One of the trickier subjects that solution providers need to broach with their customers is the concept of IT automation. In general, we’ve done a good job as an industry using IT to automate everything except, of course, IT itself.

But with the rise of virtualization and cloud computing, enterprise customers are beginning to look at deployments that won’t scale without some level if automation. They simply can’t afford to keep throwing people and hardware at what will eventually amount to hundreds of virtual servers and thousands of virtual desktops.

This is why it’s worth noting what CA Technologies is up to when it comes to IT automation. The company today announced extensions to the CA Automation Suite that include new offerings for automating IT management processes.

According to Ryan Shopp, senior director of automation product marketing, the new offerings are specifically designed to make it easier for customers to start embracing IT automation. Shopp says the new CA Technologies provide a methodology for capturing a customer’s existing processes that can then be used to create a baseline for IT automation. Once that “tribal knowledge” is captured, Shopp said solution providers can then essentially upsell customers on additional IT automation tools as they become comfortable with the technology.

The challenge is that customers are wary of IT automation because of a lack of transparency into how these tools work, an ability to customize them, and the simple fact that they potentially threaten many jobs within the IT organization.

It will more often than not fall to the solution provider in the face of stiff resistance to show senior IT managers how they can leverage IT automation to help their IT organizations lower costs today while scaling to meet the challenges of tomorrow.