Part 1 of this blog series outlined the problem that, as the number of systems, applications, databases, and whatnot platforms increases, the IT business community requires a holistic approach across all these various systems to provide a single point of running IT jobs and workload automation. It also pointed out the difficulties in achieving this noble idea, and introduced Advanced Systems Concepts Inc. (ASCI) and its ActiveBatch cross-platform enterprise job scheduling and workload automation solution. Read the rest of this entry »

We certainly learn new things every day, and sometimes out of pure serendipity. Namely, when I was recently asked by one of my industry contacts (working for a PR agency) whether I would like to have a briefing with and about his client, whose name included the word “batch” as a part, I agreed, thinking it was a process enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendor or maybe a manufacturing execution system (MES) vendor.

To my chagrin, as soon as the Web conference meeting and demo started, I realized that I was in the quite unfamiliar territory of enterprise job scheduling and workload automation, especially when it comes to highly diverse and distributed information technology (IT) environments. Many of these jobs are still run in a batch mode without human interaction and intervention (at least preferably).

Some batch job examples would be: database/data warehouse updates, payroll runs, file copying and archiving, systems rebooting, disks de-fragmenting, reports printing, processing insurance claims, billing statements, and/or enrollments, file transfer protocols (FTP), and so on. Thus came the ActiveBatch product name, I guess. Read the rest of this entry »