Managing an IT environment means managing tasks. Today’s operating systems provide rudimentary scheduling systems – at best. The Windows “Scheduled Tasks” interface is quite limited, providing almost nothing in the realm of alerting on failed jobs, and even less when trying to automate hundreds or thousands of jobs per day. And the UNIX/Linux chron scheduler is not much better.

Moreover, in today’s increasing regulated environment, auditing and the ability to satisfy auditors’ increasingly vocal demands becomes paramount.

Enterprises need to automate their jobs… So what is a job?

A job could be any of the following…

• Financial transfers (moving around money!)

• Payroll check printing

• Accounts receivable

• Crystal Reports

• SQL Reporting Services

• DTS Packages

• Server maintenance tasks

• FTP file transfers

• …and many others

Additionally, enterprises need to run these jobs in often complex scenarios involving alerts, macros, notifications, and a specific order in which jobs are to be executed depending on the outcome of previous jobs.