Organizations that rely on DIY automation often end up with disconnected scripts, point tools, and one-off utilities that are hard to scale and support. According to Omdia’s Economic Validation, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform helps teams standardize automation and align it with business goals instead of running “random acts of automation.”

Key reasons teams move from DIY to Ansible Automation Platform include:

• Unified platform vs. tool sprawl: Instead of juggling multiple tools and custom scripts, Ansible Automation Platform provides a single control plane (Automation Controller), shared language (YAML playbooks), and reusable content (roles and collections).
• Faster time to value: Customers interviewed by Omdia reported that developers learned Ansible in just a few weeks and had cross-functional automation running in months instead of 1–2 years it would have taken to build a comparable DIY framework.
• Lower ongoing effort: Teams estimated they would need a team at least twice the size to create and maintain automation without Ansible Automation Platform.
• Built-in governance and security: Role-based access control, centralized auditing, and secure execution help reduce the risk of unauthorized changes and credential exposure that often come with ad hoc scripts.
• Support and validated content: Certified and validated content collections, plus Red Hat support, reduce the risk and effort compared with maintaining unsupported scripts and community-only tools.

In short, Ansible Automation Platform helps organizations reimagine automation as a strategic, standardized capability rather than a collection of isolated scripts.

Omdia’s research found that many organizations struggle with tool sprawl, lack of standardization, and difficulty scaling across locations. Ansible Automation Platform is designed to address exactly these issues.

It supports collaboration and scale in several ways:

• Common language and workflows: YAML-based playbooks and shared workflows give developers, operators, architects, and security teams a single way to describe and review automation.
• Automation mesh for scale: The automation mesh and containerized execution environments make it easier to extend automation across data centers, clouds, and edge locations without exposing teams to underlying architectural complexity.
• Self-Service Automation Portal: A dedicated portal lets new users consume automation without needing to learn the full platform, which encourages broader adoption across business units.
• Faster cross-functional collaboration: Customers reported that a unified platform, shared tools, and common processes helped them bring together managers, developers, operators, and security teams, breaking down silos and building trust.
• AI-assisted onboarding: Ansible Lightspeed Intelligent Assistant uses generative AI to guide both experienced developers and new users, speeding up onboarding and content creation.

Customers told Omdia they were able to get cross-functional automation up and running in a few months and then expand quickly, instead of spending years building and aligning separate DIY solutions across teams.

Omdia’s Economic Validation highlights three main categories of benefit from Ansible Automation Platform: faster time to automation, reduced operational complexity, and reduced risk.

Operational and economic impacts reported by customers include:

• Faster creation of automation: Ansible’s simple YAML syntax, CLI tools, and Ansible-lint make it easier to build and test playbooks. One customer noted they could build automation in Ansible that would have taken them three times as long with their previous tool.
• Shorter project timelines: Automation that previously took weeks or months (including meetings and information gathering) could often be completed in days or even hours.
• Lower maintenance overhead: Teams can update playbooks, roles, and execution environments and publish changes via collections without rework. Customers estimated they would need a team at least 2x larger to maintain equivalent DIY automation.
• Less time managing automation at scale: Automation Controller centralizes job management, access control, and execution, while Automation Dashboard tracks job success rates, cost savings, and ROI. This helps operations and business leaders make data-driven decisions.
• Reduced risk and complexity: Standardized, reusable automation content and private Automation Hub reduce the risk of errors, incompatible tools, and unsupported scripts, while improving governance and compliance.

Overall, organizations using Ansible Automation Platform are able to rethink how they deliver IT services: they spend less time building and fixing automation and more time applying it to higher-value, cross-functional use cases.