I would agree with this whole heartedly. I worked as a developer for Cisco and the project we worked on was bringing in automation via a recent acquisition's software into the mix of a part in house developed and part vendor based managed service provider monitoring platform. The work we did as network engineers related directly to automating all the tasks that a level one tech would perform or gather from the customer in software. Even though we have not seen too much in this space in the popular it zines, this is the glue for the overall future IT departments. SDN comes to mind, vm automation as rutgerht mentioned, log/data gathering, basic troubleshooting (cycle interfaces, reboot, etc), updating support cases, provisioning devices, etc are things I have seen automation being used for. Its basically infinite as long as there is some sort of web service or other method to invoke what ever should be automated.
Sohail Bhamani
Loop1 Systems