Right on. If you do a search here some guy here at digital point wrote a php program for his site and it submites to 140 search engines in about 2 minutes, free.
Plenty of automatic submission programs but until their is an automatic submission acceptance program I'll give them a miss as most are rejected!
If you mean submission to multiple search engines this is one thing, and since I know exactly how it is implemented I can tell you it does not harm but does not help much either. It has a very simple code implementation and I would not pay for this service. Another thing is Automated Submission Web Directories. I suggest that you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_submission_web_directories
I started a thread at http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1468273 that you may wish to look at.
Automoatic submission might get your site banned, rather use semi automatic where the softwares automatically fills in the form for you. I know of a great 1 at http://www.submiteaze.com/
free automatic directory submitter . Why spend endless hours submitting manually to some directories when you can use 4DL for free. 4DL.info also has a paid submission mode. For only 10$ it submits your website to one thousand directories. It breaks captcha image codes automatically. It automatically selects the closest category and it supports using multiple titles and descriptions. All this and there's no need to download any software. Yes, you heard me write it does all of the above directly from your browser. Now this is indeed an automatic directory submitter.
SubmitEaze is now completely automated with the new version 10 and added support for decaptcher.com -- also now you can add custom directories and use the turbo submitter with them. Amazing, just fill out your forms, click submit, minimize, and come back in a few hours to a nice 3000 or so directories submitted to (depending on how many custom directories you have added).