There are a number of production job scheduling products available in the market today. Many of these vendors have a background in scheduling, often times originating in mainframe scheduling.

Today some of the leading job scheduling vendors are:

• Argent Software

• BMC Software

• CA

• UC4

The most critical features for a production job scheduling product are the following:

1 – Security

Without security, all bets are off – if the product lacks complete security and authentication, then holes exist in the product.

Bottom line: unauthorized people – both employees and/or outsiders — can access and even change the critical production job scheduling data. From an IT perspective, this is what Sarbanes-Oxley is all about.

2 – Stability

Job scheduling is the most important product any company or government department purchases, because the job scheduling product runs the company or government department.

No scheduler = no company or no government department.

Proof of this can be found discussing the support load with the VP of Technical Services at any leading scheduling vendor – they all tell the same story: when scheduling Customers call with issues, the Customers are sometimes weeping…

Thus stability is second only to security in importance.

3 – Scalability

Closely related to stability is the ability of the job scheduling product to scale. While this sounds relatively simple, it turns out to be relatively difficult.

Often a scheduling product with a superb GUI that looks wonderful and that performed well in the vendor’s demo fails abysmally when put into production. Or worse…the job scheduling product does perform well, at least initially. Then after six months or a year, just when confidence in the job scheduler is finally growing, performance slowly degrades to become glacial.