CASE STUDY
Wilson HTM Investment Group Partners with JAMS
Under Wilson HTM Investment Group's old method, there were no dependencies in place between jobs, which increased the business risk of jobs potentially running out of sequence (or not at all). If this occurred, then the result was a significant effort the following day to remedy the situation.
Product
JAMS Scheduler
Financial Services
APAC>Australia
Windows
SQL
About the Company
Wilson HTM Investment Group (www.wilsonhtm.com.au) is a diversified financial services organisation with a range of expertise in Investment Management, Capital Markets and Private Wealth Management Services. Wilson HTM is a publicly listed company on the Australian Stock Exchange, has over 110 years of investment experience, and employs 300 plus people across Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne and regional centres.
The Challenges
Wilson HTM had a number of critical batch jobs that ran nightly. These critical batch jobs were initially scheduled by a number of different products – Windows Task Scheduler, SQL Server Agent and SQL Server Reporting Services. As the number of jobs increased it became obvious the organization required a true enterprise job scheduling solution for the submission, control, monitoring and notification or these critical overnight batch jobs. Under the current method there were no dependencies in place between jobs, which increased the business risk of jobs potentially running out of sequence (or not at all). If this was to occur then the result was a significant effort the following day to remedy the situation. Alerting was also sporadic and poorly targeted and on occasions overnight jobs would fail. The IT Team would discover if jobs failed from internal customers who were expecting job outputs. The cost and inconvenience to both the business and IT in lost productivity was significant and there was a flow on reputation cost to IT amongst the business.
The Solution
Having elected to move away from Windows Task Scheduler, SQL Server Agent and SQL Server Reporting Services, Wilson HTM started compiling a list of enterprise class job schedulers on the market. Once a list had been compiled they were analysed against key criteria to reveal the following results:
PRODUCT
COMPANY
COMMENTS
Control M
BMC
Discarded on the basis of cost
PRODUCT
COMPANY
COMMENTS
Tivoli
IBM
Discarded on the basis of cost
Enterprise Schedule
ISE
Discarded on the basis of cost - was also provided with a reference site who owned ISE but upgrade to JAMS.
Event Manager
SQL Sentry
Discarded as it doesn't handle windows cmd files - it merely reschedules Windows Task Scheduler and SQL Agent jobs.
Visual Cron
Visual Cron
Shortlisted
JAMS
Fortra
Shortlisted
Further analysis was undertaken, to produce the below results:
KEY CRITERIA
VISUAL CRON
JAMS
Submit Windows CMD
Yes
Yes
Cross Server Dependencies
No
Yes
Run on MS Cluster
No
Yes
Alerting
Email, User (Popup), Event Log, Sys Log, Sound and Job
Email, User and Job
Support
Internet Forum (poor)
24x7 (excellent)
Cross Platform
Yes
Yes
Notification
Success, Failure, Timeout (stops job), Non Zero exit
Success, Failure, Stalled, Runs too long, Runs too quick
Scheduling
Event triggered, Time triggered
Event Triggered, Time triggered, uses natural language (eg 3rd workday of period)
PowerShell
via CMD file
Natively
Links into Active Directory
No
Yes
Reporting
No
Report Server
Wilson HTM indicated there were workarounds for the cross server dependency issue but revealed they were cumbersome. However, there was no work around for its inability to run on a cluster. Pricing for Visual Cron was reportedly a lot more cost effective than JAMS (at a couple of thousand for a site license) as opposed to the thousands of dollars price tag for JAMS. Support was of concern to Wilson HTM also as the batch jobs running nightly were critical to the business.
The Benefits
It was stated by Wilson HTM that “JAMS satisfied all the criteria and then some”. Ian Robert, Senior Technical Consultant said “The support with JAMS was brilliant, and during the course of the evaluation over 70 emails were exchanged, numerous phone calls and one web-ex demonstration. No email went more than 12 hours without response (including overnight). Most were responded to within two hours. A number of issues were identified during the course of the evaluation which the support staff had resolutions to the next day”.
