Red Hat Ansible Automation

Improves IT Agility and

Time to Market
An IDC White Paper, Sponsored by Red Hat
Authors: Mary Johnston Turner, Harsh Singh
 IDC White Paper | Red Hat Ansible Automation Improves IT Agility and Time to Market

Sponsored by: Red Hat

Authors:
Red Hat Ansible Automation
Mary Johnston Turner
Harsh Singh
Improves IT Agility and
June 2019 Time to Market
Business Value EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Highlights IDC conducted research that explored the value and benefits of organizations
498% using Red Hat Ansible Automation to standardize and automate IT operations and
five-year ROI configuration activities across their environments. IDC interviewed multiple decision

5 months makers about their experiences using Red Hat Ansible Automation. This research found
that these organizations were realizing significant productivity, agility and operational
to payback
benefits by using Ansible Automation’s programmatic software driven approach to IT
$1.13 million automation. Ansible Automation users report increased IT and DevOps agility, improved
in additional new revenue
gained per year standardization and compliance, and better control over cost of infrastructure and cloud
resources.
68%
more productive IT All Ansible Automation customers interviewed rely on a Red Hat subscription to
infrastructure
management teams provide support, testing and training services. Based on IDC’s calculations, these Red
Hat Ansible Automation users realized discounted benefits worth $1.17 million per
68% organization per year. Major types of business value realized include:
faster deployment of
new storage resources
» Increased IT operational productivity across a variety of infrastructure teams due to
41% the standardization and automation of many configuration tasks and IT operations
more efficient application processes
environment
management teams
»  aster deployment of new computer, networking, and storage infrastructure
F
135% resources
more applications
developed per year » More efficient and secure application lifecycle management

25% » Increased scale and speed of application development and deployment using fully
more efficient IT
security teams automated CI/CD tool chains to accelerate time to market

53% » Improved application performance and availability due to reductions in unplanned

reduction in unplanned downtime
downtime

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 IDC White Paper | Red Hat Ansible Automation Improves IT Agility and Time to Market

Situation Overview
Increasing enterprise adoption of multicloud, hybrid IT architectures, DevOps
continuous integration and deployment lifecycles, and container and Kubernetes
platforms for production applications are dramatically increasing the operational
complexity of many IT infrastructure environments. As applications are deployed using
microservices, and workloads become more and more distributed, the end-to-end
application experience becomes highly dependent on the alignment and resiliency of
many interconnected compute, network, database, storage, source control and related
resources.

IT operations teams are tasked with maintaining application performance, security

and reliability while simultaneously optimizing costs and ensuring compliance with
corporate policies. Traditional manual and script-based approaches to IT infrastructure
configuration, security and application deployment are unable to keep up with the
demands of today’s complex environments. Automation is no longer optional. Rather,
automation is required to ensure that IT can keep up with the needs of the business.

The question for IT teams today is how to best select and implement automation
solutions that will scale and be able to adapt over time to the introduction of new
and varied technologies and operational models. Programmatic, software driven
approaches to automation allow IT teams to create standardized automation programs
that can be managed using source control, shared across the organization, and
integrated using API driven architectures. For organizations moving toward containers
and Kubernetes, it is critical that they adopt code-based approaches to configuration
management in order to be able to integrate infrastructure operations into CI/CD
workflows.

To be effective in today’s agile environments, enterprises are turning to these types

To be effective of programmatic, infrastructure-as-code approaches to configuration, provisioning,
in today’s agile security and application release automation.
environments,
enterprises are Many organizations begin their journey toward programmatic software driven
turning to these types automation using open source solutions. Open source communities such as Ansible
of programmatic, are providing a rich supply of reusable automation building blocks, called playbooks
infrastructure-as- and roles in the Ansible Galaxy community. These freely available playbooks and
code approaches roles can be customized and integrated to create templates and workflows that can
to configuration, be managed under centralized source control and reused as needed across the
provisioning, security organization.
and application
release automation. The open source communities offer enterprises access to rapid innovation but do
not provide enterprise class support, testing, hardening or validation. Open source
solutions typically lack many important enterprise scale capabilities like API access,

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 IDC White Paper | Red Hat Ansible Automation Improves IT Agility and Time to Market

graphical user interfaces, and security testing and certification. As a result, many
Ansible users, including the Red Hat customers profiled in this paper, rely on Red Hat
subscriptions to provide hardened, supported Ansible Automation software including
Ansible Tower, Ansible Engine and Ansible modules for many use cases including public
clouds, virtual machines, network, security and more.

