
The result of both the virtualization and cloud computing trends is isolated silos of technology
that must be bridged by human efforts rather than through standard tools and methods. To meet
immediate needs, IT departments have come up with ad-hoc, situation-specific automation
solutions that usually involve scripted interactions between pairs of machines, applications, or
services. These solutions may involve activities ranging from job scheduling to release manage-
ment—but because they were typically developed to support the requirements of a particular
group within the company, they tend to create silos of automation rather than end-to-end
automation solutions, as shown in Figure 1. The combination of a lack of cross-project
communication and the inherent lack of flexibility in legacy automation solutions results in point
solutions that normally add no value outside of the silo they support.
Figure 1. Point solutions for automating IT silos typically end up wasting resources and money
on a dozen or more isolated tools.

4. The Answer: ONE Automation
A better approach than the point automation solutions found in IT departments today is
what we at UC4 call ONE Automation. As illustrated in Figure 2, ONE Automation is an
approach that enables you to integrate and orchestrate workflows across the enterprise into
a single, automated process stream that encompasses all your computing environments.
Breaking down the technology silos, ONE Automation provides visibility and touch points
that let you see and manage processes throughout the enterprise. In so doing, it enhances
your productivity, lowers your operating costs, and serves as the foundation for the agile IT
infrastructure that your company needs to meet its business objectives. And it’s available
today, through the UC4 Automation Platform™.
Figure 2. With ONE Automation, you have a single, automated process stream that
integrates and orchestrates workflows across the enterprise.
The UC4 Automation Platform supports the most operating systems, databases, applications,
and services of any automation solution available today. A highly scalable platform, it can
handle tens of thousands of servers and millions of jobs and processes per day. And, as shown
in Figure 3, it eliminates automation silos, providing end-to-end monitoring, orchestration, and
execution, across physical, virtual, and cloud environments—enterprise-wide.
Figure 3. The UC4 Automation Platform offers smarter automation, breaking down
operational silos and automating decisions as well as tasks.

5. The UC4 Automation Platform unites a unique and powerful process automation engine with
innovative Complex Event Processing (CEP) technology. Its real-time CEP intelligence enables
it to apply policies and rules to identify event patterns that could affect your ability to meet your
service level agreements (SLAs), and then take automated action to resolve these situations
before they become critical. For example, if changes in conditions threaten the completion of a
key business process, UC4 can predictively reschedule other workloads or provision additional
resources to ensure that the process can be executed without interruption.
With legacy point solutions, automated decisions can be based only on information that
exists within the one silo addressed by that solution (unless you add excessive complexity
to the process). With the UC4 Automation Platform, that limitation no longer applies. Breaking
down operational silos, UC4 delivers smarter automation, basing its automated decisions on the
ever-changing business indicators across all aspects of your business—not just on IT indicators,
as traditional automation tools do.
The UC4 Automation Platform takes the guesswork out of your automation requirements. It
enhances your productivity, accelerates your business and IT processes, reduces your
operational costs, and enables you to deliver the promised services on time—every time.
Automating Tasks
Your IT infrastructure and applications support various business processes that often do not
connect and talk to each other natively. Add in virtual applications and those hosted in the
cloud, and you have an incredibly complex environment to manage.
Further complexity comes from the intricate network of interdependencies that exists across
your applications and IT infrastructure, with some processes depending on the successful
completion of others. In addition to making sure that steps are performed in the right order,
you also need to ensure that you have sufficient IT resources to meet the needs of each
step, as well enough to handle the overall process load. These challenges present
themselves in every process—from fulfilling an order, to running a report, to automating
month-end close; and they apply to on-demand as well as scheduled processes.
Without a broad automation solution, organizations must coordinate all these processes
separately—through e-mails, phone calls, file arrivals, and elementary scheduling at the
operating system, database, or application level. This approach, as pointed out earlier,
typically results in automated processing silos, with no means of global visibility,
management, or control.
The only way to eliminate these automation silos is to apply a single, enterprise-wide
automation solution—one that’s powerful enough to manage complex tasks and interdepen-
dencies across hybrid infrastructures, while also making intelligent decisions in real time.
The UC4 Automation Platform is the only solution available today that’s capable of accom-
plishing this. It will also help keep your IT overhead costs down by eliminating low-value,
error-prone manual tasks. In the next few sections, we’ll describe more specifically how the
UC4 Automation Platform handles specific types of business and IT processes.

