From Legacy Job Scheduling to Modern IT Automation

Discovering the Leading Advantages

of a Modern IT Automation Solution

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Discovering the Leading Advantages of a Modern IT Automation Solution

The Challenge:
Legacy Schedulers Are Not Designed For Change
In a very short amount of time, computing resources have gone from very expensive and scarce
to highly available and affordable. But despite this exponential growth in computing resources,
IT staffing has not kept pace. The need for IT people continues to grow and finding experienced
IT people with the right skill set is harder than ever. The difference between the number of
computing resources and IT staffing has resulted in an IT Resources Gap.
As a result, now more than ever, IT organizations are looking to simplify their environments and
consolidate the number of technologies they have to manage with Job Scheduling and IT
Automation software.
While modern workload automation solutions are stepping up to the challenge, most
organizations still employ legacy schedulers for their automation needs. Legacy schedulers were
designed to use spare computing resources to execute batches and rely heavily on custom
scripting with limited date and time scheduling. Most of todays legacy schedulers require
common IT and business workflows to be hard-coded by senior-level developers, who are
already a scarce resource within the IT organization. Legacy schedulers erect barriers to the
modification of existing IT operational and business processes, thereby increasing operational
costs and lowering IT service levels to the business. Additionally, they lack the necessary
integrations, cross-platform functionality, and end-to-end workflow creation that IT
organizations need to quickly build and automate complex workflows in todays dynamic
business environments.

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Discovering the Leading Advantages of a Modern IT Automation Solution

So what happens is that instead of gaining more control and simplifying their IT environment,
legacy scheduling solutions are adding more complexity. As business requirements continue to
change rapidly, new technologies and applications are introduced, and processes need to be
updated - legacy schedulers are not designed to easily accommodate these changes.
Consequently, organizations end up spending increasing amounts of time and money creating
workarounds to fix problems that keep happening over and over again.

Common Issues with Legacy Job Schedulers

o

Exponential growth in licensing and support costs

Slow user interface

Lack of pre-built integrations and pre-tested logic

Problematic and time-consuming upgrades

Lack of triggers

No event automation

Difficult to use

No Change Management System

The Solution:
Modern IT Automation
The answer to the limitations of legacy job schedulers is modern IT Automation. The challenge,
however, is how to make the move from a legacy scheduler to a modern IT Automation
solution.
Most organizations with legacy schedulers experience problems for years, but are wary of the
risk, costs, and time commitment the migration to a new IT Automation solution would require.
But what most organizations dont realize is that modern IT Automation solutions offer several
ways for organizations to minimize the risk associated with migrating from one software to
another.
In addition to this, migrating to a new IT Automation solution can have a big impact on the
bottom line as organizations will save significantly on maintenance costs as well as gain more
functionality, resulting in a more efficient use of IT people resources as senior developers are
free to tackle bigger projects and initiatives.

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Migrating From Your Legacy Scheduler To A Modern IT Automation Solution

Agility, Risk, Costs:

Deciding Factors for Leaving Your Legacy Scheduler
In todays digitalized business environments where technology is driving the pace of business,
organizations cant afford to be held back by legacy schedulers. In our experience, organizations
have migrated from their legacy schedulers and homegrown solutions, for a number of reasons,
but in the end it comes down to three key factors:

Increase Agility
Users of legacy scheduling solutions spend hours writing custom scripts and creating
manual workarounds to processes that could otherwise be completely automated. Script
creators tend to be senior-level individuals who are pressed for time and faced with an
ever-increasing workload. In addition to this challenge, when individuals leave an
organization, the first-hand knowledge that went into developing that script is gone,
making it more difficult and time-consuming for other developers to pick up where the
last individual left off.
Migrating to a modern automation solution with pre-built integrations and proven logic
increases IT agility because developers no longer have to spend time researching,
designing, and coding the logic or trying to understand the logic that went into another
users scripts. A modern automation solution reduces the dependence on scripting,
providing users with a painters palette and canvas that makes workflow creation and
maintenance simpler, faster, and more reliable. Additionally, with modern automation
solutions like ActiveBatch, organizations can benefit from robust automation capabilities
like SLA monitoring, Audits, Resource Provisioning, Alerting, and more that a scriptbased approach doesnt offer.