Red Hat Ansible Automation

Red Hat Ansible Automation encompasses several products which are typically
Red Hat Ansible purchased and used together to provide a comprehensive, supported automation
Engine ships with a experience. Red Hat Ansible Engine provides a core command line execution
library of tested and environment for Ansible modules, playbooks and roles. Red Hat Ansible Engine ships
supported Ansible with a library of tested and supported Ansible modules for a range of use cases including
modules for a range network, compute and cloud. Red Hat Ansible Tower is the centerpiece of the Red Hat
of use cases including Ansible Automation family. Red Hat Ansible Tower provides enterprise scale operations,
network, compute
analytics and security as well as integrations to source control and third-party systems
and cloud. Red Hat
such as ServiceNow. It can be deployed on both VM and container-based infrastructure
Ansible Tower is
and can integrate with on-premises and public cloud infrastructure resources. Red Hat
the centerpiece of
the Red Hat Ansible Ansible Tower is based on technology available in the AWX open source community.
Automation family. Specifically, Red Hat Ansible Tower supports large-scale and cross-domain environments
by providing:

»  n open REST API that enables integration with source control systems to maintain
A
Ansible modules, tasks, playbooks and roles and to enable developers and third-party
platforms, including container application platforms such as OpenShift, to integrate
with Ansible workflows using API calls

»  visual dashboard for creating and managing complex, multi-playbook automation

A
templates, tracking automation status, generating compliance and usage reports and
connecting multiple Tower clusters for large scale environments

» Integrations with the Galaxy and Ansible.com open source community sites to easily
assess, evaluate and share modules, tasks, playbooks and roles

» Log monitoring and integrations with third-party log analytics tools

» Centralized and auditable system credential management, security and access control

» Inventory synchronization with a broad range of asset tracking and CMDB source to
ensure that automated actions are aligned with the most current system state and
configuration data

» Management of access control and user credentials

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 IDC White Paper | Red Hat Ansible Automation Improves IT Agility and Time to Market

The Business Value of Red Hat

Ansible Automation
Study Demographics
IDC conducted research that explores the value and benefits for organizations of using
Red Hat Ansible Automation to manage their IT infrastructure. The project included nine
interviews with organizations using Ansible Automation that have experience with or
knowledge about its benefits and costs. All customers rely on Red Hat Ansible Tower
subscriptions to ensure enterprise scale and control of operations.

During the interviews, companies were asked a variety of quantitative and qualitative
questions about the impact of the solution on their IT infrastructure operations,
businesses, and costs. Table 1 presents the study demographics and profiles.
Organizations interviewed had an employee base of 14,564, most of whom were using
IT services. Those services were supported by an IT staff of 641 employees and 357
developers overseeing 101 business applications. (Note: all numbers cited represent
averages.) In terms of geographic representation, most companies were US-based
with Australia, the UK, and Brazil also represented. Industries represented include the
manufacturing, healthcare, IT, telecommunications, government, and finance sectors.

TABLE 1

Firmographics
Average Median
Number of employees 14,564 3,000
Number of IT staff 641 150
Number of developers 357 100
Number of employees using IT services 14,528 3,000
Number of External Customers 2,057,541 6,500
Number of business applications 101 100
Number of business applications, 18 2
containerized
Company revenue $9,028B $708.5M
Countries US (6), Australia, UK, Brazil
Industries Manufacturing (3), Healthcare (2), IT,
Telecommunication, Government,
Finance
IDC, 2019
Source:

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 IDC White Paper | Red Hat Ansible Automation Improves IT Agility and Time to Market