6. Job Scheduling
The concept of job scheduling has been around for decades, dating back to mainframe
days, when all business activity was driven through batch transactions. Initially, most
companies launched their batch jobs manually. However, as the number of machines, jobs,
and scheduling dependencies increased, this approach soon became unworkable.
Today, however, enterprises that run batch jobs still typically need to intervene manually at
numerous points. Manual processes may be needed to set up new batch runs, review
previous job output, verify that dependent batch jobs have been successfully completed,
gather additional input data, or initiate subsequent jobs. Further complexities stem from the
use of multiple computing platforms and business processes that run 24/7, making it harder
to find windows of time to run batch processes.
Standard scheduling tools simply cannot handle this degree of complexity, due to inherent
limitations in their design. These limitations typically include:
 Limited support for scheduling options, such as calendar rules (see Figure 4)
 No support for parallel processing, resulting in longer job execution times
 No ability to adjust schedules to handle dependencies between jobs or job sets
 No ability to see and control any jobs beyond the native application and computing
platform for which they were designed
 Difficulties in dealing with parent/child processing
 Limited error-detection abilities, resulting in processes with errors in the logs or
listings still finishing with a completed or normal status
 No ability to deal with file events or other event types
To overcome these limitations, many organizations have resorted to writing custom code to
submit, monitor, and manage enterprise application processes. These custom solutions are
typically initiated by operating system schedulers, such as CRON or Windows Task
Scheduler. The limited functionality in these schedulers generally results in incomplete or
hard-to-manage solutions.
Figure 4. Calendar rules specify the date and time that jobs need to be run.
JOB1 JOB2
JOB3 JOB4
JOB5
Process Flow

7. The UC4 Automation Platform supports traditional batch job scheduling, but its scheduling
capabilities go far beyond the limited capabilities of traditional batch schedulers, encom-
passing calendar- and event-based scheduling, and more. Working across all your
computing environments—on-premise, virtual, and cloud—UC4 gives you enterprise-wide
visibility and control over all jobs that are running, integrating existing (legacy) schedulers
and new applications, streamlining your IT operations with true end-to-end automated
processing, and eliminating islands of automation.
Key job-scheduling benefits provided by the UC4 Automation Engine include:
 One tool for managing jobs enterprise-wide—across all platforms, databases,
applications, and Web services
 Scriptless integration with most enterprise applications and tools
 Built-in script, version, and source control
 Multi-tenant support for business units and subsidiaries
 Complete audit trail and security features to ensure compliance
 Full international time zone support
 Unmatched scalability and throughput, enabling it to handle tens of thousands of
servers and millions of jobs and processes per day
 Clustering and load balancing to ensure continuous operations, so that if one server
fails, processing can continue uninterrupted
Application Release Automation
Releasing new and updated applications is a complex process. For example, within a single
week, you may be releasing multiple applications to different platforms, environments, and
owners—each with different deployment requirements. Complex dependencies between
applications, operating systems, configurations, and other elements further complicate the
process. Deployment also typically involves numerous manual steps, which not only require
extensive staff time but also increase the risk of errors. Yet, with all this complexity, you still
need to keep everything on schedule, be able to verify that the deployment matched the
expectations in each case, and be aware of any problems that arise.
The more frequent your application releases, patches, or updates, the more complicated
deployment becomes. In addition to all the hours of staff time deployments typically require,
any errors that occur—for example, from missteps in manual processes, corrupt packages,
or conflicts between applications that are released in parallel—may result in production
outages, making it hard to fulfill your SLAs.
The UC4 Automation Engine automates the application release process end to end—from
packaging all the way to deployment. A flexible, cross-platform solution, the UC4 Automation
Platform coordinates and automates all the activities involved in application deployment,
allowing for different environments and owners and different processes in each case. It
handles upgrades, changes, patches, and first-time deployments—from development
through multiple intermediate stages to production. It gives you visibility and control across
all application releases, enterprise-wide. It provides you with the assurance you need by
generating notifications if any problems arise, and it can take automated actions (continue,
pause, remediate) based on rules you specify. And it does all this in an auditable and
reversible manner. It’s also the most scalable solution in the market, supporting even the
largest deployments, as well as the most databases, operating systems, and tools of any
application deployment solution.

