In its simplest definition, a job is a single unit of work, regardless of whether it is done by an individual or done by a computer. Management, by definition, is "the conducting or supervising of something." Job management then, in the IT space, is simply applying the world's oldest and best-known management theory to the orchestration of the jobs being run on the computers within your IT infrastructure. And regardless of how sophisticated the environment, the oldest management principle still applies: "What gets watched, gets done."
CA has applied this simple principle across the broad and heterogeneous world of IT with its industry leading Unicenter Enterprise Job Management solution, which consists of a comprehensive set of distributed, mainframe, and cross-platform job management products.
From theory to action
The most recent IDC survey of 230 companies showed that in companies of 10,000 employees or more, a full 36 percent were planning to invest in job scheduling software within 12 months to help further automate their data center operations. Smaller enterprises, although less likely, still showed great interest in automation. You should be involved in those projects now. By industry sector, that same IDC survey identified transportation/utilities, manufacturers and retail/wholesale firms as the sectors showing the greatest interest.
This level of interest should surprise no one whose shop runs thousands, maybe millions of jobs a day across a wide variety of devices and computing platforms. The intricate order, dependencies, and need for assurance of the reliability and integrity of the business processes helps to avoid costly reruns and the manual effort associated with the remediation of failed processes. Effective job management is just good common sense, and offers an excellent business value. The measurement of IT performance, with or without Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in place, helps raise the level of interest in job management.
For a variety of reasons--including complex distributed applications, the migration to new platforms, and value chain collaboration requirements--today's need is for job management and scheduling systems to support the multi-platform operations most of us run. The "holy grail" of autonomous computing and on-demand IT resources to the business has also made this a foundation-level element of many IT manager's plans.
To support CA's Managing On-Demand Computing initiative, and to leverage the strength of CA's leading solutions on each platform for our customers, CA has introduced the Unicenter Enterprise Job Management solution, which leverages your investment in CA scheduling technology. The new Enterprise Job Management solution is the focus of this issue.
More control over workloads
Job scheduling in a complex multi-platform environment is what theUnicenter Enterprise Job Management solution offers, but what you'll be most interested in is the way CA offers this. A unique visualization component supporting "drag and drop" creations and visualizations of complex multi-platform jobs simplifies administration of multiple scheduling engines and gives you powerful, centralized, or distributed control of your resources. By leveraging CA's Web and portal technology, information from multiple CA scheduling and automation information sources gives you more sophisticated viewing and control of workloads, regardless of the platforms being managed.
The Unicenter Enterprise Job Management solution's application adapters allow you to integrate business-driven jobs with the rest of your production workload and align them with your scheduling process. Multiple event processors have dramatically improved performance, scalability, and risk isolation. These, combined with the leveraging of other core CA strengths, like enhanced security, has given CA job management solutions the most flexible and granular policy-based security. Future integration with Unicenter Performance & Availability components will improve the Enterprise Job Management solution's awareness of the data center policies and system availability and will, among other things, effectively support the grid computing model.
Among the most important capabilities being introduced, the Unicenter Enterprise Job Management solution can "invert" the traditional "resource-centric" view of the IT infrastructure, visualizing all the IT assets involved in supporting specific business processes. Real-time, color-coded status diagrams can be personalized and delivered via the Web and the portal interface to operations personnel, departments, business units or partners.
Articles in this issue range from CA's vision for job management ("One Giant Step for Enterprise Job Management," page 14) to CA's strategy on how it's implementing this vision ("Unicenter Enterprise Job Management: Scheduling for the Future," page 8) to a customer success story ("Unicenter Job Management Helps Barnes & Noble Better Manage Its Business," page 36).
CA understands job management has never been more challenging or critical to your success. The availability of Unicenter Enterprise Job Management is a key element in delivering real business value today, and supporting Managing On-Demand Computing tomorrow.