A New Spin on Old Job Schedulers

By David Rubinstein

August 1, 2008 —  There’s a new spin coming on an old discipline, with the release this month of an enterprise data center job scheduling solution by a company called OpsWise.

OpsWise, headquartered in Los Altos, Calif., was initially funded by BMC Software founder John Moores. It was spun out of the Moores-backed JME Software earlier this year. OpsWise sells automated batch and event-based process software.

Job scheduling is morphing into a practice that industry analysis firm Gartner calls workload automation, and job schedulers are becoming workload automation brokers, according to Gwyn Clay, vice president of product management at OpsWise.

Modern tools must consider virtualization and the invocation of Web services, he said. “The [job scheduling] tools are becoming long in the tooth,” Clay said. “There have been a lot of advances in this area, but the management tools have only bolted on new technologies here and there.”

The OpsWise solution, due to launch on Aug. 30, is one set of code that can run on mainframe, midrange or Linux/Unix boxes, Clay said, with a focus on usability. Clay noted that in many cases, a Web interface—or even a Windows GUI—was an afterthought for these older scheduling products, many of which were created before Windows and the Web came into existence.

OpsWise’s solution has a Web-based interface with multiple management dashboards, integrated reporting and what Clay called a Visio-like drag-and-drop workflow. Furthermore, he said the log files are intuitive to read and “don’t look like something written by five different developers over a 10-year period.”

Having a multi-platform solution with a Web-based interface becomes increasingly important as organizations work to integrate their one-time, end-of-the-day batch processing with more real-time event processing.

“All these legacy platforms haven’t disappeared, but their roles might change,” Clay said. “Now, getting an e-mail, or a message on a message queue, can kick off complex business processes, and security and auditing need to be built in from the beginning. Even at the operations level, they’re getting audited for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.”

Clay gave the example of applying for a credit card as a way to illustrate how real-time event processes helps businesses attain greater speed and flexibility. “When my parents went to a department store for a credit card, they filled out an application, which was given to someone to input the information. Then, they ran a batch job at the end of the day, had to manually call the credit bureau, then run another batch to see who was approved, and then six to eight weeks later, a credit card showed up in the mail.

“Today,” he continued, “I can apply online, and the company can run an instantaneous credit check, and I can get a temporary card that I can print out and use today. The same steps were followed, but the pace at which business moves has drastically changed.”



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