8. Run Book Automation
Data centers are dynamic entities. They have the tendency to grow over the years, and they
continually change. Without detailed and timely documentation of all systems and processes,
the IT department can quickly lose control, no longer understanding its own internal
processes. Questions such as “How did these results come about?” and “What are the
mutual dependencies between these processes?” become difficult to answer. IT run books
are the documents that contain descriptions of these process and dependencies. They serve as
an IT operations manual, describing how to perform specific tasks and jobs.
A significant portion of the run book consists of IT housekeeping procedures—fundamental
infrastructure processes and maintenance routines, such as database maintenance and
backup and recovery procedures. These processes are critical for the data center to
operate efficiently and provide the necessary support for business continuity in the event of
a disaster. However, they take a lot of time and are also error-prone, due to the need for
manual intervention—for example, to shut down a database before taking a complete
backup. And the more manual steps involved, the larger the probability of making mistakes,
with potentially serious consequences.
The UC4 Automation Platform, with its built-in source control and version management,
enables you to automate and standardize IT housekeeping processes across your entire
infrastructure. As a result, you can manage tasks more efficiently and process workloads
faster and more transparently. For example, a common Windows or UNIX management
routine can be stored centrally inside the UC4 Automation Platform and executed on each
applicable server, eliminating the requirement to store source on each individual server.
And as new servers are brought into the data center, UC4’s automated agent recognition
can be used to place the new server into the appropriate agent group—so as you add
capacity in your data center, maintenance processing will automatically be performed
appropriately on the new servers.
By automating fundamental infrastructure processes and maintenance tasks, UC4’s intelligent
IT housekeeping ensures that tasks are performed at the right time and in the proper manner;
enhances performance and availability; increases transparency in the data center; and frees up
administrative personnel for other tasks. Because UC4 provides centralized control across all
computing environments through a single management console, it solves the IT house-
keeping problems introduced by heterogeneous IT landscapes. In addition, it eliminates the
errors that often occur with manual efforts and makes it easier to implement and report on
compliance requirements. Figure 5 illustrates how run book automation can improve
reliability and availability.
Figure 5. Run book automation enhances reliability and availability by reducing the risk of
manual errors.

9. Managed File Transfer
Managed file transfer (MFT) is a core requirement of batch automation and is the most common
way of transferring data from one application to another, as well as a common means of
transferring data between business partners. MFT solutions facilitate the secure movement of
files from one computer to another over a network, converting character sets as needed while
also providing high performance. With a trusted key relationship that ensures end-to-end
encryption and the ability to guarantee delivery from origin to destination, MFT offers significant
security and control advantages over traditional File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or Secure File
Transfer Protocol (SFTP).
The UC4 Automation Platform includes tightly integrated MFT functionality, eliminating any
need for third-party products. With UC4’s MFT capabilities, you can be confident that your
file transfers are secure, encoded, and fully auditable, with comprehensive safeguards
against using inaccurate data. And because the entire file transfer process—including
encoding—takes place automatically, it eliminates all the tedious manual steps that are
required when working with other technologies, such as FTP/SFTP tools. Figure 6
illustrates the breadth of UC4’s MFT capabilities.
For the occasional situation where FTP or SFTP is a more appropriate choice, UC4 also
provides support for these protocols, enabling you to transfer files without having to write
any script—and without having to place user names or passwords in clear text.
Figure 6. The UC4 Automation Platform includes tightly integrated MFT functionality with
extensive built-in protection.

