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Workload Automation today is primarily focused on automating workload in mainframe and distributed environments that are of a batch or near real-time nature. While this form of workload will continue to remain prevalent in the data center for years to come, there are new forms of workload, made possible by new shifts in enterprise architecture that are emerging in parallel and will necessitate the integration of both existing and new platforms.

To more greatly concentrate computing power to reduce overall run time, applications have taken to greater balancing of workload to shorting data processing windows. Parallel processing emerged, and was later refined by Grid computing. Data centers now had greater capability of executing workload within their existing infrastructure, but could not optimize hardware resources. This led to large numbers of servers under utilized the vast majority of the time and on standby for peak operating periods.

The on-demand nature of virtualization technology and cloud computing changes that - though the vast majority of job scheduling and workload automation solutions deployed in the enterprise cannot leverage it.

Technical Challenge	Consequence for Workload Automation
Virtualization and Cloud-based technologies mean inexpensive, on-demand computing resources can be made available at any time to accelerate processing of workload	Workload Automation solutions must be able to differentiate between the workload to the infrastructure, and be able to identify new resources on the fly as they become available. More importantly, solutions must be able to integrate and control provisioning tools of these environments.
Key components of an Enterprise's workload may exist in disparate data stores including in-house as well as SaaS-hosted applications in the cloud.	The Solution must simultaneously support corporate as well as the industry's standard security protocols. Must be able to easily extract and move large volumes of data between partners.
These new workload systems, such as Grid Computing, are also closed systems with limited awareness in terms of other workload management systems - but may have data and process dependencies	These systems need to be integrated with the rest of an enterprise's workload, which may span generations of technology. The WAB must be able to integrate with and create cross-platform, cross-application workflows to manage workload end-to-end and create an effective business process view

Today, OpsWise helps you move forward to Workload Nirvana by providing a set of core services that moves the bar in what is achievable by a Job Scheduler and Workload Automation Broker today by providing:

• A state of the art user experience that's 100% web-based that allows users to build business-level views of the workload that's running
• Integrate all of your platforms - from z/OS to virtualized Linux servers
• Dynamically place workload on servers - and auto-discovery of new machine images containing OpsWise agents
• Load-balancing of servers based on CPU
• Broadcasting workload across a set of servers

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.

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.