An Overview of the LANDesk® Management Automation Platform

The LANDesk Management Automation Platform is an IT process management solution, designed to enable organizations easily define, design, implement and execute cross-platform IT automation initiatives. The new platform will allow IT to bring together process and automation disciplines to facilitate efficient task design, repeatability and auditability—assisting IT organizations in reducing costs, eliminating process variability and achieving compliance with regulatory requirements across industry solutions.

Open Architecture Approach

LANDesk estimates that as much as 30 percent of IT operational costs can be attributed to redundant and repetitive tasks and the failure to document and adhere to IT best practices. Through an open architecture approach, the LANDesk Management Automation Platform enables process automation initiatives to be implemented across various IT functions and solutions including LANDesk® Management Suite, LANDesk® Security Suite, LANDesk® Asset Lifecycle Manager and LANDesk® Service Desk. This industry open platform is available to all LANDesk customers at no charge. At Interchange, LANDesk’s annual user conference, the company highlighted approximately 165 best practices.

"The need for process automation in IT is obvious, yet it has been an area that has been underserved. Mobility is exploding—the number of devices, software implementations and security vulnerabilities—and regulatory IT compliance and management requirements are going to increase exponentially. IT departments will be hard pressed to manage their environment without some form of process automation. Our goal in introducing this platform is to provide a complete, open solution for automating operational tasks across a spectrum of IT disciplines."
—Steve Daly, President and CEO, LANDesk Software 

Cross-Product and Third-Party Application Support

LANDesk Management Automation Platform provides cross product and third-party application support exposing job, task, event and action automation integration and a robust resource center containing best practices and standard setting content. Comprised of four tool areas—Content and Resource, Best Practice Processes, Software Development Kit (SDK) and Connections—LANDesk Management Automation Platform provides a roadmap where organizations can automate repetitive or manual processes and better manage changes and make improvements to existing processes as well as achieve compliance with regulatory requirements such as CoBIT, Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA and more.

"This platform spans business and operational processes across multiple data, department and application silos - capabilities not found in traditional IT management approaches. By applying LANDesk Management Automation Platform to the specific, routine tasks inherent in patch management, OS migration, software license monitoring and so on, it brings the benefits of repeatability while reducing human error and risk, and enables significant cost reductions."
—Steve Workman, Vice President of Product Management, LANDesk Software 

User and Developer Access to Tools

With the initial release of LANDesk Management Automation Platform users and developers will have access to the following tools:

• Content and Resource Center: A single repository designed to facilitate the identification, definition, design and refinement of customer built processes. The Resource Center will contain all the content libraries to enable users to easily download and upload capabilities quickly as well as a web based process and workflow designer for designing automation processes.
• Best Practice Processes: With this release of the Management Automation Platform, LANDesk is offering users approximately 165 best practice process automation templates based on industry standard and current users’ management best practices.
• Software Development Kit: An open platform SDK that enable cross product utilization of functional objects registered with the service layer. Code is comprised of application program interfaces (APIs) encapsulating the functional elements and components of the Management Automation Platform and an SDK for wrapping the APIs into a consumable package for use during development. The SDK allows for seamless internal and native product integration as well as integration with third party applications. This includes easy-to-use graphical tools for process modeling and configuration, auditing, workflow reporting and analysis.
• Windows 7 Migration: Designed to determine migration readiness and assessment and application compatibility, while creating minimal end user disruption, LANDesk Management Suite 9 supports migrations to new operating systems such as Microsoft® Windows 7. With today’s announcement LANDesk extends native support of the Win32 console on Windows 7 (both 32-bit as well as 64-bit) simplifying deployment of Windows 7 by providing both PXE and Virtual Boot image deployment. It also provides provisioning and Hardware Independent Imaging (HII) that allows administrators to retain one generic image that can be deployed to many different platforms.
• Connectors: Workflow connectors that enable process to be constructed between any of the industry’s top ERP, CRM, Service Management and other applications. The connectors act as third party application data listeners, data integration points and functional instrumentation for cross product process and automated workflow definition, design, implementation and execution.