Upgrading Your Job Scheduling Environment: Reducing the Risk, Effort and Cost of Replacing Your Job Scheduler

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Introduction – The Move to a Distributed Environment
Job Scheduling was one of the first major components of IT infrastructure, introduced during the “big-box” vendors’ mainframe era. In essence, job schedulers process the unattended background executions in a computing environment that support the business processes that IT manages.

However, as IT infrastructures move to a more distributed environment, multiple job schedulers can cause problems due to barriers between platforms, department and applications, reducing visibility and control throughout your entire enterprise while increasing cost.

According to Gartner, Inc.: “Due to the current economic climate, the demand to lower costs, and reduce human error by reducing the number of job-scheduling tools and automating business processes across a heterogeneous computing environment, will continue unabated.” (Source: Gartner, Inc. “Magic Quadrant for Job Scheduling,” by Milind Govekar, 28 April, 2009.)

So how do you decrease complexity and cost with a limited budget? The solution is to utilize one tool to consolidate and automate your job scheduling environment. By simplifying your IT infrastructure, teams throughout your IT Operations Group can all maintain central visibility of your company’s job scheduling processes.

Market Drivers – Reducing Costs and Improving IT Processes
Many IT organizations are currently deploying numerous schedulers throughout their enterprise, increasing overhead, maintenance and resource costs. This works conversely with what industry analysts are predicting in this current economic climate.

In a Gartner, Inc. report entitled, “Findings: Gartner Lowers Its Global IT Spending Growth Forecast for 2009,” Gartner stated, "Gartner’s preliminary forecast is that IT spending during 2009 will decline by 3.7 percent." (Gartner, Inc. "Findings: Gartner Lowers Its Global IT Spending Growth Forecast in 2009" by Richard Gordon, 12 March, 2009).

The need for an affordable solution that can streamline, automate and consolidate your job scheduling environment has never been greater. While reducing cost and risk is on every executive’s mind right now, maintaining high levels of IT service remains a fundamental objective of any IT department and ultimately, the two go hand-in-hand.

ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is an organization that provides a systematic and professional approach to the management of IT service provision. Adopting its guidance offers users a huge range of benefits that include:

• Reduced costs
• Improved IT services through the use of proven best practice processes
• Improved customer satisfaction through a more professional approach to service delivery
• Standards and guidance
• Improved productivity
• Improved use of skills and experience
• Improved delivery of third party services through the specification of ITIL or ISO 20000 as the standard for service delivery in services procurements

By improving your processes to become a more mature IT organization, you reduce internal costs and provide improved service delivery within your organization. As the old adage goes, “killing two birds with one stone.”

The Problem with Disparate Job Schedulers in Your Environment
Your job scheduling environment is often managed by multiple groups of people using different processes and technology, such as platform-specific job scheduling solutions. For example, your applications and development group should not be involved in your job scheduling environment. This prevents end-to-end visibility of business processes and impairs IT maturity initiatives like ITIL. Having to deploy and maintain multiple job schedulers increases cost, effort and complexity.

Are your current solutions working in your environment? With multiple job schedulers in your IT infrastructure, you may have too many schedulers that lack the functionality to do what you need. Additionally, your existing job schedulers may not be able to be deployed enterprise-wide, adding another issue to your complex environment.

Many of your job schedulers probably come from the “big box” vendors that are too expensive and complex to effectively deploy across your entire enterprise. Moreover, they confine you to a long-term contract that has little room for flexibility once the contract is signed.

In addition to lack of visibility, increased costs and not being able to deploy your job schedulers enterprise-wide, you face lack of integration throughout your entire job scheduling environment. This leads to the aforementioned multiple groups working independently and not communicating with other job scheduling groups, affecting business agility.

The Solution is Cross-Platform Technology
The key to solving these business issues is to consolidate the number of job schedulers used by deploying one independent, enterprise-wide tool. This job scheduling solution is able to integrate with an existing scheduler to provide a true enterprise solution that combines all elements of your IT infrastructure into a holistic view. One job scheduling solution enables people to work across platforms without specialization, standardizing processes and consolidating tools, improving IT maturity while reducing hard and soft costs significantly.