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Discovering the Leading Advantages of a Modern IT Automation Solution

Mitigate Risk
As business requirements change and government regulations arise, organizations with
legacy schedulers expose themselves to more risk with scripts that become brittle over
time, resulting in broken workflows and processes. Oftentimes, people think migrating to
a new IT Automation solution creates more risk for the organization as functioning
workflows and scripts may need to be completely re-written in order to work in the new
environment. As a result, organizations often stay with their legacy scheduling solution
for years, incurring significantly higher operational costs despite encountering more
problems and resistance to change.
To overcome the initial risk of migration, most modern automation solutions provide
migration tools and professional services that allow organizations to migrate quickly and
pain-free with little risk to existing workflow logic or operational performance. Using
migration tools and services, organizations can reduce the time to ROI and ensure a
secure, reliable transition from their legacy scheduler to their new automation solution.

Reduce the Total Cost of Ownership

Expanding your legacy schedulers ability to adjust to changing business needs and IT
requirements is difficult, and even if it is possible, it is usually prohibitively expensive.
Licensing and support costs for legacy schedulers are extremely high, rising into the six
figures year after year.
While there is always some initial cost associated with a change, migrating from a legacy
scheduler to a modern automation solution significantly reduces licensing, maintenance,
support costs, and overall IT expenses, with organizations cutting expenses by more than
45% on average.

When these factors are considered, its clear that migrating to a modern IT
Automation solution offers a scalable investment that is designed to meet
changing business and IT needs.

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Discovering the Leading Advantages of a Modern IT Automation Solution

3 Strategies for a Successful Migration

Once the decision is made to move forward with a migration, there are multiple
methods of successfully migrating to a modern IT Automation solution like
ActiveBatch. Each one is attractive for different reasons, but ultimately, you have
to choose what will work best for the specific needs of your organization.

Automated Migration
One approach to migration is to use the new solutions automated migration
tool. Depending on the legacy scheduler you have in place, the migration
process may vary slightly. Typically however, the migration of the legacy
schedulers applications to the new solution will be carried out via a commandline program. This will output an .xml file that will then be imported into the new
automation solution.
For organizations who want to minimize the risk of losing critical
workflows/processes and the risk of manual errors, an automated migration
provides a secure, proven method of moving from your old scheduler to your
new automation software while keeping your existing data in-tact.
An automated migration also provides an extra layer of security as organizations
benefit from the in-house technical expertise provided by the solution provider
during the migration process. In-house technical expertise can cover a range of
services such as reviewing existing jobs and preparing for implementation,
building new workflows according to Best Practices, testing newly created
Objects, and providing final review and documentation. As a result, an
automated migration with technical services removes the time and expense of
having to build a migration strategy or program in-house, allowing
organizations to speed up the time to deployment and realize the ROI on their
new automation solution faster.

Key Benefits of
Automated Migrations

Mitigate the risk of losing critical data

and workflow knowledge
Faster time to deployment
Reduce costs of building an in-house
migration tool

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Faster time to ROI

Discovering the Leading Advantages of a Modern IT Automation Solution

Build a New Automation Strategy

On the other hand, if an organization is looking to completely reinvent its automation
strategy, the organization might want to start from scratch and not bring in any existing
data or workflows. At Advanced Systems Concepts, weve had several customers take this
approach after initially deciding on an automated migration. The customers started using
ActiveBatch and realized that instead of bringing over all of the old problematic and
cumbersome workflows and processes they had built, they could build a better, more
elegant automation strategy from the ground up; one that would make it easier to
accommodate changing business and technology requirements.
This start from scratch approach often works best for smaller IT organizations who do not
have as many existing workflows and processes, as well as for organizations who have the
time and people resources to commit to building out a new, holistic automation strategy.
Oftentimes, weve seen customers are reluctant to take this approach because of the
increased risk, but are very happy when they do so because they get the benefit of a clean
slate- building simple, powerful workflows and building extensive in-house knowledge from
the beginning. But this approach does have its drawbacks. Starting from scratch requires a
lot of time and people resources and given the nature of building everything new, it takes a
long time to roll out, thereby increasing the time to production.