Choice and Use of Red Hat Ansible Automation

The companies surveyed described usage patterns for Red Hat Ansible Automation
and provided a snapshot of their overall IT and business environment as well. They
also discussed both the value proposition and rationale behind their choice of
Red Hat Ansible Automation. Customers cited a number of benefits including the
ability to meet DevOps requirements for private cloud and the ability to customize
thereby making it easier for DevOps resources to be deployed rapidly and easily.
They also cited business benefits such as total cost of ownership, the ability to offer
standardized automation, and the fact that their developers were already familiar
with and comfortable working on open source technology. Study participants made
specific observations about these benefits:

»  nabled more agile IT operations: “We’ve been in digital transformation for

E
two years and trying to adopt agile ways of doing business. Red Hat Ansible
Tower was one of the best tools we purchased because we could easily start
automating the most simple tasks in our company, especially the ones for IT
operations. We were doing things manually and Ansible Tower was a really good
choice because it has given us more ways to easily implement automation.”

“Standardizing »  ostered standardization across the business: “Standardizing our infrastructure

F
our infrastructure configuration is a big benefit. Red Hat Ansible Automation allows us to lock in
configuration is a standards across the business, which has been good for us.”
big benefit. Red Hat
Ansible Automation »  elped bring multiple teams together: “The benefits…included business
H
allows us to lock in considerations such as total cost of ownership. Specialty developers on my team
standards across the are used to employing a lot of open source products and are big Red Hat fans.
business, which has Ultimately, we found that it’s easier to manage resources with Red Hat Ansible
been good for us.” Automation.”

» Integrates with an agile DevOps model: “We were changing into an agile
DevOps-focused organization and we needed tooling that could meet
requirements for DevOps capabilities for our private cloud. Because we are
using products from multiple vendors, we needed a tool that was flexible enough
to cope with the existing suite of products as well as any new requirements. Red
Hat Ansible Automation’s support of key deployed infrastructure and software
along with the ability to quickly and easily do custom functionality meant that the
new DevOps capability could be deployed and provide business benefits pretty
rapidly.”

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Table 2 provides more data on the IT environments that characterized surveyed

companies as well as the reasons these organizations selected supported Red
Hat Ansible Automation. Overall, an average of 27 applications were supported by
Ansible Tower within these organizations. Every organization interviewed wanted to
standardize their infrastructure configuration and provisioning. Most organizations
turned to Red Hat Ansible Automation to run their IT environment, deploy a private/
hybrid/multicloud environment, and assist in their application modernization efforts.
Multiple customers also looked to Red Hat Ansible Automation to help bring
different IT groups closer together.

TABLE 2

Red Hat Ansible Automation Usage

Ansible Usage Ansible Customer Respondent
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Automating DevOps 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4
workflows
Standardizing 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4
infrastructure config/
provisioning
Run complex IT 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4
environments
Deploy private/hybrid/ 4 4 4 4 4 4 4
multicloud
Application 4 4 4 4 4 4 4
modernization
Bring different IT groups 4 4 4 4
closer together
Source: IDC, 2019

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 IDC White Paper | Red Hat Ansible Automation Improves IT Agility and Time to Market

The Business Value of Red Hat Ansible Automation

IDC’s research explored the value and benefits of using Red Hat Ansible
Automation to manage IT infrastructure. Survey data was applied against a
sophisticated business value algorithm to arrive at quantified and verifiable
benefits.

Using this methodology, IDC found that Red Hat customers realized significant
benefits by leveraging Red Hat Ansible Automation to increase IT infrastructure
management team productivity, enable faster deployment of resources such as
compute and storage, optimize application development and management team
tasks and processes, and reduce unplanned downtime affecting business users.
Specifically, these organizations were:

» Deploying applications faster thereby decreasing time to market

» Managing IT systems more efficiently

» Building a strong foundation for DevOps

» Increasing the number of applications and features developed

In the aggregate, these benefits helped their businesses operate more efficiently
and effectively in pursuit of business goals. Study participants discussed how they
are using Red Hat Ansible Automation to achieve these benefits:

