Is Scheduling Dead?

Posted on December 23, 2011 by chris.lentz

With the advent of new “in-memory” technologies—like SAP® HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance), which is gaining profile since announced last year—many people I’ve talked to recently ask about what that means for traditional scheduling and automation platforms. Does it mean that scheduling is dead? Absolutely not.

In-memory technologies certainly do not mean that scheduling and automation aren’t important. On the contrary, in high performance environments scheduling and automation are even more important. With in-memory computing, the same processes still have to happen. They just happen faster. No matter how quickly they occur, these processes still need to be orchestrated both within the high speed environment and, critically, in context with the wider IT landscape. To do that, companies will need a fast, flexible, dynamic and event-driven automation solution.

In fact, the new high speed in-memory environments demand a solid and effective scheduling and process automation solution that can keep up with real time demands. For example, if you use a traditional data warehouse, you’re familiar with how they aggregate information as it comes in. That way, the warehouse is ready if or when a particular query is run. With in-memory computing, there’s no need for a data warehouse to build the aggregates in advance of a query. In-memory computing can enable business users to bypass the traditional data warehouse scenario and simply perform calculations or build a query in real time against the underlying high speed database. While this means that it takes less infrastructure (but more computing muscle) to get critical data, it doesn’t mean that these tasks don’t need to be scheduled, orchestrated and, in many cases, automated to work at optimum speeds. In many cases, the high performance computing environment is exactly the kind of environment that can benefit the most from automation.

One of the sector’s foremost analysts, Milind Govekar of Gartner, Inc., writes and advises about the current and future need for speed in business process execution. After talking with literally thousands of end-users and vendors, he has seen a trend towards what he calls the Zero-Latency Enterprise or ZLE, where data and information pass as quickly as possible through the business via Real-Time Infrastructure. I agree whole heartedly with Milind. I know that businesses demands—and will continue to demand—faster, more complete and more accurate data as the global economy and business environment continues to speed up. I also know that central to fulfilling this demand will be scheduling and automation solutions.

Part of the reason that scheduling and automation will continue to be important to any enterprise is that scheduling and automation are at the very core of what IT actually does (and has always done) best—execute repeatable processes quickly and precisely. Speed it up. Slow it down. Change the way it’s done in any way. IT still needs careful orchestration and scheduling to build automated processes that support any business. It’s a fundamental requirement. Zero-latency technologies like HANA only underscore the need for real-time process orchestration.

Three Reasons Why Automation in the Cloud is a Good Idea

Posted on December 13, 2011 by chris.lentz

At a trade show recently someone asked me if job scheduling and automation are suitable for cloud enablement. My answer was: “Why wouldn’t they be?”

Analysts and businesspeople alike have embraced the model of cloud services for all kinds for IT. Whether they view the cloud as a delivery model for a service or a “place” where they can store information, cloud enablement of any IT service adds flexibility, expandability and sheer ease. For many business and IT applications these factors are critical. The cloud is a great place for scheduling and automation for three main reasons:

It fits the new model of IT.
It decreases risk and initial expense.
It fulfills increasing demands of business to do more with less.

The New Model of IT

For years, IT has been moving from a model that measured success by capacity, assets and functions to one that fulfils business requirements. Increasingly, IT is now measured not on overall infrastructure might, but on how well it performs business-critical tasks.

With cloud-enabled automation and scheduling, automation becomes a basic IT service that thelps run the business. With cloud-based automation, administration and growth are completely flexible. You can control anything you need from anywhere. You can change a process or dependency on the fly and satisfy business needs in real time.

Reduced Risk and Cost

Cloud-based automation and scheduling is easy to implement, cost effective and, as a service, can be cancelled at any time. When subscribing to a cloud-based model, customers can dramatically reduce the risk traditionally associated with IT changes. That’s because it’s not really an IT change—it’s subscribing to a service. Customers can sign up and test the service for a minimal cost. If it doesn’t work the way they want it to, they can cancel and they haven’t had wasted investment in hardware or licensed software. Cloud services are all about giving customers the outcome they need—with a minimum of risk and effort.

Meeting Increasing Demands

Gone are the days when IT departments could demand the latest and greatest technology simply on the basis that they need it to keep things working. With piles of shelfware and billions spent on IT assets and applications that have never shown their value, we’re now in the era of tightening belts in IT – demonstrable returns have to be made. Many companies spend a significant portion of their IT time and effort working to drive down costs while driving up speed, efficiency and accuracy.

Cloud-enabled automation is the way that IT can emerge from the vicious circle of higher cost for higher performance. With automation as a service, customers only pay for what they need. The continuity and quality of the service are built into existing service level agreements (SLAs) so IT professionals can focus on the strategic results instead of simply keeping it working. As with other IT services, this is just another way that cloud-enablement makes delivering on business requirements fast, easy and flexible.

I’d like to thank my friend who asked the initial question. It’s a good one.

SAP® Solutions from Redwood

Posted on November 24, 2011 by chris.lentz

With process automation, your business processes become more streamlined, rational and consistent. You remove the element of human error and make once time-consuming manual tasks fast, self-regulating procedures. But to automate processes you have to automate and coordinate all of the underlying applications.

For SAP® users, this means aligning their SAP environment with any number of home-grown or purchased applications to get the maximum result from their SAP implementation. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)® describes six phases of application lifecycle management (ALM). The best way to implement enterprise process automation in an SAP environment is to align it with these best practices.