One of the key benefits to this approach is that you can leverage your existing investments. While you may think you need an entirely new scheduling system, there are reasons not to buy a new scheduler, including risk, cost and effort. Additionally, a technology independent job scheduling tool increases your business’s ability to support emerging technologies such as service oriented architecture (SOA).

Considerations When Looking at a Job Scheduling Solution
With a considerable amount of job scheduler vendors in the marketplace, it is important to research vendors’ capabilities and reputation. Some of the more important considerations include:

• Does the vendor provide platform-independent technology?
• Does the vendor solve my problem?
• Research the vendor’s experience and expertise in the market
• Does the vendor readily provide client references?
• Is the vendor flexible and cost-effective?

Now that you know what to look for in an enterprise job scheduling solution, how do you find the one tool that can consolidate, automate and streamline your job scheduling environment? At Stonebranch, we provide Independent Scheduling Agents technology.

Indesca™, Stonebranch’s Independent Scheduling Agents Solution
Indesca, Stonebranch’s Independent Scheduling Agents solution, gives you the ability to upgrade your current job scheduler environment to solve mission-critical business problems. We are not a job scheduler. We are the solution to your job scheduling problems.

By upgrading your job scheduler environment instead of moving to a new job scheduler, you reduce your company’s risk, effort and cost. Our solution enables you to:

• Reuse Technology, Which Reduces Cost and Eliminates Risk
• Consolidate Technology, Improving Business Service
• Provide Real-time Information to Business Stakeholders
• Provide Event-driven Processing
• Reduce Total Cost of Ownership

With our Independent Scheduling Agents solution, you are able to leverage your existing investment in software, processes and skill sets. Indesca seamlessly integrates with your existing scheduling solution. It is an upgrade, not a replacement. By implementing Indesca, a national retail chain did not have to throw away years of investment and know-how to extend the benefits of a mature and robust scheduling function to every critical business application.

Can you really afford to have two or more groups providing the same business service? Stonebranch’s Independent Scheduling Agents solution offers a viable strategy for consolidation of multiple scheduling tools. A large global healthcare provider was able to consolidate two schedulers to a single scheduler and eliminated backup and application or platform-specific schedulers with Indesca. This single process and view aligned with their ITIL initiative. They are now able to leverage one small team to manage all scheduling using a consistent toolset.

Let your business drive your visibility requirements, not your software. Our Independent Scheduling Agents solution delivers flexible visibility tools and capabilities to meet your specific business and operational needs. A leading securities processor used applications staff to run their own schedules using many different tools. By implementing Indesca, the applications staff now keeps tabs on schedule progress and status without having to interface with different departments. Because of the success of this process, they now have centralized enterprise scheduling.

Integrating scheduling with business workflows streamlines the business process. Indesca optimizes the integration of business events with your enterprise scheduling to avoid delays and help you maximize revenue. One financial services customer dynamically schedules workloads to process financial data and orders from investment companies and private sector customers. Being able to process financial transactions in near real-time is a huge factor in their ability to satisfy and retain their customer base.

Software cost does not stop at the purchase price. Stonebranch’s Independent Scheduling Agents solution provides real value through our pricing model, integration capabilities and ease-of-use. A large financial institution was able to consolidate scheduling functionality from six groups to one with Indesca, greatly reducing staffing needs. Quality and efficiency were increased, allowing them to do more with less.

But don’t just take our word for it:

“Before using Indesca, I needed about 75 percent of my daily time to manage our workload environment due to the many errors we repeatedly needed to correct. Now, with Stonebranch’s solution, I need only 10 percent of my time to handle all processes.”

“The important part of the Stonebranch solution is that it is independent. It gave us the ability to upgrade our current job scheduling environment.”

- Torben Olsen, Systems Engineer at CSC

Recently, Liam McGlynn, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), wrote a white paper entitled, “Reducing Costs with Consolidated Job Scheduling and Intelligent File Transfer: A Timely Discussion of Stonebranch.”

In this paper, McGlynn writes:
“Indesca, Stonebranch’s Independent Agents solution, is not a job scheduler. Rather, it provides the ability to upgrade the scheduling infrastructure. Because Indesca does not replace existing schedulers, the implementation is straight-forward, rapid and non-disruptive.”

Next Steps – Contact Stonebranch
Want to learn about how Indesca enables Stonebranch’s clients to save valuable time, money and resources? Visit us at: http://www.stonebranch.com/indesca.