ISSUE 001 / AUGUST 2026
FROM JAMS
THE QUIET HOURS
JAMS Software’s monthly newsletter.
Welcome to the first issue of The Quiet Hours.
The idea is simple. Once a month we’ll send you what changed at JAMS Scheduler, what we’ve been writing, and a few things from elsewhere that we thought were worth your time. No product pitch dressed up as a newsletter. If a month goes by and we have nothing useful to say, you won’t hear from us.
July was not one of those months.
BS
Bobby Schmidt
VP of Marketing, JAMS Software
On the calendar
How to Measure Your SQL Server, with Brent Ozar
Wednesday, August 19, 10:00 AM Central
Brent has spent twenty years telling people their SQL Server is slower than they think and then proving it. This session covers the three metrics actually worth tracking, how to pull them, and how to tell the difference between a server that is struggling and a server that is simply busy. Free, one hour, recording sent to everyone who registers.
01 / ANALYST NEWS
Named a Niche Player in the 2026 Magic Quadrant
JAMS Scheduler was named a Niche Player in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms, published August 5, 2026. Our take, and it is ours rather than Gartner’s: a Niche Player position is not just a recognition to us, it is a strategy. Vendors across this category try to be the automation platform for every industry, every region, and every deployment model at once. JAMS Scheduler gives IT teams centralized, intuitive orchestration, without the months-long rollout or the dedicated architect to keep it running. We feel our placement reflects a company that has stayed close to that mission instead of drifting away from it. The full report is available at no cost, including the quadrant graphic showing every evaluated vendor on Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision.
02 / WHAT SHIPPED
JAMS Scheduler 7.9.0
Two AI capabilities went generally available in July, and both ship at no additional cost as part of the new JAMS Web Client. JAX is an AI agent inside the new JAMS Web Client. It finds jobs, diagnoses failures in plain language, and answers how-to questions grounded in the JAMS Scheduler user guide. It acts only when you ask. Reads flow freely. Every write pauses for your explicit approval before it runs. JAMS MCP is a connector built on the open Model Context Protocol standard. It brings JAMS Scheduler into Cursor, VS Code with Copilot, Claude Code, Claude Desktop, and Codex, so you can ask JAMS Scheduler questions without leaving the tool you already have open. The part we think matters most is the control model. There is no elevated AI account. Both act as the signed-in user with that user’s exact permissions. You pick the model, including one running entirely inside your own network, and JAMS Scheduler never trains on your data. Also in 7.9.0: the IBM i Agent moved to 6.2.11 with TLS support between the Agent and JAMS Scheduler, and certificate and TLS verification logging got clearer. The Misconfigured Agent state now surfaces when an Agent and the JAMS Scheduler server do not share a common encryption type, which should save somebody a long afternoon.
03 / WHAT'S NEXT
JAMS Incident Management is in customer early access
Alerting, escalation, and on-call, as a standalone product. Voice, SMS, push, email, Microsoft Teams, and Slack. Policy-driven escalation, two-way sync with ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Azure Monitor, and flat tier pricing published on the page rather than quoted on a call. It does not require JAMS Scheduler. If you do run both, a failed job can open an incident on its own. Customer early access opened August 1. Public launch is September 1.
Worth reading
Most performance complaints are not performance problems, they are the absence of a baseline. A practical walkthrough of establishing one before the next escalation.
What teams actually said after a migration, including the parts that were harder than expected.
What else we’re reading
Firetiger’s postmortem on a March ingest failure. The technical root cause is interesting; the reason it took eight hours to notice is more interesting.
blog.firetiger.com
Scientific American on the proposal in front of international timekeepers this year: a negative leap second is now a real possibility before 2035, and no production system has ever handled one.
scientificamerican.com
Ten of the loudest failures in computing history, each broken down the same way: what broke, why, when, and what changed after.
semicolony.dev/postmortems
Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms, 5 August 2026, by Hassan Ennaciri, Daniel Betts, Chris Saunderson. Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.
Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
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