Digital business makes enterprises more dependent on infrastructure, adding fuel to the booming infrastructure and operations (I&O) market. But it can be difficult for I&O vendors — which are responsible for the management of technology, information, and data — to see what digital infrastructure they have and ensure it delivers customer value. According to Gartner, vendors increasingly need tools to enable workloads to flow to the right environments and meet business needs to guide future upgrades. I&O functions are seeing shorter timelines, with technologies in deployment expected to reach adoption within the next six to 18 months.

Against this backdrop, ReadyWorks, a digital platform conductor (DPC) platform, today announced that it raised $8 million in a series A financing round led by Credit Suisse Asset Management’s Next Investors. ReadyWorks aggregates and normalizes program data, analyzes risk, and orchestrates workflows, delivering status alerts when something goes wrong.

DPC

DPC is a term that Gartner uses to describe tools that enable I&O vendors to manage their infrastructure, regardless of the environment or location. As vendors add features for managing infrastructure outside their traditional scope, the breadth and depth required to play the management role for this infrastructure is giving rise to DPCs that can fill the need.

“Everyone talks about modernizing IT infrastructure in support of anywhere operations, yet the teams responsible for implementing digital transformation are the ones who still rely on legacy systems and outdated manual processes that prevent enterprises from achieving transformation goals,” ReadyWorks cofounder Paul Deur told VentureBeat via email. “Given the increasing complexity of an ever-changing and distributed IT estate, enterprises need complete, real-time visibility into all physical and virtual assets to make informed decisions regarding their infrastructure and to maintain security compliance. This applies to everything from asset lifecycle management to workload and data placement across the IT infrastructure stack.”

Founded in 2019 by Andrew Sweeney, Michal Jaworek, and Deur, ReadyWorks leverages AI and automation to orchestrate IT infrastructure transformation programs — and provide companies with a way to ensure business continuity. The platform analyzes information about endpoints, users, apps, and their interdependencies; defines the rules for change; and uses AI, machine learning, and automation to implement those changes.

“ReadyWorks connects to existing enterprise infrastructure management tools to analyze the IT environment and define the rules for change using AI, machine learning, and intelligent automation to implement those changes….Specific enterprise use cases include cloud and datacenter migrations, asset lifecycle management, Windows and operating system lifecycle management, Office 365 migration, [and] Active Directory migration,” Deur told VentureBeat via email. “ReadyWorks [algorithms] detect data impurities and automatically build optimized schemas to stage the incoming data…ReadyWorks also employs recommendation tools based on years of data analysis from multiple clients.”

Future expansion

While DPC tools bring a range of benefits, there’s challenges inherent in AI-infused IT tools. Companies run the risk of failing to identify the underlying issues they’re trying to address with DPC, as well as lacking enough high-quality data to process and not capturing data points with consistency.

But Deur says that 15-employee ReadyWorks takes a “differentiated approach” towards digital transformation efforts compared with other solutions on the market. The company claims to have customers in “dozens” of enterprises as well as government agencies and universities.

“The pandemic continues to create an urgent need for our services as companies adapt to new market challenges, which has had a positive impact on the business. Businesses were forced to accelerate digital transformation … and they realized that legacy systems and manual processes are not capable of getting them to where they need to be,” Deur added. “Agility, ability to enable a distributed workforce and anywhere operations faster, business continuity, and reducing operational expenses all became critical to business success, and ReadyWorks makes this possible.”

With the latest investment, ReadyWorks says it’ll expand its platform and New York-based workforce.