Stonebranch News Archives

Periodically, we at Stonebranch will offer our followers free swag. For example, we may give you a free copy of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Workload Automation or free VIP passes to the upcoming Cloud Expo in New York City.

We have more goodies coming, but if you're not following us on Twitter you could miss out! Follow us at http://www.twitter.com/stonebranch and make sure you're in the know.

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We're pleased that Stonebranch CEO Gwyn Clay will be speaking at the Cloud Expo in New York City on Tuesday, June 12 from 5:30pm - 6:15pm.

The title of Gwyn's session is "Manage Workload Across Generations of IT Infrastructure > Effectively Integrate Big Data/Cloud with your On-Premise Data Center". That's a mouthful, but it's a session you don't want to miss.

And to help ensure you don't miss it, we have free VIP passes for you. Simply visit http://www.stonebranch.com/cloudexpo/ and we'll hook you up.

See you in The Big Apple in June!

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The Stonebranch User Group Germany (SUGG) is meeting June 12-13 at the Novotel Hannover to discuss the changing role of IT.

If you are a Stonebranch user, and interested in attending, please visit http://www.stonebranch.com/sugg2012/.

Please be aware that the presentations at SUGG12 will be in German, so if you struggle with that language you may want to wait until IE12 in Amsterdam.

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Stonebranch is an IT Automation company specializing in job scheduling, workload automation, and managed file transfer solutions. It was established in 1999 and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia with offices throughout Europe. Stonebranch is privately held.

History
Stonebranch began with a single product, an agent for extending job scheduling to distributed platforms using any vendor's job scheduling solution, eliminating the need to only use the scheduling vendors agents. Later Stonebranch added a Managed File Transfer solution. In 2011, Stonebranch merged with Opswise Software, which developed and marketed a new workload automation/job scheduling engine.

Recent Milestones
2008 - Added SOA capabilities to universal Agent
2009 - Indesca Agent receives SAP Certification
Stonebranch recognized in Visionary quadrant for Gartner study on Managed File Transfer
2010 - EMA recognizes Opswise as Value Leader with Best Interface Design
Partnership with Terma Software to add Workload Analytics offering
2011 - Merger with Opswise Software brings Automaton Engine to portfolio
Product Integration achieved with core products achieved in 80 days
2012 - New release of Opswise Automation Center, with merged agent technology
Simplified branding and marketing under Opswise brand.
Opswise Controller
Opswise Universal Agents (formerly Indesca, formerly Universal Command)
Opswise MFT (formerly Infitran, formerly Universal Data Mover)
Only Visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Workload Automation

Components

Opswise Controller
The controlling engine for job scheduling and workload automation that is 100% web-based for both production scheduling and administrators. It resides in an Apache Tomcat container and can be deployed in the Cloud. Definitions of workload activity are referred to as tasks, with automatic triggers of various types. All artifacts are stored in a relational database that is MySQL, SQLServer, or Oracle.

Opswise Universal Agents
Common agent technology for the Opswise Controller or any other vendor's scheduling or workload automation engine. When used with Opswise Controller the agents can self-register. A variety of operating systems are supported.

Opswise MFT
A managed file transfer that includes a scripting language and can guarantee file transfers. Can be used in conjunction with Opswise Controller or run standalone but is part of shared agent code with Opswise Universal Agents.

Opswise B2B Gateway
Manages file transfers between businesses and suppliers

Complementary Products

Terma Software Labs JAWS - Workload Analytics
ASG Zeke can drive workload thru Opswise Universal Agents
BMC Control-M can drive workload thru Opswise Universal Agents
CA 7 Workload Automation can drive workload thru Opswise Universal Agents
CA AutoSys Workload Automation can drive workload thru Opswise Universal Agents
CA ESP Workload Automation can drive workload thru Opswise Universal Agents
CA Scheduler Job Management can drive workload thru Opswise Universal Agents
CA Jobtrac Job Management can drive workload thru Opswise Universal Agents
IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler can drive workload thru Opswise Universal Agents

Industry Recognition

The Gartner research group placed Stonebranch in the leadership quadrant of its Magic Quadrant for Managed File Transfer in 2009

In 2010 EMA Radar Report on Workload Automation Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) name Opswise Automation Center as a "Value Leader" with the "Best Interface Design"

In 2012, Gartner placed Stonebranch in its Visionary quadrant on their Magic Quadrant for Workload Automation

External Links

http://www.stonebranch.com

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On February 26-28th, the Stonebranch Education Summit was held held in Atlanta, Georgia and brought together many of the existing Stonebranch customers to hear about the recent 5.1 release. In traditional Stonebranch style, this was a family affair and several customers brought their spouses and older children along to take in the city of Atlanta and enjoy the Stonebranch hospitality. The event kicked off with a fascinating tour of the World of Coke. The group was given a guided tour of all this is Coca-Cola, from the "secret formula" to the tasting room where we were free to enjoy the varieties of Coca-Cola products from all over the world.

But this event brought much more than entertainment for the participants. A variety of informative sessions and demos showcased the new functionality in the 5.1 release that became available in January 2012. By holding the event in Atlanta, several of the Stonebranch Customer Support team and the Development team were on hand to meet the customers in person and share their expertise, as well as listen to any feedback from the customers.

