The current economic climate has boosted the demand to lower costs and reduce human error by reducing the number of job-scheduling tools and automating business processes across an IT environment, will continue unabated. Despite the adoption of new technology and applications, Gartner estimates that 70% of business processes are performed in batch, rather than in real time.
Job-scheduling tools have been automating static batch workloads for a long time, particularly in data center environments. These tools have been able to automate multistep processes, such as processing and printing customer bills, transferring funds or loan approvals, and feeding and extracting data from data warehouses to help build business scenarios based on calendar-based schedules. Thus, a job scheduler can automate a series of jobs, tasks or processes at a certain time every day or on a particular day, or based on certain date and time considerations.
Job scheduling is evolving to a more dynamic market, from one that had been considered mature (in which all problems had been solved, and the choices had been consolidated into a handful of dominant vendors) just a few years ago. There are more than 50 vendors in this market, with new ones entering as recently as 2006 and 2007. This is because users in this market continue to be challenged by new requirements resulting from the adoption of new technology and the complexity of the IT infrastructure, as well as from the opportunities to automate a greater portion of business processes. Therefore, many vendors have begun to offer technologies and products that support date- and time-based scheduling, event-based scheduling and adapters for integration with automation applications.
Gartner has positioned BMC CONTROL-M in the Leaders Quadrant of their “2009 Magic Quadrant for Job Scheduling.” This Gartner report assesses the ability to execute and completeness of vision of key vendors in the marketplace. Click here to read a full copy of this report, courtesy of BMC Software.