SAP Central Process Scheduling by Redwood (SAP CPS) gives you unique power to manage and automate critical business processes throughout the entire ALM cycle. Real-time, event-driven process automation and job scheduling with SAP CPS by Redwood delivers rapid returns on your investment; lowers your total IT costs, and helps you adapt quickly to changing customer and market demands.

With SAP CPS by Redwood you can successfully integrate and manage the execution and coordination of all of your applications. SAP CPS ensures compatibility with legacy, current and future business processing requirements while centralizing and simplifying how you control the scheduling and automation of all of your IT processes.

With SAP CPS by Redwood, you can reduce or eliminate latency in background workload processing while increasing online system availability. Ultimately, SAP CPS gives you a powerful automation tool that brings all of your processes together within your SAP environment. For more information about how Redwood can give you the SAP solution you need, visit www.redwood.com.

For Maximum Value: Think Business Process Automation

Posted on November 10, 2011 by chris.lentz

You might think of job scheduling as simply a means to an end. But, in reality, scheduling is the engine that runs the IT that supports your business. At their core, the business processes facilitated by job scheduling software are simply a series of related, dependent tasks that must be completed in a logical sequence, but their real value lies in their completion and outcome. When you begin to optimize processes as a whole, job scheduling transforms into process automation.

You can start by looking at exactly what makes up business processes. They are more than just jobs; more than just procedures. For business process automation to really work it must combine passive (or analytical) automation, process-based automation and active automation into an architecture that incorporates business rules and service level agreements (SLAs).

And the benefits increase as you scale up. With enterprise-wide process automation, business outcomes themselves are driven by technology—without the need for constant manual patchwork to keep the processes functioning. The more processes or steps you automate, the less time you spend manually pushing them through. The more repeatable and automated processes are, the faster you get results. If you apply this to your enterprise, the benefits grow even more.

The key to competitive advantage is proactive management of, and response to, changing business demands and requirements. Cronacle and SAP™ CPS by Redwood enable real-time business requirements to drive process automation, offering unmatched agility, efficiency and scalability.

By dynamically recognizing and responding to business events, Redwood ensures that critical business processes maintain priority. Process problems are immediately detected, recovery actions automated, and relevant business and IT users notified to ensure up-to-the-minute awareness of process status. One retail customer, for example, took a whole series of disparate individual tasks involved in reordering stock and combined them into a single automated process. It saved them enormous amounts of time and money. Find out more at www.redwood.com.

Business Process Automation can help keep your CFO, CEO and CIO happy

Posted on November 1, 2011 by chris.lentz

Keeping your boss at the C-suite happy is a full-time job. Every day you have to manage his or her expectations as well as the tenuous balance of people, processes and technology you oversee as an IT leader. Somehow, you’ve got to keep everything working—even improving—as you cut costs, increase efficiency and expand the business.

The key is to anticipate what drives your C-suite and explore the best practices that will keep you ahead of their concerns, requirements and demands. Don’t wait for them to come to you with problems or requests. Be proactive, process-minded and remember their goals. It’s easier to do than you might think.

Business process automation—on any scale—can help you reach your IT goals by improving productivity, work quality and flexibility all at once. And it all starts with job scheduling software. Scheduling isn’t just the day-to-day batch processing of specific, isolated tasks—it’s the foundation of real business process automation.

Redwood’s enterprise process automation and scheduling solutions, Cronacle and SAP™ CPS by Redwood, continuously optimize the underlying systems of business-critical processes using logic tied directly to your business policies. The platform-agnostic architecture enables you to build and maintain responsive business processes with the speed and reliability you need to secure market leadership and sustain profitability. With Redwood there’s no need to create lengthy scripts to build complex job scheduling chains.

What you have already created can be easily brought into our process logic without a painful rip-and-replace process. From the start, you can manage and control your business processes, easily connecting events, alerts and actions into a complete enterprise-wide automation solution. So you can start and end wherever you like and move at your own pace. Find out more at www.redwood.com.

What does Enterprise Process Management Mean?

Posted on October 18, 2011 by sam.ellis

Redwood Software helps businesses reduce the cost of running their enterprise wide business processes, eliminating the need for repetitive and error prone manual tasks, as well as improves those processes by making them more reliable, faster and more transparent. At Redwood, we call this Enterprise Process Management. In essence, it’s about improving productivity, lowering the cost of doing business and reducing risk.

But taking what can seem like something a little abstract to something more tangible can be better explained by an example. Take a typical business process such as the financial period end close, where companies need to reconcile and close their books for a financial reporting period. This typically involves many manual activities and usually requires the need to take information from multiple financial applications and systems (imagine a company with many subsidiaries for example). It’s understandable that the processes to achieve a financial close are typically overseen though the use of spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are the standard tool of a finance person but there has to be a better, more accurate and reliable way for a business to gain transparency of all the steps necessary to undertake the close process.

That’s where Enterprise Process Management comes in. It connects and orchestrates the critical business processes across all the disparate technologies and platforms across which a business process resides. Wherever there are multiple applications and platforms used for a business process, this is typically where there is an opportunity to make a positive difference. By the same token, Enterprise Process Management also provides greater transparency to the business of the status of underlying critical processes.