It’s close to 11 p.m. on the last day of the quarter in a large corporation. IT gets an urgent request to postpone a closing of the books process because there’s a large order stuck in the CRM system.

This means that the order won’t hit the books and be recorded as a booking.  The customer won’t get her order, the salesperson won’t get paid, and finance will show a missing number.

This generates an urgent call to the team that manages the workload automation platform: Hold the closing workflow!  Stop the presses!

The admins have to get to their console to find the job and pause it.  Not a huge deal, except there are thousands of jobs to be run and hundreds of business people calling on a regular basis, at all kind of hours.

Some customers have created help desks for their workload automation teams or they may even off-shore the call center to serve these kinds of requests.

No more.  Introducing self-service for workload automation.

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Tags: data center, intelligent automation, job scheduling, orchestration, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler, unified management, workload automation

Last night we uploaded version 6.1 of Cisco’s Tidal Enterprise Scheduler. I’m pretty excited to introduce the new functionality of this tool and there’s a lot. Particularly with Hadoop support and Amazon EC and S3 support as well. If you are unfamiliar with TES, the datasheet is here.

But when talking about big data, I thought, I’d start small. Like iPhone small. Existing Scheduler customers and the curious, can download the free Apple iPhone app to control jobs. Here’s the AppStore description and link

Cisco Enterprise Scheduler is the premiere job scheduling and process automation software that provides a single point of control and monitoring for business operations. Enterprise Scheduler for iOS now allows Scheduler administrators and users to monitor and control their operations directly on their mobile devices. Enterprise Scheduler for iOS was designed for the mobile user experience, but retains core features of the Enterprise Scheduler web client that users are familiar with including:

* Monitor and view jobs, connections, events, schedules, queues, logs and alerts.
* Control all aspects of jobs, including holding, rerunning, canceling, and overriding jobs.
* Powerful search and filtering for all Scheduler objects.

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Tags: cisco enterprise scheduler, Hadoop, intelligent automation, iphone, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler, unified management, workload automation

In my last installment on Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler, I talked about how our customers have increased their usage of this end-to-end solution by 2-3x.

Based on the upswing of Big Data usage and adoption in the market, this trend is likely to continue for quite some time. And Cisco finds itself with the right solution at the right time.

I’m live here from Strata Conn/Hadoop World 2012 in New York City where “Strata Conference explores the changes brought to technology and business by big data, data science, and pervasive computing. This year, Strata has joined forces with Hadoop World to create the largest gathering of the Apache Hadoop community in the world.” It’s THE place to be for the Big Data and Hadoop geek out.

At this sold out event Cisco is introducing our new 6.1 release  of Cisco Tidal Enterprise Scheduler. This new release is packed with new features such as a very cool iPhone app, integration into Amazon EC2 and S3 and a self service portal (stay tuned for more blogs on this later). It also includes a new Hadoop adapter with API integration into Sqoop, Hive, HDFS Data Mover and MapReduce.

What’s that you say? Enterprise workload automation for Hadoop clusters? Why would I need that?

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Tags: Big Data, intelligent automation, workload automation

I was talking to a few analysts this week on workload automation and some interesting themes came up.   Workload Automation (aka Job Scheduling) starting with IBM mainframes and job control language.  Over the years the automated execution of business processes (moving batch data  in real-time schedules) became a major workload in the data center.   This was extended from mainframe to distributed computing with Unix and then Windows compute.  Along with this came all the Enterprise Resource Planning and Business Intelligence package applications that made SAP and Oracle famous.  Moving the data around was absolutely mission critical.  Huge demand on the data center resources drove the need to begin to control the resource states of the target compute engines to be ready for the high demands of processing millions of transactions or running critical reports for the Enterprise.

Now here is the rub…

The 40 to 60 year old set (of which I am member) know all about this “in the background” processing and its importance.  The challenge now, with all the new Web applications being created and a new batch of IT professionals is that this critical part of the IT ecosystem is being forgot about, downplayed and generally not paid attention too until there is a big outage and enterprise controls and automation are put in place.  There are so many places where workload automation can be applied to help automate key processes.  Many of our customers of this product line have increased the size of their operations 2-3x over the past 3 years.  All this cool new technology and new products being sold are putting increased demands on workload automation.   Learn more about this cost saving automation technology, your CIO will thank you for it.

Tags: data center, intelligent automation, Oracle, SAP, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler, workload automation

The Intelligent Automation Solutions Business Unit hosts user groups for our Workload Automation software customers.  Our Tidal Enterprise Scheduler  is used by many enterprises to manage the execution of business process and moving data around the data center.  We recently met many customers during our user groups in Chicago, Boston and New York City.  We see some very interesting differences in our user base  and how our customers use our product between these cities.  For example in our Chicago

user group during the winter we had some key large customer implementation and many customer s who were deploying job scheduling for department level deployments and wanting to drive the usage throughout their enterprise.  It is very common to start using Workload Automation in one key area and then expand into other areas as the success multiplies.  It was good to see old friends who have used our scheduler for almost a decade as well as new users learning how to use our software product to accomplish cool new technical use cases.

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Tags: analytics, application, enterprise job scheduling;, intelligent automation, job scheduling, Tidal Enterprise Scheduler, workload automation