Hybrid Approach
Finally, organizations who want to mitigate the risk of carrying objects over from their
existing scheduler but also want the flexibility to build a new automation strategy should
consider a hybrid approach. In this approach, an organization will first migrate their existing
processes over to the new solution using an automated migration tool. Once the automated
migration is complete, the organization will reconstruct other processes on a forward-basis
and rebuild existing processes or leverage the new solution providers Professional

Services

to facilitate these efforts.

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Discovering the Leading Advantages of a Modern IT Automation Solution

Insights from Automated Migration

One anonymous customer, an IT Director at a global financial services company based in the
United States, shared their organizations migration experience with us:
We had thousands of scheduled tasks in our Development, Production, and Test
environments. We wanted to take as much as we could from our existing scheduling
solution, but at the same time our goal was to improve on these existing processes and
build out a new strategy that took full advantage of the new capabilities we had to work
with. The automated migration was fantastic and got us up and running within just a few
months. The knowledge-transfer was seamless and having an ActiveBatch consultant on
hand was extremely helpful. Once we got into production, we were able to really start the
second phase of the migration and build out new workflows, replace existing ones, and
explore the new power and agility we had with scheduling. About six months in, we could
already see the amount of time we were saving in automating processes that used to
require manual workarounds.

Conclusion
As IT environments keep growing in complexity, organizations need modern IT Automation
software that can accommodate dynamically changing business and IT needs. Migrating to a
new automation solution is a daunting challenge for any organization. However, with the right
migration strategy, organizations can overcome the migration hurdle and ensure a low-risk
move to their new solution.

Get Your Legacy Scheduler

Migration Planning Kit

Ready to Learn About Your

Migration Options?

A step-by-step guide with everything you need

to plan your migration from a Legacy Scheduler
to a modern IT Automation solution.

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Discovering the Leading Advantages of a Modern IT Automation Solution

Why Automation?
According to research by Gartner1, most large organizations have more than three IT
Automation tools implemented in their environment. With the ever-expanding array of software
and technologies most businesses use today, managing these different automation tools just
adds to the complexity. Instead of moving forward faster with new and innovative technologies,
IT is held back by a disjointed automation framework that is brittle and unyielding to change.
What is needed is an automation solution that can provide a single point of control for
managing these disparate technologies and bridging the gaps between them.

ActiveBatch IT Automation
An Architectural Approach to Automation
Relying on scripting or platform-specific scheduling systems builds a fragmented elemental
approach that lacks governance and is neither scalable nor designed to accommodate change.
In order to remain competitive and manage multiple systems and technologies, a modern
architectural strategy is needed. ActiveBatch provides organizations with an architectural
approach to IT Automation that consolidates silos of automation within a single framework,
giving businesses the IT agility they need in todays technology-driven world.
ActiveBatch is redefining IT Automation with its innovative Integrated Jobs Library, which
provides hundreds of templated Job Steps for key technologies and applications like SAP,
Informatica, Microsoft System Center Suite, and more. The templated, drag-and-drop Job Steps
can be assembled into powerful workflows, including workflow logic, which shorten
implementation time and reduce the risk of scripting errors.
Modern automation solutions like ActiveBatch recognize most organizations have used legacy
schedulers in the past, which heavily rely on a script-based approach. ActiveBatch protects your
script investment with a script vault or content library that gives users one central location for
storing all existing and future scripts. Additionally, capabilities like lifecycle management and
revision history give users greater control and visibility by showing them who last edited the
script and when, while also providing an option to restore to previous versions.
1

Gartner, Market Guide for Workload Automation, Milind Govekar, Yurika Nagashima, 25 September 2014

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Migrating From Your Legacy Scheduler To A Modern IT Automation Solution

ActiveBatch is Redefining IT Automation

Take Your Organization . . .

From an Elemental Approach

To an Architectural Approach

From Multiple Scheduling Tools

To a Single Automation Solution

From Custom Scripting

To Production-Ready Job Steps

From a Legacy Job Scheduler

To a Solution Designed for Change