Even seasoned veterans of the Stonebranch products were able to gain new ideas and exciting methods as we shared industry best practices that have been collected over the decades of job scheduling experience in the Stonebranch staff. Using the embedded capabilities of the Opswise Automation Center products they would be able to further reduce the minimal effort required to take advantage of the "rock- solid" agents they are using with a variety of scheduling engines, CA 7, TWS, Control-M, Zeke, etc. Many of these customers were quite interested in the new Opswise Controller to either replace or collaborate with their existing scheduling engines. One customer even stopped before leaving to tell us how impressed he was with Opswise and that he looked forward to being able to exploit more modern capabilities that would make his life easier.

Everyone's time is precious and we tried to pack in as much content in the two days as possible. But many of the customers cited the desire for a longer conference next year. They even volunteered to be on the Customer Advisory Council to assist in improving not only the customer conference, but helping us achieve the vision we have for Workload Automation.

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Have you heard the great news? Stonebranch has been named a Visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Workload Automation!

Here's an excerpt from our press release:

Workload Automation Specialists Stonebranch today announced it has been named a Visionary in analyst firm Gartner Inc.'s Magic Quadrant for Workload Automation, 2012. This culminates a year of growing momentum for the company in the global workload automation market.

Vendors in the Visionary quadrant are innovators that excel with highly differentiated solutions, introducing a radical new approach to the market.

Stonebranch CEO Wolfgang Bothe said: "We are honored to be recognized by Gartner with a placement in the Visionary Quadrant. We consider this a validation of our hard work, particularly over the last year, to deliver an easy to use and quickly implemented workload automation solution to our customers."

Stonebranch gained a significant number of premier customers in the financial services sector as well as next-generation data centers over the past year. Since its acquisition of Opswise Software in early 2011, it has fully integrated its core products into a single, unified set of solutions.

Stonebranch differentiates itself in the industry with a highly portable, web-based solution with unmatched ease of use. Customers praise it's quick deployment capabilities, diversity of integration possibilities, and its ability to enable easy management of mission-critical IT workload for IT Operations, as well as application development staff and business users.

You can access this Garner Magic Quadrant for Workload Automation here.

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We received some great news yesterday when Gartner unveiled their new Magic Quadrant for Workload Automation. Actually, it's better than great news, it's exceptional news, and it validates everything we've believed about our Opswise Automation Center.

We'll be sharing the specifics about this exceptional news later in the week, so we thought now would be a great time to remind you that you can follow Stonebranch on LinkedIn.

Simply click the button below to follow us there.

See you there!

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Many have invested in Opswise Universal Agents (formerly known as Indesca) and the reasons are aplenty.

• Counter price increases
• Limited deployment due to cost
• Require platform not supported
• Current agents not getting the job done
• Minimum order requirements
• Standardize on a single agent
• Multiple function agent
• Leverage "bench strength"
• Consolidate schedulers

Why invest in Opswise Managed File Transfer (formerly known as Infitran)? Here are several reasons:

• Counter price increases
• FTP not getting the job done
• Single agent with multiple functions
• Standardize scripting
• Integration to workload automation
• Guaranteed delivery
• Encryption and compression

The Opswise Automation Center is indeed intelligent workload automation for the modern data center. Here's why:

• Reduced cost
• Web based solution
• Visibility and Reporting
• Ease of use
• Portability

If you're wondering why you should invest in Opswise, the answers are above, but don't take our word for it. Check out the several case studies from very happy Opswise Automation Center customers.

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About a year ago now, we announced that Opswise Automation Center is, in fact, the first Workload Automation broker to be fully enabled for cloud deployment.

Today, Automation Center can be centrally deployed in the cloud and control resources in the cloud and also back in your data center. Alternatively, you can keep Automation Center deployed on-premise, and connect to resources in the cloud.

We also took it one step further - dynamic registry of newly provisioned servers into Automation Center - and newly registered agents are automatically assigned to work queues for immediate allocation of workload.

It's a significant step forward from what is considered possible. Why was it so easy for us to achieve?

• As a solution designed and architected within the past 12 months, we follow the web and architecuture standards of today
• 100% Web-based. No thick client, no socket to reconfigure, no ODBC driver to fiddle with. Just pop up your browser, and presto, instant access
• Our agents were designed to auto-register to begin with. Extending smart agents is much easier than dumb ones
• Adherence to modern security standards - fully support for SSL end-to-end ensured our message security played nice on the web, and now, in the cloud!
• A desire to innovate & consistent communication with our clients, many of which, are cutting edge, rapidly growing 21st century data centers

The result? Opswise in the cloud. While the cloud may not be for everyone today, we are seeing more and more examples of how enterprises can leverage workload in the cloud. And we're there - today.

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We're hitting the road for a series of seminars in Europe next month.

We'd love to see you there. Simply click the link for the seminar that's most convenient for you to register and learn more information.

For current Stonebranch event information at any time, visit http://www.stonebranch.com/news/events/.

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