10. Application Process Automation
IT departments have always operated under mandates to provide the highest quality of
service at the lowest possible cost. Application Process Automation is one of the best ways
to lower IT costs, since it can eliminate a great deal of manual effort. But with organizations
running hundreds, or even thousands, of different applications, each with its own distinct
technologies and interfaces—and with business processes often spanning multiple people,
departments, applications, databases, and servers—implementing end-to-end automation
can be difficult. The result is often a complex set of integrations and custom solutions based
on multiple tools, creating islands of automation.
The only way to simplify this situation is to integrate all applications into a single automation
platform. And because your application landscape is always changing—whether it grows
organically or through mergers and acquisitions—you need a means of dynamically and
rapidly integrating new applications, databases, servers, tools, and services into your
automation strategy.
The UC4 Automation Platform supports the most operating systems, databases, applica-
tions, and services of any solution in the industry, allowing you to rapidly automate all your
business processes, across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. It can automate
legacy, custom, packaged, and service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications. It also
provides you with template packages for rapid automation of such functions as Automated
System Copy for SAP, Oracle Retail Merchandising, Oracle Customer Care & Billing,
Oracle Financial Period Close, JD Edwards nightly and monthly financial reports and more.
With the UC4 Automation Platform, you’ll be able to automate your application processes
enterprise-wide, reducing your operational costs and giving you better visibility and control
across your entire IT landscape.
Figure 7 illustrates how UC4 enhances one such process, SAP System Copy, by automating
the pre-copy and post-copy tasks that normally have to be performed manually. This automation
can reduce the time required to perform SAP Automated System Copy by as much as 90%.
Figure 7. The UC4 Automation Platform automates the complete
SAP System Copy process, including pre-copy and post-copy tasks,
reducing time requirements by as much as 90%.
Virtualization Automation
One way that IT organizations can reduce costs is by converting physical servers to virtual
servers. Virtualization technology facilitates numerous IT initiatives, including green IT, time-
based control, event-based management, and dynamic provisioning.
Virtual environments do create a number of IT infrastructure challenges, however. They add
an additional layer of complexity and management requirements; increase security and risk
exposure; make software compliance and configuration management more difficult; and
create potential service and performance challenges. And because of the complexity of
virtualized environments, error identification can also be difficult.
Virtualization vendors provide some automation tools, but these tools have limited func-
tionality. They focus solely on the virtualized infrastructure and provide no visibility of IT
processes that occur between physical and virtual environments.

11. Yet being able to automate business processes across the entire enterprise offers tremen-
dous business advantages. By eliminating the need for manual intervention across the IT
landscape, and by defining rules that ensure that processes will run correctly, in the right
sequence, and with proper error handling, virtualization automation can improve IT
compliance while also enhancing the ability to handle enterprise workloads.
The UC4 Automation Platform accomplishes all of the above, making your virtual environment
processes part of your enterprise-wide automation solution. For example, by incorporating
virtual machines into your IT housekeeping strategy, it ensures that backups and snapshots
are taken not just at the scheduled time, but at the right time (e.g., after completing any
dependent processes).
The UC4 Automation Platform also determines the right time to provision additional virtual
machines to increase processing capacity—that is, before the lack of sufficient resources
causes performance problems. For example, because UC4 is aware of event patterns, it will
provision additional capacity before the monthly financial close processes are initiated.
Similarly, because it’s aware that the Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) data warehousing
process is CPU-intensive, the UC4 Automation Platform will provision additional virtual
capacity before initiating an ETL process, thereby avoiding resource overload and enabling
the ETL process to finish earlier. In addition, after the month-end or ETL process completes,
UC4 will de-provision the added virtual servers, avoiding the inefficiencies of server sprawl.
By providing the right virtual resources at the right time to meet the needs of your business,
the UC4 Automation Platform helps you take best advantage of your virtual capacity.
Figure 8 illustrates the broad virtualization management capabilities of the UC4
Automation Platform.
Figure 8. The UC4 Automation Platform interacts with a broad range of virtualization technolo-
gies, incorporating virtualization management into your enterprise-wide automation strategy.