“By automating a lot of » Faster business agility: “By automating a lot of mundane and tedious tasks
mundane and tedious with Red Hat Ansible Automation, we are improving the productivity of various
tasks with Red Hat teams. This improves our business competitiveness. Our business is able to
Ansible Automation, achieve its objectives much faster by having the tools and applications we
we are improving need.”
the productivity of
various teams. This »  ore efficient IT operations: “Our resource and staff efficiency is great
M
improves our business with Red Hat Ansible Automation. Platform deployments have dropped from
competitiveness. Our taking several days or weeks to hours by removing requirements to have
business is able to multiple team members get involved in the build process. In terms of business
achieve its objectives continuity, we’ve got patches and updates that can be applied with Red Hat
much faster by Ansible Automation with a significantly higher success rate. This means that
having the tools and end users aren’t inconvenienced with planned or unplanned outages during
applications we need.” the day. We’re also managing to keep our platforms a lot more consistent by
using the same deployment method across our operations. This ensures that
development, test, pre-production and production environments are aligned
while reducing typical infrastructure and patching-based errors.”

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»  uicker to market: “Because of Red Hat Ansible Automation, we are able to

Q
deliver faster. That’s very valuable for the business. As the result of this higher
reliability, we can deliver applications without any problems. For example, we
do not have to roll back applications from production. All of this is helping us
to get more clients.”

“From an end user’s » Better on-time delivery: “From an end user’s standpoint, Red Hat Ansible
standpoint, Red Hat Automation has helped with expectations. Business units expect something to
Ansible Automation be delivered on time and it is.”
has helped with
expectations.
Business units expect Improved Efficiencies in IT Infrastructure Operations
something to be
Red Hat customers described improvements and the IT staff efficiencies that
delivered on time and
it is.” resulted from the use of Red Hat Ansible Automation, particularly Red Hat
Ansible Tower. These included optimizing and automating routine and frequently
repeated tasks such as configuration and change management, patching,
provisioning, and security updates. Activity streams were recorded in audit trails
of all changes made to Ansible Tower including job creation and credential
storage. This enabled more streamlined delivery of applications and services to
Red Hat OpenStack Platform, VMware, and Amazon Cloud environments.

The ability to scale was cited as especially important. In smaller team

environments using best practices for playbooks, security and delegation are
manageable with unsupported open source tooling. However, when a larger and
more diverse set of users begin using open source, many participants write their
own playbooks with considering corporate standards or attempt to automate
activities outside their designated span of control. In this type of environment,
competing playbooks and overlapping automations can create havoc. Customers
wishing to implement large-scale, programmatic automation recognized that
use of the Red Hat Ansible Tower subscription helps bring order to the chaos by
managing source control integrations, scheduling automations, synchronizing
inventories, managing operator access and logging all actions. Administrators are
provided a real-time view of job status updates and playbook runs with a visual
dashboard for job scheduling and graphical inventory management.

In addition to the ability to scale automation to support complex deployments,

Red Hat customers reported that the process of deploying an application was
able to be done in a more standardized and optimized fashion, which saved time
and increased productivity. Other customers emphasized how the dashboard
provided good visibility to team members for the array of projects in play. Study
participants also noted that Red Hat Ansible Tower made it easy to embed

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 IDC White Paper | Red Hat Ansible Automation Improves IT Agility and Time to Market

functionality into existing tools and processes. They commented on these and other
benefits:

»  elped bring multiple teams together: “Red Hat Ansible Tower is phenomenal
H
for bringing our IT teams together. The server, security, network, and database
teams can all work on their separate tiers and then use Red Hat Ansible
Automation to create their own playbooks. From there, we can daisy chain
those playbooks using Tower with much less interaction between the engineers
required to make that work. They don’t need to actually sit in a room like they did
before and hash it out manually.”

“Ansible Tower saves » Improved IT focus with better visibility: “Ansible Tower saves a lot of time with
a lot of time with tedious tasks. Before, only a few of our people knew how to do these tasks.
tedious tasks. Before, Now more people…can use the tool to manage IT projects and see what they are
only a few of our supposed to be doing for each project. This saves the team a lot of time in terms
people knew how to of productivity and manageability while also providing a dashboard to see which
do these tasks. Now projects are ongoing and which have problems that need to be addressed.”
more people…can use
the tool to manage IT » Improved infrastructure management: “Before, we didn’t have any tool for
projects and see what automating our infrastructure, only a bunch of scripts that were used to deploy
they are supposed and manage the automation. Now the process is faster because it’s very easy to
to be doing for each implement automation using Red Hat Ansible Automation. We also didn’t have
project.” the need to train for Ansible so people could get started quickly. And I think
we’re saving a lot annually.”

