Finding Relief from Stagnant Technology

When summertime arrived and temperatures soared into triple digits (at least where I live), humidity can rise and the air becomes stagnant, making things pretty miserable outside. It’s really unpleasant when those sort of conditions exist in your everyday business life as well…the business demands are rising, management pressure/heat is increasing and the technology you currently use, while at one time it was fresh and exciting, no longer has the capability to provide the relief you need.

You may be using a software solution that has been around for years, your staff knows it well and has even built custom automation to provide additional capabilities. But, you may feel locked into a vendor solution that cannot keep pace with the business demands, and you feel there is no way to advance your business capabilities in these circumstances. While you may have the ambition to start an ‘initiative’ to change the way you provide for the data processing needs of your business, the risk and cost could seem too great, to your both career and your business.  

For years now, data centers have constructed their own methods of solving the automation challenges that their existing job schedulers could not address. I have seen many data centers with complex, sophisticated automation routines they have built in-house, out of necessity, to support the business.  But, many of these data centers are finding that the ongoing support and maintenance for these routines is becoming a problem, and they really need an out-of-the-box solution to handle the immediate processing needs of the business. Building a custom solution may seem like a good idea at the time, but over the long term, it becomes too costly to support.

I’ve also seen data centers that chose NOT to lock themselves into one vendor for an enterprise solution, and were able to bring in a ‘vendor-agnostic product’ to allow for a single staff to define and manage workload across the enterprise. This gave them independence from any vendor trying to leverage a hefty price tag for a renewal on the management component. They could evaluate the benefits of later replacing the managing component for another vendor solution, without the need to replace all the distributed agents, a huge cost in a replacement scenario.

Another growing trend we are seeing is that the business areas themselves have become more interested in workload processing, along with the data centers. Some are even willing to take control of the processing of the business data and are evaluating, selecting, and implementing independent solutions to manage their mission critical workload. They can no longer deal with the restrictions and quirkiness of the older job scheduling solutions. They don’t have the time to learn the native scheduling language required to become affluent and easily able to utilize the data center solution. What’s so hard to understand about schdids, in/out conditions, and the daily and long term plans?

The business-focused users wanted something that is web-enabled, graphical, visual and fully accessible from smartphones and iPads, much more than just simple command/control statements from a skeleton web interface. They don’t want to have to learn to become “job schedulers”, but need to deliver the functionality to the business quickly. They need capability to meet the needs of the business at an accelerated rate.

Today’s IT Manager must serve two masters…1) be able to sustain the core legacy processes, and 2) provide independent means of delivering business functionality at the rate which is expected. They can no longer box the ‘scheduling’ solution inside the walls of the data center, and must look outwardly for ‘automation’ solutions that could be universally used by both the business areas and the data center alike.  Maybe it’s not absolutely necessary to do a total replacement of the current job scheduling solution, but provide an alternative, self-enabled automation tool that can meet both the needs of the business and the needs of the data center.  The rest of the workload could either be migrated over time, using a re-energizing approach, or simply be left alone to run on the current automation product.

Are you ready to break free from the stagnation of your automation solution and embrace a more independent method of meeting the needs your business demands? You know, Webster defines stagnation as “to stop developing, growing, progressing or advancing”.  While the products you currently use for workload automation may fit the category of stagnant solutions, you can still find an alternative means of meeting the business requirements, you just need to explore the