Forrester

Why Read This Report

Job scheduling is a necessary component of data centers. Without job scheduling, an enterprise could simply not execute long application processes that deal with massive amounts of data and are necessary to prepare for online and transactional processing. Over the past 10 years, we have seen job scheduling evolve into workload automation: Starting from a discipline that used spare computing time to execute batches, we now see an enterprisewide solution to execute asynchronous applications resulting from events or user actions. The increasing use of distributed systems and complex asynchronous applications has brought new constraints to the planning, execution, and monitoring of jobs with a stronger accent on automation. Eventually, we believe that workload automation and IT process automation will go hand in hand to increase IT's efficiency. To reach that stage, another evolution step is required to integrate workload automation with business service management (BSM).