Financial Services Firm Achieves Efficient Workload Automation with JAMS

Yvette Carpenter is the technical operations manager for a financial services firm that spun off from another company in 2016. Before the transition, the company wasn’t using true enterprise scheduling solutions, and Carpenter was tasked with automating a great number of manual processes.

After evaluating potential automation partners, the company selected JAMS, a centralized workload automation and job scheduling software that runs, monitors, and manages jobs and workflows that support critical business processes. Carpenter’s review on PeerSpot (formerly called IT Central Station) details how she easily consolidates jobs into one enterprise scheduling solution.

MAIN USE CASE

Carpenter started with basic tasks because the company was bringing items over from Windows Task Scheduler. But over time, the IT department got much more detailed in its scheduling requirements. She explained, “We use what is currently called JAMS Setups (now called Sequence Jobs) quite a bit, especially for our enterprise data analytics team. We do some pretty complex scheduling scenarios.” JAMS also is used for holiday calendars that impact scheduling and for multiple regular scenarios, such as dependencies on a file or another job or another Setup.

NUMEROUS BENEFITS

Carpenter’s former employer used a homegrown solution that worked with SQL Server Agent jobs. Consolidating to one scheduling solution allows her to put dependencies on different jobs between different systems. It also lets her monitor everything from one place, while offering the ability to do exception handling.

“We have unlimited licensing with JAMS, and we have hundreds of environments that we have agents on and do testing on,” Carpenter said. “Having one location that we monitor everything from, and handle all the exceptions from, is critical.”

The transition to automated processes with JAMS freed up IT staff time. “We’re not spending 30 minutes doing something manually that JAMS can do in five minutes,” Carpenter noted. “It has freed up IT resources, but it has also sped up our processing times. For just the technical operations center team that I manage, it has saved about 20 hours a week.”

JAMS also helped eliminate “data slack” across her firm’s applications, allowing access to Teradata, Apache Hadoop, and Snowflake cloud solutions for data integration. “It has been very valuable having one place where we can process all of the data and do batch schedules with chunks of data,” Carpenter explained. “Having current data ready to go when our users need it is extremely critical.”

VALUABLE FEATURES

The most valuable feature of JAMS, Carpenter said, is the ease of updating parameters on the fly. She feels its monitoring and historical views are robust, and she enjoys going into a job inside a Setup and, using the Except clause, saying, “Turn this one off for a while.”

Another useful function is the ability to pass parameters and variables between different jobs and different steps in a job or a Setup.

STABILITY AND SCALABILITY

Since Carpenter started working on JAMS in 2016, she has never had the software crash. “For the most part, JAMS has been a very steady, reliable tool,” she remarked. Because the company has unlimited licensing, she said JAMS has been extremely scalable for her company. “We can put agents on whatever servers and environments that we need to fairly quickly and easily,” Carpenter said. “We now have that set up as an automated process. It’s extremely scalable, based on the pricing model and how many agents you’re allowed.”

LOW COSTS AND UNLIMITED LICENSING

Using a lower cost model has benefited Carpenter’s firm. In addition to the required functionality, she likes how maintenance and additional features are included in the yearly cost. Overall, it is less expensive than what one would pay for maintenance for another product, she noted.

Carpenter also raved about the licensing setup, declaring, “I don’t know of another solution where you can actually get true, unlimited licensing, (and) where you can have as many instances and as many agents as you want. That has been a godsend for us because we have environments that we spin up and take down on demand. There are times when we have hundreds of environments going at one time.”

STRONG SUPPORT AND COLLABORATION

Carpenter says JAMS’s support is responsive, sharing, “They get back to you quickly, and they usually have a good solution to whatever your issue is.” She also appreciates how JAMS has taken many of their recommendations, building them into their newer versions of the software. “It has been an exciting journey for us to be able to have a lot of input into how the product works,” Carpenter concluded.

To learn more about what PeerSpot reviewers think about JAMS, visit: https://www.peerspot.com/products/jams-reviews