» Improved application deployment: “The advantages of Red Hat Ansible

Automation are clear. It gives us a very standardized way to deploy applications.
Everyone can read or write Ansible playbooks for deploying applications. So the
process of deploying an application is very standardized and optimized.”

Figure 1 quantifies these benefits by zeroing in on a group of typical tasks involved

with infrastructure management. While improvements were realized in all key areas,
the greatest improvements were identified in the areas of configuration and change
management (44%), patching (41%) and provisioning (40%). Additional metrics are
presented in the figure.

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 IDC White Paper | Red Hat Ansible Automation Improves IT Agility and Time to Market

FIGURE 1

Infrastructure Management Staff Time Efficiencies

Change/configuration management 44%
Patching 41%
Provisioning infrastructure 40%
Security updates 39%
Application/service orchestration 31%
Incident management 8%
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50%

(% of improvement)

Source: IDC, 2019

These benefits were further quantified in terms of financial benefits that Red Hat
customers realized as the result of efficiencies introduced by Red Hat Ansible
Automation. Table 3 presents IT infrastructure management productivity impacts in
terms of FTE levels which showed a 68% improvement and yielded a salary value of
$460,000.

TABLE 3

IT Infrastructure Management, Productivity Impact

Before Red Hat With Red Hat Difference % change
Management of IT infrastructure, equivalent FTEs 6.8 11.4 4.6 68%
Staff time value per year $681,000 $1,142,000 $460,000 68%
Source: IDC, 2019

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Infrastructure resource configuration and deployment management is a key activity

area for IT infrastructure teams in the companies surveyed. Analysis of study
participants’ data indicated improvements in this area as well. Table 4 presents IT
agility metrics for three key categories within infrastructure resource configuration
and deployment: server resources, configuration processes, and storage resources.
As shown, the time required to deploy new server resources (measured in days)
showed a 55% improvement while staff time required to deploy new storage
showed a 68% improvement.

TABLE 4

IT Agility Metrics
Before Red Hat With Red Hat Difference % change
Server resources
Time to deploy new server resources, days 1.8 0.8 1.0 55%
Staff time to deploy new server resources, hours 13.0 6.8 6.3 48%
IT Configuration
Staff time to configure resources, hours 7.8 2.7 5.1 66%
Storage resources
Time to deploy new storage, days 2.0 0.7 1.3 66%
Staff time to deploy new storage, hours 11.5 3.7 7.8 68%
Source: IDC, 2019

Another key IT infrastructure area that IDC looked at was network management.
Figure 2 shows the staff time efficiencies for this function that were realized via
the use of Red Hat Ansible Automation. Here the greatest improvements included
overall staff productivity (31%), network planning and management (21%), and
network security management (44%). Additional metrics are presented in the chart.

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FIGURE 2

Network Management Staff Time Efficiencies

Increased productivity 31%
Network planning/management 21%
Network provisioning/deployment 20%
Network security management 20%
Software management and support, including upgrades 15%
Network performance optimization 9%
0% 10% 20% 30% 40%

(% of improvement)

Source: IDC, 2019

Application development was another area of improvement. Red Hat customers

reported that Red Hat Ansible Automation had positive impacts on the process of
application development. Table 5 presents application development staff impacts
for two key areas: building new applications and adding new features. As shown,
the number of new applications developed annually improved by a substantial
margin (135%). In addition, the number of new features that could be developed
increased from 32 to 56 per year, representing a 75% improvement.

TABLE 5

Application Development Staff Impacts

Application Development Staff Impacts Before Red Hat With Red Hat Difference % change
Developers, productivity impact 8.2 6.8 1.4 17%
Developer salary cost per year $821,000 $677,000 $144,000 17%
New Applications, New Logic
Number per year 6.8 16.0 9.2 135%
Development lifecycle, weeks 21.2 13.5 7.7 36%
New Features
Number per year 32.2 56.2 24.0 75%
Development lifecycle, weeks 6.2 2.6 3.6 59%
Source: IDC, 2019

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As discussed previously, study participants reported that Red Hat Ansible Automation
integrated well with an agile DevOps model and could meet requirements for
DevOps in a private cloud environment. IDC quantified these benefits using the
Business Value Model. Figure 3 shows DevOps efficiencies by activity. As indicated,
deployment tasks recognized a 32% improvement. In addition, there were similar
improvements in the areas of productivity (28%) and integration (24%).

