Hybrid IT environments can often add complexity to operations, which impacts your agility and capacity to innovate and create new products. Software-Defined Operations shatters that complexity. Software-controlled workflows and processes let you take advantage of your hybrid environment so you can quickly and dynamically adapt to business needs as they arise.
But what exactly do we mean when we talk about Software-Defined Operations? To answer that, we’ll need to go back in time a bit.
At the turn of the century, electricity revolutionized the manufacturing industry. Manufacturers would generate their own 
electricity for their operations, but over time the cost of building and maintaining power plants took away from their core competency – new product development and manufacturing.
Entrepreneurs saw an opportunity. They established independent electric power generation firms and a utility model that consolidated power production to offer electricity at lower costs and achieved great economies of scale. It was this kind of innovation that facilitated the nationwide expansion of the utility industry.
Zenoss: Pioneer of Software Defined Operations
Over the last 2 years, Zenoss has been laying the groundwork for Software-Defined Operations. Much of what we’ve already done with unified monitoring and analytics has opened up an entirely new space in a market once dominated by legacy Big 4 systems management frameworks. With the latest release of Zenoss 5, Zenoss lets you scale out monitoring, scale back costs, avoid service disruptions and respond quickly to business demands. In a world where users expect 100 percent uptime and availability, and response times in fractions of a second, you need a platform that gives you fast and precise insight into potentially affected services so you can address issues before your business and users are impacted.
Just as the electric power generation business redefined the utility landscape, the implementation of virtualization in IT operations broke down physical siloes and dramatically improved the data center. We’re now entering an age of hybrid IT, where modern business operations must work with existing systems and new technologies enabled by
cloud computing. Software-Defined Operations leverages software-defined storage, networks and compute to create dynamic software-defined workflows and processes to liberate organizations from their reliance on large IT organizations.
Rather than paying IT organizations exorbitant sums to keep the lights on, Software-defined operations lets you push services you don’t need all the time into a cloud model. This kind of variable involvement helps you avoid the sunken cost of running idle systems that aren’t business critical so you get more out of your IT budget. With the space to bring in new technologies you are able to virtualize all aspects of your infrastructure for greater agility and scalability. Software-Defined Operations lets you develop actionable strategies based on what the business needs, rather than what the IT organization can do.
IT-centric operations have been the norm for far too long. Software-Defined Operations cuts through the bureaucracy and red tape - the limitations and constant noise that prevent you from rapid, dynamic consumption of IT resources to suit the business' needs when it needs it.
In this model, IT becomes an auditor of services rather than a keeper of keys, ensuring your services are delivered in manner that supports your strategic initiatives from the top down. When IT no longer dictates what you can or cannot do, you are able to conduct and drive your IT resources. Much like the power-switching capabilities that revolutionized an industry and a nation, Software-Defined Operations lets you decide on your level of usage for a level of control and clarity to focus primarily on the operations that matter most to the success of your business.
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