IT departments must spend a significant amount of time provisioning and deploying resources to meet the demands of their business. A key component of overall IT costs and meeting service levels is the amount of labor spent on maintaining and continuously improving the IT environment.

The major pain points in data centers today are:

• 
     Understanding what resources are available
  
•    Facing the challenges of change
  
•    Reducing cost and labor
  
•    Following processes

Data center automation suites contain four functional areas:

• 
     Comprehensive discovery
  
•    Configuration and change management
  
•    IT process orchestration
  
•    Change

This Forrester research brief reviews the top vendors in data center automation (DCA) and HP is The Unified Data Center Automation Front-Runner.