FIGURE 3

DevOps Efficiencies by Activity

Deployment 32%
Increased productivity 28%
Integration 24%
Testing 11%
Plannng 10%
Coding 4%
0% 10% 20% 30% 40%

(% of improvement)

Source: IDC, 2019

Figure 4 presents application management staff time efficiencies. As shown, there

were improvements in all areas including patching (26%), configuration management
(25%) and security processes (20%).

FIGURE 4

Application Management Staff Time Efficiencies

Patching 26%
Configuration management 25%
Security 20%
Monitoring 8%
Incident management 4%
0% 10% 20% 30% 40%

(% of improvement)

Source: IDC, 2019

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Table 6 presents application development impacts specifically with respect to the

process of software management and associated annual staff time costs for the
same, both of which showed a 41% improvement after introducing Red Hat Ansible
Automation.

TABLE 6

Application Management, Productivity Impact

Before Red Hat With Red Hat Difference % change
IT application management, equivalent FTEs 5.7 8.1 2.3 41%
Staff time value per year $574,000 $808,000 $234,000 41%

Source: IDC, 2019

Study participants pointed out that these benefits also extended to security teams.
IT security staff time efficiencies are shown in Table 4 referencing core tasks
typically performed by these teams in the organizations surveyed. As shown, the
time required for patching showed a 27% improvement. In addition, compliance
testing and enforcement both showed approximately 20% improvement.

FIGURE 5

IT Security Staff Time Efficiencies

Patching 27%
Mitigation 20%
Compliance testing 19%
Compliance enforcement 14%
Incident reporting 9%
0% 10% 20% 30% 40%

(% of improvement)

Source: IDC, 2019

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The efficiencies afforded by Red Hat Ansible Automation also had positive impacts
for security team productivity as shown in Table 7. Overall, both FTE-measured
productivity and savings as a result of staff time efficiencies showed at 25%
improvement after deployment of Red Hat Ansible Automation.

TABLE 7

IT Security, Productivity Impact

Before Red Hat With Red Hat Difference % change
IT security, equivalent FTEs 4.7 5.8 1.1 25%
Staff time value per year $467,000 $581,000 $114,000 25%

Source: IDC, 2019

Because the automation capabilities of Red Hat Ansible Automation optimized IT

operations and procedures, there were less impacts in terms of help desk issues
and concerns reported by study participants as shown in Table 8. Improvements
were recognized with both the number of calls made to help desks and the tickets
generated annually (16%), and the average time to resolve issues as measured in
hours (26%). Additional metrics are shown in the table.

TABLE 8

Help Desk, Productivity Impact

Before Red Hat With Red Hat Difference % change
Calls/tickets per year 319 268 51 16%
Average time to resolve (hours) 3.3 2.4 0.9 26%
Help Desk, equivalent FTEs 15.7 11.8 3.8 25%
Staff time cost per year $1,567,000 $1,183,000 $384,000 25%

Source: IDC, 2019

Unplanned Downtime Impacts

Red Hat customers also spoke to IDC about the positive impacts of the Red
Hat Ansible Automation in terms of unplanned downtime and overall business
productivity. Surveyed organizations were able to reduce the incidence of outages,
a benefit that also extended to line of business (LOB) users. This was related to
the ability to standardize configurations and workflows for deploying applications,
more easily automating infrastructure operations, and gaining better visibility into

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the status of IT automation workflows. More consistent completion of patches and

updates meant that end users were not inconvenienced with planned or unplanned
outages.

Table 9 presents unplanned downtime event impacts. The number of instances of

unplanned downtime per year showed a 40% improvement. When instances did
occur, the time required to address them was also diminished and showed a 34%
improvement.

