ASCI Adds i OS Support to Job Scheduler

Published: June 23, 2009

by Alex Woodie

Advanced Systems Concepts (ASCI) last week announced that it has added support for four operating systems with its cross-platform job scheduling software, called ActiveBatch Job Scheduling and Workload Automation, including IBM i, Hewlett-Packard's NonStop Kernel, SuSE Linux, and SCO Group's SCO Unix operating environments.

Advanced Systems Concepts is a software development company based in Morristown, New Jersey. It's not to be confused with the Chicago, Illinois-based Advanced Systems Concepts that Help/Systems bought in October 2006. The company says its customers have installed its products 200,000 times in 36 countries around the world, including about 1,300 installations for ActiveBatch.

ASCI describes ActiveBatch as a "cross-platform framework" that enables users to organize and manage various jobs and tasks that reside at the server, application, and database levels, with the goal of improving service levels, eliminating latency, and reducing errors. The product's graphical job editor can be used to create "end to end workflows" that rely on a series of event triggers, such as e-mail event triggers, MSMQ event triggers, file event triggers, WMI event triggers, resource level event triggers, or system startup event triggers. Users can also set up time-based schedules that run according to calendar or fiscal years.

With last week's announcement, ActiveBatch customers can now include applications and jobs residing on IBM i5/OS V5Rx and IBM i 6.1, HP NonStop, SuSE Linux Enterprise, and SCO Unix platforms with ActiveBatch workflows. Customers targeting these platforms must be using the latest release of the product, ActiveBatch version 7, which was launched in February and brought new features such as support for MSMQ, Web services integration, and new graphical job-creation capabilities.

Jim Manias, ASCI's vice president of marketing and sales, says the support for the additional platforms "gives enterprises operating large, diverse computing environments the additional system support they need. Our goal with this extension, as with all enhancements to ActiveBatch, is to continually meet the real-world requirements of our full range of customers."

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