Our development team has done a fabulous job getting Winter 2010 out the door!

What's New Winter 2010

New Features include the much anticipated command-line interface, SNMP notifications on workload, and SNMP and Email Notifications on Agents, the Mid-Tier and Cluster nodes.

We're just getting started on our 2010 Roadmap, Spring release starting to take shape....

Latest EMA Radar Report™ examines 13 industry-leading Workload Automation (WLA) products for enterprises

BOULDER, Colo., Jan.12, 2010 - Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a leading IT management research and consulting firm, today announced the release of its newest EMA Radar Report™ titled, Workload Automation Q1 2010 - An EMA Radar Report™. Created to assist IT professionals in selecting the right Workload Automation (WLA) products, EMA has identified the leading vendors in this space based on key criteria defined by EMA VP of Research, Systems & Storage Management, Andi Mann.

Results identify key strengths and weaknesses and highlight characteristics, summarized in a detailed market map and Radar Chart - which includes a composite score for each vendor - making it simple to see how vendors measure up in the market, as well as against other vendors.

The following criteria were the five major factors used to evaluate WLA solution maturity:

1. Cross-Platform Job Scheduling - creating workflows across multiple platforms and applications.
2. ITSM Integration - orchestrating ITIL-based process inputs and outputs
3. Resource Optimization - dynamic resource allocation and load balancing
4. Business Integration - linking IT services to business requirements, business impact analysis
5. Predictive Analytics - dynamic thresholding, impact analysis, heuristic monitoring, etc.

Some of the top honors awarded include BMC for "Best Overall ITSM Integration" and "Best Automated Resolution," CA for "Best Security Integration" and "Highest Rated Functionality," IBM for "Best Workload Management Integration," OpsWise for "Best Interface Design," ORSYP for "Most Scalable Architecture," The complete Workload Automation Radar Report showcases all products awarded and provides a detailed outline of strengths and weaknesses.

"The EMA Workload Automation Radar Report highlights EMA's choices for best products in this space and provides IT professionals with a starting point from which to evaluate available WLA solutions," said Andi Mann. "Furthermore, this report provides a maturity model that explains the progression from chaotic batch job scheduling to dynamic and adaptive WLA. Undoubtedly, it is a beneficial, independent guide for end-users and vendors alike."

The complete Workload Automation Q1 2010 - An EMA Radar Report™ is available online for $795 at http://www.enterprisemanagement.com/research/asset.php?id=1646

The summary is available for free online at http://www.enterprisemanagement.com/research/asset.php?id=1645

About the EMA Radar Report The EMA Radar Report delivers an in-depth analysis of industry-leading vendors and vendor products, including their overall market position in comparison with other vendors. This information is laid out in an easy-to-decipher, detailed Radar Chart - which includes the composite score for each vendor - making it simple to see how vendors measure up in the market, as well as against other vendors. The EMA Radar report also provides a detailed discussion of methodology and criteria, a high-level market segment overview, a comprehensive analyst write-up on each vendor, as well as an evaluation of software products based on five key dimensions: Ease of Deployment and Administration, Cost Advantage, Architecture and Integration, Functionality, and Vendor Strength.

About EMA Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that specializes in going "beyond the surface" to provide deep insight across the full spectrum of IT management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices, and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solu¬tions to help its clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research, analysis, and consult¬ing services for enterprise IT professionals and IT vendors at www.enterprisemanagement.com or follow EMA on Twitter http://twitter.com/ema_research.

http://www.enterprisemanagement.com/news/press_release.php?p_id=996

A number of inquiries we get relating to OpsWise Automation Center, is from organizations who are growing, and as a result, it's simply time to replace cron.

For decades, administrators of UNIX and UNIX-like systems such as Linux have relied on cron, the built-in systems scheduler, in order to schedule and automate tasks. In this post, we will explore cron's strengths and weaknesses as well look at the challenges that this approach as opposed to an enterprise automation approach, such as OpsWise!

