Just closed a deal with a leading European investment bank that was using Appworx. No real technical issues with Appworx. Just frustrated by the fact that their maintenance fees increased every year and yet the level of support was diminishing. The client was turned onto JAMS by an outside consultant who had worked with JAMS at another engagement. Anyway, after hammering away at JAMS for about 3 months, they pulled the trigger and here is what they had to say:

“I just wanted to take a moment and say thanks to you and your team for all of the effort in assisting us with our migration to JAMS. We’re live with JAMS and things are performing well. Our application development team is also leveraging JAMS any chance they get to save themselves time and resources. We couldn’t be happier with our decision to move to JAMS.”

SNMP has been the backbone of network monitoring for  decades.   It provides lightning fast reactions to various events across the network.  JAMS now includes full SNMP support for seamless integration of job scheduling events with other network conditions.  
 
Administrators have been using SNMP consoles for years to monitor for network outages.  Now you can monitor for mission critical JAMS events in the same console as other SNMP events.  This is a powerful extension of JAMS notification ability.

Job Scheduling tools are often perceived to reduce operational costs and increase IT efficiencies. However, most of the scheduling tools used by IT organizations worldwide were introduced in the seventies, designed to deal with very simple computing challenges.
Today, a competitive business environment sets new challenges that require integration with web technologies, real-time processing, and support for new platforms and applications. Attempts by legacy scheduling vendors to meet today’s challenges are costing companies millions, and not delivering the desired results. Attend this webinar to find out how companies reduce their costs by switching to JAMS. Register to Attend

Like most vendors, we have tried it all when it comes to marketing. Two years ago, we were told by industry analysts to talk about Business Process Automation. Now, we are being told that Workload Automation is the key. However, when we talk to you (the people in the trenches), you are still concerned with automating various tasks and scripts that are running through home grown solutions, Windows Task Scheduler, SQL Server, and Cron. You have DTS packages, SSIS jobs, batch files, and a myriad of other jobs running across the network and you just want one centralized solution to manage it all. Well, here we are...

28 people turned out for our webinar on May 12th. Everyone is impressed with the Windows, SQL, and Cron converters we have built to automate the process of turning all of these processes into JAMS jobs so that they can leverage the full capabilities of an enterprise job scheduling tool. We even signed up one customer a week later after completing an Automate conversion utility to move them off a competitive solution.

Next webinar is scheduled for June 8th. Sign up here.

We still run into people who are knee deep in Windows, trying to automate various functions and applications, and yet still don’t leverage Windows PowerShell.

There are some great sites to check out when it comes to PowerShell. Here are a couple.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/powershell/

http://www.WindowsITPro.com/categories/Category/Scripting/DonJonesonPowerShell.aspx

We recently finished off a module for JAMS that allows JAMS to manage SAP jobs. Sound simple? Well, actually it was quite simple. After about 2 months of work, we had JAMS running SAP jobs and handling dependencies between SAP and non-SAP processes. We started shipping the new SAP component in May and quickly scored two deals as a result. However, we were now at a crossroads, do we spend the $15,000 on getting the official "Certified for SAP" stamp or do we just keep on going.

Give us your feedback on certifications (for products or people)? We still remember the days when it people were writing all sorts of acronyms after their names like MCSE, MCP, CNE…

Last year, one of the industry analyst firms released a document ranking various job scheduling vendors. No shock here that CA, BMC, and IBM received top marks. After all, these three vendors always seem to receive great marks in any analyst report you read. The real question is if you know that these three vendors are some of the biggest money spenders on the services provided by these same analyst firms?

By the way, you know the report I mention from 2009 that ranked job scheduling vendors? Well, one of the analysts who wrote it now works at CA. Hmm...

MillerCoors will be running JAMS across all of their breweries in order to streamline all batch processing across the enterprise.

A number of factors were involved in the selection of JAMS at MillerCoors. First, MillerCoors needed an enterprise scheduling system that supported both Windows and OpenVMS as primary scheduling platforms. JAMS' cross-platform, cross-application job scheduling fit the bill.

Second, MillerCoors was using a legacy solution from another vendor and there was concern about the amount of effort that would be required to move from the legacy platform to a modern solution. The good news for MillerCoors is that MVP offers batch scheduling conversion utilities for most other solutions. As a result, MillerCoors converted most of their jobs into JAMS in less than three weeks.

JAMS gives MillerCoors much more automation, control, and visibility over processes running throughout the breweries across North America. JAMS provides alerts if jobs fail anywhere in the workflow. As a result, JAMS can take proactive measures to keep processes flowing.

Twenty two new customers signed on to use JAMS in December 2009. Combined with the new customers that signed on in October and November, MVP had its best quarter ever in terms of new customers and total revenues.

As a testament to the scalability of JAMS, the customers came from various industries, and ranged in size from small regional school systems to Fortune 500 companies.