Advanced Systems Concepts Inc. early next month will release a new version of its Active Batch distributed job scheduling tool that promises greater flexibility and ease of use.
Despite the predominance of real-time processing, company officials believe that batch processing in the distributed processing world is needed now more than ever, thanks to the need to squeeze the most out of IT investments, according to Jim Manias, vice president of marketing at the Parsippany, N.J., company.
“Many organizations are just realizing that things like supply chain need to be processed in batch mode. If you have compute cycles that you want to run in lights-out mode, then you need automated processing tools,” he said.
The Active Batch job scheduler, developed from scratch as a Windows-based tool, uses the full set of security mechanisms in Windows and an implementation of the Windows Management Interface to allow users to run jobs that restart failed services or execute security alerts. It also can schedule jobs on demand or by date and time.
Version 4.0 adds a graphical representation of jobs based on date and time, showing all job streams and dependencies in a single view. The graphical interface also allows users to modify, change, edit or update any job.
The new version also supports ODBC as well as Microsoft Corp.s .Net. In addition, Advanced Systems enhanced the tools reporting capability and increased its flexibility with the introduction of group job scheduling.
Active Batch is capable of scheduling jobs across multiple operating systems, including Windows NT, Unix and OpenVMS.
Active Batch, which comes in a Microsoft-only version and an enterprise version supporting multiple platforms, starts at $695 but can range up to $100,000 at the top end.