CRON the Good

There's a lot of good about cron, for instance:

• As an embedded tool, it's free
• The implementation of CRON is available across a large number of operating systems, and is consistently implemented
• Cron is immediately available as a service, no software to install
• From a security perspective, users can have their own individual crontab files and do their own scheduling
• From a scheduling perspective, it provides good flexibility in terms of scheduling capabilities and especially good at running cyclic jobs (e.g. runs every 20 minutes)

CRON the Bad

• Scheduling not sophisticated enough to understand holidays, so avoiding running workload on holidays or specific days (e.g. an inventory day) requires significant manual intervention
• Stuck to the time zone of the server you are running on
• Stuck to the server cron is running on
• No workflow logic, you cannot take different processing directions based on the success, failure, or error code recieved
• Stuck on time-only triggering. Much of the time, automation can be driven off of file-based activity or on RDBMS activity. With cron, you are stuck with just time

CRON the Ugly

• Maintenance headache as you add more and more servers. Want to run the same scheduled task on twenty different servers? That's twenty different servers you need to log into, create a cron tab entry, test, and debug
• No central point of control - users have to manually log in and look at the output of their workload in order to determine success or failure
• No notifications automatically if something goes wrong, which could be hours, or days. You are blind to processing errors.
• No audit trail for workload = compliance nightmare. If you have initiatives such as SOX, HIPPA, or PCI, a lack of evidence is problematic. The collection process, while possible, is very time consuming

OpsWise as a CRON replacement

OpsWise addresses the Bad and the Ugly of cron, providing you with:

• Definition of tasks and workflows across all of your severs, and centralized monitoring of job status from a single web-based enterprise console
• Notifications - get an email notification directly to your smartphone everytime something goes, wrong, including diagnostic output so you can pinpoint the error
• Manage cross-platform dependencies across servers and operating systems through a simple drag-and-drop workflow editor
• Automatically react to file activity instead of being dependent on time
• Full Audit Trail, Audit Reports, and Role-based security makes being compliant and tracking compliance data a breeze
• More sophisticated scheduling, including calendaring and time zone support. We even provide a unique cron-compatibility mode for those used to scheduling using cron's five positional parameters. This also makes migrating your data from cron far easier than with other solutions
And, of course, many, many more benefits.

I just got flipped this link to EMA Analyst Andi Mann's personal blog. As one of the principle use cases of Cloud Computing is provisioning capacity for running workload, it's great to see the Analyst community starting to talk about this. I know we have been for a while.

It's hard to believe that a year has gone by since a band of propeller-head IT Automation gurus first released OpsWise Automation Center. Weeks before the worst recession since the great depression is certainly most interesting timing for launching a new solution, but ahead we went, much to the chagrin of our competition and the naysayers that the industry does not want another job scheduler/workload automation broker.

One year, and three additional seasonal releases later, here we are - continuing to sign new customers and build great new features that we deliver to customers, sometimes monthly. We won't be done until we're the best Workload Automation Platform on the planet.

Well, it took a little longer than we wanted, but we've come out with a great new release!

Congrats to the team for pulling this together. It was certainly a team effort. This release has a very interesting quality - we've provided serious innovation in terms of integrating with Legacy Systems and Cloud Computing all in one release! This also marks our 3rd release since the launch of Automation Center in September 2008. Let's review the highlights...

Dynamic Allocation of workload in elastic cloud and virtualized environments

This is our favourite new job scheduling feature in a long time! We hinted at this last July with our press release where we announced our plans for workload automation and enterprise job scheduling in cloud computing environments.

So how does this work? Well, it's pretty simple. Say, for instance, you're running an application where you're using lots of load balancing, say for instance, based on CPU utilization - and you are distributing your data for processing across a number of servers. If you know you're back is up against the wall in terms of CPU utilization, or meeting your SLA's, simply provision new images of servers in either a VM environment or in the cloud - and watch as these new images start up - perhaps for the first time - and presto! Automatically join work queues and start running workload. That easy. Oh yeah, the OpsWise EC2 image is also here.

Full re-run/restart for z/OS

We've been working for months with a mainframe customer craving new workload features and getting none. They are in the process of shifting off of CA-7 and onto OpsWise. Besides unparalleled ease of use, a more modern architecture, a tool that they can use to also automate their distributed environment - they're actually also getting BETTER MAINFRAME functionality than they were getting before. Including a better rerun/restart manager than what's provided by CA-11. Tired of your mainframe scheduler? We've got the answer.

To top it off, we've added lots and lots of small features, most requested by our users. We've bumped up our file monitoring with new built in variables, scheduling of reports to be delivered by email, and due to a number of Mac geeks on the team, full support for OSX - the first enterprise job scheduler with 100% support for OSX with both Server and Agents.

Time to relax is over - onwards to our Winter 2009 release - lots of API and integration work to be done. More on that later...

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

With our new Summer release (coming soon!) 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?

1. As a solution designed and architected within the past 12 months, we follow the web and architecuture standards of today
2. 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
3. Our agents were designed to auto-register to begin with. Extending smart agents is much easier than dumb ones
4. 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!
5. 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.