Turbo Talk

Greg Ness of Infoblox recently posted about the benefits of virtualization and how it (along with other trends) would enable “Just In Time IT”.  Greg made one point in particular that I wanted to reblog and discuss here:

While some network equipment vendors watch, others will be replacing manual tasks and processes with policies and mouse clicks. History will repeat itself once again.

I agree 100% that moving to a more policy-based approach of managing IT is superior to the mostly manual approach taken by many organizations today, and that most vendors will want to support these approaches in their products.  Customers who implement policy-enabled products, especially if they have not invested in IT automation products in the past, should see big benefits from adopting this kind of approach, assuming they manage a large and somewhat complex IT environment.

However, with any investment,  the marginal benefit due to each incremental dollar of spending will eventually start to decrease.  I would think that investment in IT automation technology should be no different.  As virtualization and cloud computing trends accelerate the move to a more automated IT stack, optimization of automation processes and tools will become critical in order to maintain those marginal benefits.