In The Trenches With: JAMS Software

June 8, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In a world where applications and workflows are spread across multiple on premises systems and across the clouds, keeping track of how those applications and workflows are performing, fixing them when they stall or fail, and making sure everything is monitored and governing properly is a big job. And probably one that you don’t want to take on with so many other things going on.

JAMS Software, which has been selling workload scheduling software for more than four decades, wants to help. JAMS was spun out of systems software conglomerate Forta a year ago last week, and has a keen interest in the IBM i platform and all of the other platforms you use. We sat down with Peter Hegland, chief executive officer at JAMS, to get the low-down on what is happening in workload automation in the midrange and in the market at large.

Peter Hegland: Well, first off, it’s very nice to meet you, Timothy. I’ve been a long time reader. I started out as an intern at Help/Systems back in 2016, and on day one or two, my boss told me I need to read IT Jungle routinely.

TPM: Thank you for reading. We appreciate the support, and we endeavor to be useful. We are the last of the independent news and technical publications in the AS/400 and IBM i market, which has been very good to me and the rest of the IT Jungle team for a very long time. It’s a wonderful thing to still be doing this.

Peter Hegland: The community is great, too. That’s the other cool thing: It’s a small community, but it’s a really loyal community. The IBM i platform is just so core and critical to everything that a lot of enterprises are doing. It’s a good place to do business and a good community to be involved in.

TPM: Let’s start this interview with a little background about yourself and JAMS Software.

Peter Hegland: I started my career at Help/Systems, which obviously became Fortra. I worked on the acquisition team there for more than a half dozen years, and then at the end of 2022, the company had obviously done a lot of mergers and acquisitions and that slowed down. I was looking for what else could I do in the organization, and an opportunity came up to run the automation business unit, which JAMS was part of.

If you look at Fortra today, they have the really large cybersecurity business, and that’s for sure the largest business unit. And then there’s the big Power Systems business. For the automation unit, JAMS had been bought to sit along Skybot, which was a development effort for anyone that was going to migrate off Robot. If anyone was going to ever leave Robot or the IBM i, they wanted to have a solution for them.

When I was part of the acquisition team, Help/Systems actually bought JAMS to further augment Skybot and just have a bigger, non-IBM i scheduling base. But this business unit ended up being really small in comparison. Forta ended up with this really large cyber security business and a really large Power Systems business, and then had this nice little scheduling business, which was still adjacent to the Robot team, but just like not very big even though it was growing nicely. It’s good customer base. In any event, the decision was made that we should spin this out, which happened a year ago last week, in fact. JAMS was sold to Providence Strategic Growth, a private equity firm Based in Boston that focuses on growth stage B2B software companies, which also picked up Skybot as part of the deal. MVP Systems Software, the company that created the JAMS enterprise job scheduler, was founded way back in 1985 before the AS/400 was even launched, and was founder owned and operated until Help/Systems acquired JAMS in 2018.

TPM: Now let’s get some feeds and speeds on JAMS. How big is the company? How big is the base? How fast are you growing?

Peter Hegland: So we are growing high teens to low twenties. We have got about 1,000 customers and we are at about $25 million in annualized run rate. We have about 70 people in various development, support, sales, and marketing roles.

TPM: I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to ask simple financial questions about a company and get the answers. No fuss, no muss. Thank you.

Doing the math, that is absolutely respectable growth for B2B software in established markets, and the software sales per employee is also very good. It’s about $360,000 per employee, which puts you in the same range as the best in class public B2B software companies.

Let’s go in a different direction. If I had an observation, it would be that a lot of the AS/400 and now IBM i shops are big on DIY. Somewhere north of 65 percent of IBM i shops are maintaining their own applications, perhaps with a mix of some third party applications and perhaps not. The programmers have job security because of this, and the system administrators, if they are not also the programmers, have their own kind of job security because they have scripted the heck out of everything and they are the only ones who understand how jobs on the system are connected to each other.

But things keep getting more complex, and even with a single IBM i system, you have a zillion things going on inside of it. So, I would think that now is a good time for IBM i shops to realize they should be focusing on modernization, not just for Web front ends and databases but now for AI, and not on the administration and debugging of complex jobs running across the system.

Peter Hegland: I absolutely agree with that. But here is the other big driver: Compliance and auditability. Ultimately, at the end of the day, if you are in a regulated industry, someone comes in to do an audit. And then you have to be able to prove who accessed what, when did they do it, when did they change it, etc. Those things aren’t needed all the time to actually run the business day to day, but it is needed to show that you are secure and to be able to pass an audit, to prove you have governance.

TPM: Do customers come to you for governance and compliance and then realize, hey, this JAMS scheduler thing is actually more broadly useful?

Peter Hegland: Honestly, it varies by size of organization. If the company is really large, there will typically be someone that’s technical that comes and says, “Hey, we have to fulfill a compliance requirement.” And we ask them, “Which one?” And they say, “We don’t know. We just know that audit is asking us to do this right.”

More often than not, though, customers have a technical pain that they are dealing with, such as silent failures. Jobs fail and no one knows it has happened and they don’t know why. There was no alerting, and there was no monitoring, and there was no management of it. That is probably the number one thing that drives our business. Someone that has custom applications and custom job scheduling, orchestrating their my own thing using their own code.

As an aside: We do really well with hedge funds. They have custom built systems software and applications, and this is hosted on premises for low latency. These applications will never move to the cloud.

Our IBM i business is growing, but the bread and butter of JAMS is Microsoft-centric environments. That said, we got a lot of referrals from the Power Systems business when we were inside of Fortra because there were a lot of people who had a small footprint in the IBM i but did not want their job scheduler to be native on the IBM i. This is a niche we can serve really well. We are not trying to compete against Robot on the IBM i, which is the pre-eminent job scheduler. But if you have footprint on the IBM i, you probably also have Windows and Linux machines, you have got a couple different ERP systems, some applications on-prem and some in the cloud. You might even have mainframes. In this case, JAMS is a really, really good fit for you.

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