12. Automating Decisions and Business Intelligence
With information flow and event traffic increasing exponentially, it has become nearly
impossible to predict how changes in one arena will affect operational delivery in another.
This is where Complex Event Processing (CEP) can help.
CEP technology automatically sifts through massive data streams to sense, interpret, analyze,
and respond just in time to meet or exceed your SLAs and objectives. By detecting critical
business events, analyzing them, and then triggering downstream actions to keep your business
on track, CEP moves you from reactive to proactive management of your IT operations.
UC4 Decision for CEP-based Automated Decision Making
UC4 Decision is a distributed and scalable CEP platform and a key part of the UC4 Automation
Platform. It enables you to monitor your business in real time and implement just-in-time
automation. It graphically depicts business processes, lets you conduct simulations to
experiment with different what-if scenarios, and uses its unique sense-and-respond
technology to take automated actions as needed to keep your business on track.
With UC4 Decision, your company becomes a highly adaptive enterprise that monitors
business processes in real time, delivering:
 Continuously updated information on critical business processes
 Early detection of emerging business opportunities through real-time trend analysis
 Automated decision making, reacting intelligently and immediately to incoming
event exceptions
 Data-model-independent integration with existing IT systems
UC4 Decision’s predictive pattern-matching capabilities make your organization more agile and
proactive by detecting and responding to potential problems before the situation becomes
critical. In so doing, UC4 Decision helps avoid downtime, improves your overall service quality,
and enables you to meet or exceed your SLAs. Figure 9 illustrates how UC4 Decision works.

13. Figure 9. Using advanced CEP capabilities, UC4 Decision detects and responds to
potential problems before they can affect performance, making your organization more
agile and increasing your ability to meet or exceed your SLAs.
UC4 Insight for Business Intelligence and Analytics
Being able to quickly identify error patterns and understand their root cause is essential for
maintaining a high level of service quality. If you have to manually sift through raw data,
reports, qualitative information, and more to understand trends and their root causes, the
process could take weeks—or even months. In today’s rapidly changing business and IT
environments, there’s no time for that.
UC4 Insight is a pattern-mapping and 3D visualization tool that is a key part of the UC4
Automation Platform. It enables you to quickly and intuitively detect and analyze event
processes, so you can rapidly correct fault patterns before they spiral out of control.
UC4 Insight gives you immediate answers to questions such as:
 Where did irregularities occur in my IT and business processes?
 Are there recurring patterns in IT and business process failures?
 Have my IT and business processes changed over time?
 Is my IT and business processing slowing down?
 Can certain processes be executed more effectively?
 Which of several possible execution paths for a process is the most effective?
 What happened at a certain point in time, at a certain location?

14. Copyright 2011
UC4 Software GmbH (UC4),
all rights reserved. The
materials in this publication are
protected by copyright and/or
other intellectual property laws.
Any unauthorized use of the
materials in this publication
can result in an infringement of
these laws. Unless expressly
permitted, the copying of
information or documents from
this publication, in any form,
without the prior written
permission of UC4 is
prohibited.
Conclusion
It is now common for global enterprises to possess thousands of applications and applica-
tion servers, rely on extensive globalized networks, and store more data than ever before.
Therefore, it is more important than ever to have a single, enterprise-wide automation
solution that will help you efficiently manage this complex IT landscape—a solution that
delivers what we at UC4 refer to as ONE Automation.
The UC4 Automation Platform responds to this need, providing a single, intelligent automa-
tion solution that automates both processing and decision making across hybrid computing
environments—physical, virtual, and cloud. UC4 delivers event-based as well as time-
based automation, and It supports the most operating systems, databases, applications,
and services of any automation solution available today. By eliminating automation silos
and removing manual steps that slow execution time, decrease productivity, and introduce
human error, the UC4 Automation Platform will enhance your efficiency, accuracy, and
agility and will lower your operational costs. And it will enable you to deliver the promised
services on time, every time.
We invite you to visit us at www.uc4.com to see why more than 2,000 companies worldwide
have chosen UC4 to automate their most mission-critical business and IT processes—and
to learn more about how the industry-leading UC4 Automation Platform can enable your
company to experience ONE Automation.