Systems management software provider, Halcyon Software Inc., today announced a major release of one of its flagship products – Advanced Job Scheduler V9.0 for the IBM i platform.

Halcyon Advanced Job Scheduler V9.0 enables organizations to schedule highly complex job streams and track these across different IBM i systems or across other servers to ensure that business processes are running smoothly, at the optimum time and at maximum efficiency.

Key enhancements to this new release include a migration utility for rapid importation of jobs from other standard or third party job schedulers, a command list to check appropriate conditions before jobs are processed, improved reporting and an “FTP error trapping” feature to detect any issues with file transfers.

Importing jobs

A new feature allows jobs from other third party job schedulers to be imported into Halcyon’s Advanced Job Scheduler using a migration utility specifically designed for this task.

John Dominic, vice president of Sales , said, “In talking to companies, we recognized the need to make it very easy for businesses to change their scheduling software as in many cases there is clearly a resource challenge in moving thousands of existing jobs over to an alternative solution.”

Halcyon’s technical team discovered that there were two main reasons why companies want to change from their existing job scheduling software.

Dominic continued, “The first reason was purely based on cost.  Some companies have been faced with additional fees from their software vendors when they have increased the Commercial Processing Workload (CPW); that is the CPW rating of their IBM hardware.  The objective of this new release was to automate the capture and import of jobs from other schedulers, saving companies significant labor and cost, provide a reliable methodology for migration and, as our software isn’t charged on a CPW basis, protect their business from software or maintenance hikes in the future whenever their IBM i system’s CPW rating is increased.  The second reason is that the business may have outgrown their existing job scheduler or the standard one shipped with the IBM i system. Today’s businesses have a need to handle more complex job streams which requires a solution capable of dealing with multiple job dependencies and running processes across different platforms.”

Command List

The software is shipped with a command list function which allows system administrators to easily set a sequence of commands which can be run within or outside of the Halcyon Advanced Job Scheduler. For example, users may want to run appropriate checks to ensure that their usual conditions have been met (such as their high availability process has been shut down, users have all successfully signed off, all printers are off-line etc.) before running the first job of the end of day processing.

Improved reports

Reporting has been enhanced so that system administrators can easily demonstrate to the business that the IT department is meeting service level agreements.

Users can run reports on historic jobs and can also view a schedule of future jobs to see what is about to be run across a defined time period. For example, reports on specific jobs show how many jobs have run successfully and provide information on average run times. This allows IT staff to detect jobs which have over run the expected time slot so that this can be investigated and appropriate action can be taken to rectify the situation.

FTP error trapping

An “intelligent” FTP Scripting Language has been developed by Halcyon so that, in the event of a problem occurring with any File Transfers, IT administrators can set up a pre-programmed sequence of actions, mimicking what a computer operator would do in any given situation.

Pricing and availability

Advanced Job Scheduler V9.0 is available immediately, either as a single utility or as part of Halcyon’s Level 4 monitoring software suite.  Current customers using Advanced Job Scheduler can upgrade to Advanced Job Scheduler V9.0 free of charge. Product pricing is tiered and based on IBM processor groups. In addition, Halcyon has published a fair pricing policy so that if customers increase the CPW rating of their IBM hardware they will not incur software upgrade fees giving long term reassurance on costs.  To view the policy visit: www.halcyonsoftware.com/nocpw. For more information about Advanced Job Scheduler V9.0 visit: www.halcyonsoftware.com/ajs

About Halcyon Software

Halcyon Software is a global leader in multi-platform systems management solutions that reduce the complexity and cost of monitoring critical business systems, core applications and processes. They help companies prevent business disruption, increase the efficiency of their IT services and save costs.  In most cases, Halcyon’s solutions increase IT efficiency by 30 – 40 percent, delivering significant savings and a rapid return on investment – often in less than six months.

Halcyon achieves this in three ways:

Monitoring: Halcyon’s monitoring software keeps a vigilant watch on the most critical IT systems and core applications on which business depends. IT administrators receive early warnings of any potential problems or ‘bottlenecks’ before they affect the organization.

Automating: Halcyon enables IT teams to set up ‘self–corrective actions’ to issues or problems to ensure that they never impact the business again.  IT teams can also automate regular tasks, checks or jobs which would normally be undertaken manually. This frees up valuable resources, saves costs and helps to eliminate human error. 

Reporting: Halcyon’s cloud-based reporting solution proves to management that the IT team is achieving the service levels demanded by the business or flags any issues so they can be quickly resolved. 

Halcyon’s products support IBM Power Systems servers running IBM i, AIX, Linux and Windows. With regional offices in the United States, Australia and UK, Halcyon also has a network of partners and distributors supporting territories world-wide. For further information, please visit www.halcyonsoftware.com