– Colin Beasty of Advanced Systems Concepts, says:
With IT organizations now finding it necessary to adopt an “architectural” approach to IT automation by unifying multiple scheduling solutions, Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. (ASCI) addressed the need to consolidate “point” scheduling solutions within Microsoft environments at this year’s Microsoft Management Summit with the latest release of ActiveBatch workload automation and job scheduling. Version 9 Service Pack 2 features new two-way integration for Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012 and major improvements to existing Microsoft Dynamics AX integration, enabling IT organizations to augment the runbook automation capabilities of Orchestrator with the business process and workload automation capabilities of ActiveBatch. By providing IT organizations a single automation solution for both business and IT operational processes, the release is meant to increase IT productivity by eliminating the need to manage disparate automation tools.
ActiveBatch is the first workload automation product to offer integration with Microsoft System Center Orchestrator 2012, providing a two-way extension with job steps that schedule and run Orchestrator jobs from within ActiveBatch in addition to ActiveBatch jobs to be directly accessed and triggered within Orchestrator. SP2 also upgraded ActiveBatch’s existing Dynamics AX Extension, which was released back in October, featuring numerous improvements and refinements for users to better schedule, automate and integrate Dynamics AX processes throughout the enterprise.
No longer can businesses rely on traditional “elemental” approaches to IT automation with well-defined tasks set according to static schedules, solving “point” problems with platform-specific, “point” scheduling solutions. This way of thinking is outdated – in the fluid 24/7 world where business demands are real-time and where IT resources are a mix of both physical and virtual, a single automation solution is needed to manage it all. Workload automation solutions, like ActiveBatch, can automate common IT tasks across a broad range of technologies and process types without the need for scripting and from a single interface. SP2 further caters to this new way of thinking, making the product ideal for IT organizations operating in diverse, Microsoft led-environments to utilize a single automation solution for all of its processes.
