Wider use of automation tools fuels IT democratization among Red Hat customers

There is a saying in the business world that “customers vote with their feet,” meaning they will move toward products they prefer to use and willfully ignore others.

A form of this is currently playing out in the IT automation space where tech firms, such as Red Hat Inc., are seeing a wider scale adoption of automation tools among customers across organizations.

“Automation is shifting into other parts of the organization, beyond the domain experts, the network engineers or storage experts,” said Tom Anderson (pictured), vice president of product management at Red Hat. “It’s bringing them the automation platform that they can scale from the datacenter to the cloud, to the edge, and everywhere in between across a single platform with a single easy-to-use automation language. Pushing automation out into other personas in the organization has been a big trend that we’ve seen.”

Anderson spoke with John Walls, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AnsibleFest 2021. They discussed adoption of automation by developers and its role as a unifying force inside a large financial services player. (* Disclosure below.)

Removing the friction

One of the constituencies driving broader adoption of enterprise automation, such as Red Hat’s Ansible, is developers. The days have disappeared when a developer would have to open a help desk ticket to get servers built for running applications. Automation tools have taken out much of this friction, according to Anderson.

“All of that is gone now,” Anderson said. “These subsystem owners, whether that’s compute or cloud or network or storage, their ability to expose Ansible for consumption by other personas, developers in this case, makes developers happy and more efficient. They can just use those Ansible Automation playbooks to deploy the infrastructure that they need to develop, test and deploy their applications on.”

Red Hat is seeing this trend manifest itself within its customer base. In the case of financial giant JPMorgan Chase & Co., the use of automation has had a unifying effect.

“They are building automation playbooks and sharing those across the organization,” Anderson noted. “Gone are the days of very small teams of people just automating the things that they do. It’s grown so big and pervasive now, they have an ability to bring developers and operations teams together to be working as one.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of during AnsibleFest 2021. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for AnsibleFest. Neither Red Hat Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE