Migration Success: Customised Automation with Fortra’s JAMS
In many businesses, there is often a deep seeded fear of change. Time and again, a business will dedicate resources just to support an inefficient system, thinking that the sunk cost justifies the effort. The funny part is that even the people who are hired to support a broken process will recognise that the system is not optimized and needs a total overhaul. Yet they continue to support it because it has been the status quo for years and is part of their role. The real truth is, in business, anything not optimised, is broken. And not optimising is not a sustainable business model.
Fear of disruption
One of the most salient examples of inefficient processes is seen with companies using legacy workload automation solutions. Technology is constantly evolving. Companies have to adapt to stay competitive. Enterprise applications have to adapt also. Where schedulers are concerned, that is not always the case. What might have worked really well initially can very quickly become not fit for the intended purpose.
Customer requirements have evolved beyond the capabilities of the scheduler. The team has changed. The technology stack has changed. There are many reasons why a legacy workload automation solution cannot keep up with what is required in a modern business environment. Despite this, the business leaders, the stakeholders, the decision-makers, all face high barriers when considering moving to a new scheduler system. Far too often we come across organisations that have tolerated poor performance for fear that switching to a new solution is an arduous task.
Don’t let fear get in the way of growing your business. Lack of visibility into what is going on with your IT tasks and processes, lack of control over the processes that you’re managing, and lack of enterprise capabilities—like dependencies, triggers and alerting—are all problems that are solved with Fortra’s JAMS, a job scheduling and workload automation solution. While some of this functionality may exist partially with other systems and solutions, it may not work as well as it does in JAMS. Those who have chosen to make the switch can attest that the benefits far outweigh the struggles.
Below we’ll take you through three examples of customers who have recently made the switch to Fortra’s JAMS.
Flexible, customisable scheduling
One customer in Germany who operates in the financial services space came to JAMS after years of working with a competing product. The other product just couldn’t support the over 4,000 individual job definitions that were executed more than 40,000 times per day. The software was having technical problems, and they weren’t getting an adequate response from the support provided by the vendor.
The JAMS migration services team worked effectively with all the stakeholders to fully understand the customer requirements, their deliverables, and timeframes. They were able to break down the tasks into manageable components. They implemented a strategy to help the customer make the shift with zero downtime in their mission-critical daily processing. The customer loved how JAMS supports multiple non-production environments and commented that the ease with which JAMS jobs can be moved through the software development lifecycle was one of the factors that helped them make the move.
This functionality allowed them to better integrate their job creation and scheduling into their DevOps pipeline. Another compelling benefit for this customer was how JAMS is able to work with PowerShell. They were no longer limited to working with a vendor’s proprietary code, and could leverage the existing knowledge base of their in-house coders and developers. s proprietary code, and could leverage the existing knowledge base of their in-house coders and developers.
Tailored automation and integration
Another success story is from a large insurance company that was seeking to migrate from another industry competitor. They were having difficulties with certain job types, mainly a ServiceNow integration pack that was not working as advertised, and they had to fall back on using scripts to manage their ServiceNow jobs. Writing, testing, debugging and maintaining scripts can consume a lot of time. Making small changes can result in unexpected behaviour, which can lead to downtime.
They made the decision to move to JAMS after running a short “Proof of Value” trial. The flexibility of the custom execution methods offered by JAMS was a huge factor for them. This functionality allows users to create their own integrations with any system that supports an API or CMD Line connection. This is powerful functionality for any JAMS customer.
Visibility into processes
This success story comes from a customer who operates in the banking space. They were using a competitor’s product for over a decade, but ultimately found that it lacked basic modern IT architecture principals, like support for installation in the cloud. They were going through a significant transformation, moving all of their on-premise systems into the cloud. Not having cloud capabilities for the scheduler seriously impacted this business-transforming project.
Being able to install JAMS on any public or private cloud provider was an immediate advantage. Another significant benefit, according to their IT manager, was the ability to build complex, multi-step processes with dependencies and logic-based decision-making. The bank has dozens of complex, overnight processes that have hundreds of steps. With JAMS, they were able to leverage the enterprise feature set to build in much more granular control over the nightly batch. They could also visualise this complexity using the unique relational job diagram view in JAMS. This allows customers to see all the upstream and downstream relationships between dependent jobs. In a complex IT landscape, having this degree of visibility into your processing is key to ensuring your batch is set up correctly.
Why Make the Switch to Fortra’s JAMS?
Organisations that are looking for a modern and reliable scheduler will benefit greatly from JAMS. Our comprehensive enterprise feature set, ease of use, and exceptional support make JAMS a top-rated solution in the industry. Don’t believe us? See what our customers have to say on G2, TrustRadius, and PeerSpot.
You are not the first, and you definitely won’t be the last customer wanting to migrate to JAMS. The JAMS team has successfully migrated hundreds of customers off various legacy scheduling systems. Our team is experienced in migrating customers from Control-M, ActiveBatch, Redwood, Tidal, and Broadcom’s Automic, Autosys, and UC4. We use a wide range of conversion utilities to help automate all or part of the process. These are supported by proven, product-specific methodologies that can be adopted to each customer’s unique environment.
Isn’t it time to graduate to the most efficient and versatile enterprise scheduling system available? Customers that have already made the move have not looked back. JAMS is the answer you’ve been looking for.