Disciple Data Improves ASP Business with JAMS

COMPANY BACKGROUND

Disciple Data, Inc. (DDI) is a software development company that acts as an ASP to faith-based nonprofit organizations. Disciple Data’s solution can best be described as an ERP system for its clients. DDI has primary and secondary data centers where the company hosts its application.

THE CHALLENGES

DDI uses batch processing to automate tasks that are done on a scheduled basis as well as provide a mechanism to running jobs on demand. In the past, DDI relied on Windows Task Scheduler, Cron, and manual intervention to run all of its internal processes. One of the biggest issues the company faced was not having a single, centralized view of all of the jobs running across the enterprise. Due to SLA’s with clients, DDI also needed a way to create a central repository of all of the history information for the various processes.

THE SOLUTIONS

“JAMS was the only product I was able to find that met our specific requirements,” stated David Rochford, CTO at DDI. “I spent months looking for a solution that was similar to a product that I used years ago on an HP3000 midrange system. JAMS fit the bill.”

“We selected JAMS primarily for its security model that separates who can run a job from who the job runs as. Everything else was icing on the cake. The setups are very powerful. SSH support has been very helpful and has allowed us to automate certain functions on our SAN.”

Due to DDI’s experience with batch processing systems and the intuitive nature of the software, implementing JAMS was fairly straightforward. Within weeks of purchase, DDI had many of their critical processes running in JAMS. Mr. Rochford states that “JAMS gives Windows systems the batch processing capabilities needed to automate and manage batch processing effectively.”

“The only bump we saw was that documentation was not as complete as I would normally like and we often had to call with questions about features that I felt should have been fully documented.” Mr. Rochford went on to note that the documentation has improved significantly since DDI evaluated the solution in 2008.

THE BENEFITS

With JAMS in place, DDI is able to delegate routine functions to its help desk and to the technical support staff of their clients. The clients are able to run jobs that DDI create, allowing clients to do things that would normally require administrative rights. “We have a job which allows our help desk staff to reset selected Active Directory passwords on demand. The job automatically notifies the affected user, their manager, the help desk, and records the event in a public folder. These jobs can be tracked within JAMS so we can see how often they are used.”

“My staff’s time is freed up by JAMS and it allows us to spend our time working on projects rather than administrative and routine work. JAMS has been great to work with and is the type of vendor I look for in new products. They listen to feedback on the product and implement new features that make sense. They have done a good job supporting DDI when we’ve had questions and issues.”