The automation of IT and software development is accelerating at a rapid pace, helping companies bring new products and ideas to market faster and more efficiently, CIOs and technology executives say.

Automation has been a factor in the tech world for some time, but it is accelerating thanks to the availability of languages such as Java, as well as new platforms and tools. A six-month-old startup called Ansible Works Inc. raised $6 mllion from Menlo Ventures and other investors, VentureWire said on Tuesday. The company, with total funding of $7 million, 'automates onerous IT tasks such as upgrading large groups of servers with new software,' VentureWire reported. Co-founder and CEO Said Ziouani explained that the idea is to put powerful software development tools in the hands of more people, not just programmers. He also told VentureWire that the company's software reduces security risks since it 'touches the servers through a secure Internet protocol rather than software agents.'

Security also appears to be a factor in the National Security Agency's decision to eliminate 90% of its network administrators and employ more automation in the wake of revelations by Edward Snowden.

In recent months, companies from LinkedIn Inc. to Shutterstock Inc., a marketplace for digital images, have talked about how continuous software development, facilitated by automation, has raised their level of innovation and their ability to get products to market more quickly. Shutterstock which had a successful IPO in October 2012 that turned founder Jon Oringer into a billionaire, issues about 700 software updates a month.

'We do push a lot of code,' Chris Fischer, vice president of technology operations, told CIO Journal last year. 'Because it's open source, we can automate and move very rapidly and not be tied to a longer process that would often be required with other, standard vendors,' Fischer said.

Ford Motor Co. is making greater use of automation of software development and IT, and that is having a big impact on the business, Vijay Sankaran, chief technology director, told CIO Journal. 'Automation plays a huge role. A lot of things that were previously done manually are now being created in a repeatable and automated way,' he said. Automation is streamlining the testing of new IT systems, reducing the time required to complete that work by about one third, he said.

'With languages like Java, we are able to automate many processes. And people who are not developers can use tools like IBM's Lombardi to create programs,' he said. Lombardi is used to model business processes.

Automation is also leading to faster prototyping of IT systems, eliminating the need to make a list of what programmers think the folks in the business unit want, then writing code, sharing the results with the business unit and going back to make adjustments. New visualization tools now make it possible for IT people to meet with business leaders and experiment with software design in real time. Mr. Sankaran said those tools have been used to speed up prototypes for dealer ordering and warranty management systems, reducing time to market to a few weeks or months, instead of half a year. 'We are building prototypes in real time with car dealers,' he said.

Mark Kocour, associateprincipal of global IT with ZS Associates Inc., which provides sales technology and consulting for companies in pharmaceutical, manufacturing and other markets, said he began using software to automate disasterrecovery capabilities in remote facilities last year. If ZS' primary data center experiences an outage in a sales management application, VMware Inc.'s vCenter Site Recovery Manager instantly replicates the software in a secondary data center. Recovery Manager also automatically documents all of the steps taken to replicate the software, which is important for pharmaceutical customers that set limits on how quickly a service must be restored. Previously, two engineers had to manually restart a disrupted app, test it, and document steps taken during the outage to restart the application. 'It allows us to keep documentation up to date without manual intervention,' Mr. Kocour said. 'It's very valuable.'

Brian Lillie, CIO of data center host Equinix Inc., said his application developers use a few tools to automate software testing, reducing by several hours the time it takes to check code line by line, as well as the human error associated with repetitive manual processes.