TABLE 9

Unplanned Downtime, Productivity Impact

Before Red Hat With Red Hat Difference % change
Instances per year 29.4 17.6 11.7 40%
MTTR 3.8 2.5 1.3 34%
Unplanned downtime incidents, equivalent FTEs 15.3 7.3 8.0 53%
Value of lost productivity $1,072,000 $509,000 $563,000 53%

Source: IDC, 2019

Unplanned downtime also had impacts on business operations as shown in Table

10. Specifically, the total revenue loss avoided per year on a per organization basis
amounted to $829,657.

TABLE 10

Unplanned Downtime Business Impacts

Per organization
Total revenue loss avoided per year per organization $829,657
Total recognized revenue, IDC model, per year $124,449

Source: IDC, 2019

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 IDC White Paper | Red Hat Ansible Automation Improves IT Agility and Time to Market

Impacts on Business Operations

Customers explained to IDC how Red Hat Ansible Automation optimized
performance of many core IT tasks that support critical business operations in their
companies. In addition, they discussed how these improvements had ripple effects
throughout their organizations, resulting in higher levels of employee productivity,
better business outcomes, increased revenue, and faster time to market. Other
benefits included improved decision making, faster compliance and freeing up IT
staff time to focus on revenue-oriented projects. Study participants elaborated on
these benefits:

» Enable businesses to capture more revenue streams: “We definitely get more
revenue with Red Hat Ansible Automation. There are several areas that we’re not
billing for today because we don’t have the capacity to do it. Once we automate
the billing process, we think that the revenue potential is exponential. This is the
centerpiece of our strategy going forward.”

“Because Red Hat »  ree up time to focus on revenue-oriented projects: “Because Red Hat Ansible
F
Ansible Automation is Automation is freeing up time, our employees are able to spend more time on
freeing up time, our business-oriented activities, which has led to more sales for our organization.”
employees are able
to spend more time »  elp achieve faster compliance: “Red Hat Ansible Automation helps with
H
on business-oriented compliance because there’s one standard you have to meet and as long as you
activities, which has do that, you know you’re in compliance. Ansible Automation helps by giving
led to more sales for us better standardization and making sure that we don’t have any back doors
our organization.” open.”

»  rovide better predictive ability: “Red Hat Ansible Automation is helping us

P
get to market faster because we can better predict the markets we want to go
into right now…This is being enabled by the applications on Red Hat Ansible
Automation that monitor our business outcomes, allowing better decision
making.”

»  educe business risk: “There’s less risk to our organization because you don’t
R
have to code a lot. Usually additional coding can introduce extra vulnerabilities.”

Table 11 presents quantified benefits for business operations and user impact after
deployment of Red Hat Ansible Automation. As shown, total additional annual
revenue realized on a per organization basis was significant and calculated at
$299,658.

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 IDC White Paper | Red Hat Ansible Automation Improves IT Agility and Time to Market

TABLE 11

Business Operations and User Impact

Per organization
Total additional revenue per year per organization $299,658
Total recognized revenue, IDC model, per year $44,949

Source: IDC, 2019

ROI Analysis
IDC projects that Table 12 presents IDC’s analysis of the overall benefits and costs related to
these organizations surveyed organizations’ use of Red Hat Ansible Automation, with an emphasis on
will, over five years, the benefits created by the use of Red Hat Ansible Tower. IDC projects that these
realize discounted organizations will, over five years, realize discounted benefits of $7 million per
benefits of $7 million organization. When compared against a discounted investment of $1.2 million per
per organization. organization, these Red Hat customers will see an ROI of 498% and a breakeven on
When compared their investment in 4.6 months.
against a discounted
investment of
$1.2 million per TABLE 12
organization, these
Red Hat customers Five Year ROI Analysis
will see an ROI
Total
of 498% and a
breakeven on their Benefit $7,050,000
investment in 4.6 Investment $1,178,000
months.
Net present value $5,872,000
ROI (NPV/Investment) 498%
Payback (months) 5
Discount factor 12%
Source: IDC, 2019

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 IDC White Paper | Red Hat Ansible Automation Improves IT Agility and Time to Market

Challenges and Opportunities

The shift to programmatic, code-driven approaches to automation represents a
significant pivot for many traditional system administrators who have long depended
on customized scripts, manual processes, or proprietary tools. Automation
languages such as Ansible, which are largely human readable, can often provide
a faster path to value than those that rely on more sophisticated programming
languages.

