This IDC study analyzes the idea of datacenter automation, and it looks across the impact that automation has on IT service delivery, cost reduction, and business impact.

"Datacenter automation is a top investment priority for delivering on business outcomes for the large majority of IT organizations that participated in this study," according to Tim Grieser, vice president, Enterprise System Management. "According to survey respondents, automation needs to support management of multiple IT silos including servers, storage, and networks. Automation is viewed as very important for managing virtualized environments and as a use case that is poised to grow rapidly with increasing deployment of virtualization for production workloads."