In addition to ensuring In addition to ensuring that administrators have the confidence and skills to take
that administrators advantage of modern automation, enterprises also need to ensure that they
have the confidence have adequate control over security, access, source control and reporting. Many
and skills to take organizations are subject to strict compliance, audit, and change control reporting
advantage of requirements and need to implement code-based automation with an eye toward
modern automation, satisfying those requirements.
enterprises also need
to ensure that they Finally, many organizations needlessly complicate their automation environments
have adequate control and operational agility by allowing individual groups to select tools independently.
over security, access, While getting multiple groups up to speed on a common automation language may
source control and take some time, the benefits of having consistent, standardized configurations
reporting. and automation platforms in use across the organization can quickly payback
the investment by reducing the time and cost of configuring, deploying and
updating complex, interdependent resources while better coordinating end-to-end
operations and security.

Summary and Conclusion

Modern, enterprise scale IT environments will continue to become more and more
complex and dense as enterprises migrate towards multicloud, container and
microservice-based architectures. Simultaneously, every aspect of the business is
becoming digital and directly dependent on high levels of infrastructure availability,
security and application performance. IT operations and DevOps teams require
robust, consistent approaches to automation that allow integration, reuse and
rapid time to value. Automation becomes a strategic multiplier of IT operations
productivity while reducing human error and improving digital performance.

This IDC study shows that Red Hat Ansible Automation customers are realizing
significant productivity and cost savings while improving security and time to market
for business-critical applications. With Red Hat Ansible Automation, organizations
are creating reliable, repeatable workflows that can scale seamlessly as the
operational needs of the organization increase.

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 IDC White Paper | Red Hat Ansible Automation Improves IT Agility and Time to Market

Appendix - Methodology
IDC’s standard ROI methodology was utilized for this project. This methodology
is based on gathering data from current users of Red Hat Ansible Automation
specifically selected for their active use of supported Red Hat Ansible Tower as the
foundation for the model. Based on interviews with organizations using Red Hat
Ansible Automation, IDC performed a three-step process to calculate the ROI and
payback period:

»  athered quantitative benefit information during the interviews using a

G
before-and-after assessment of the impact of Red Hat Ansible Automation. In
this study, the benefits included staff time savings and productivity benefits, and
operational cost reductions.

»  reated a complete investment (five-year total cost analysis) profile based on

C
the interviews. Investments go beyond the initial and annual costs of using Red
Hat Ansible Automation and can include additional costs related to migrations,
planning, consulting, and staff or user training.

»  alculated the ROI and payback period. IDC conducted a depreciated cash
C
flow analysis of the benefits and investments for the organizations’ use of Red
Hat Ansible Automation reports over a five-year period. ROI is the ratio of the net
present value (NPV) and the discounted investment. The payback period is the
point at which cumulative benefits equal the initial investment.

IDC bases the payback period and ROI calculations on a number of assumptions,
which are summarized as follows:

»  ime values are multiplied by burdened salary (salary + 28% for benefits and
T
overhead) to quantify efficiency and manager productivity savings. For purposes of
this analysis, based on the geographic locations of the interviewed organizations,
IDC has used assumptions of an average fully-loaded $100,000 per year salary for
IT staff members, and an average fully-loaded salary of $70,000 for non-IT staff
members. IDC assumes that employees work 1,880 hours per year (47 weeks x 40
hours).

»  he net present value of the five-year savings is calculated by subtracting

T
the amount that would have been realized by investing the original sum in an
instrument yielding a 12% return to allow for the missed opportunity cost. This
accounts for both the assumed cost of money and the assumed rate of return.

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 IDC White Paper | Red Hat Ansible Automation Improves IT Agility and Time to Market

»  urther, because IT solutions require a deployment period, the full benefits of the
F
solution are not available during deployment. To capture this reality, IDC prorates
the benefits on a monthly basis and then subtracts the deployment time from the
first-year savings.

Note: All numbers in this document may not be exact due to rounding.

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