The next generation process automation tool

When it comes to reaching the full potential of your investment in enterprise information management and the business solutions that depend on it, agileDSS’ Martin Bérubé believes that a better process automation tool is the key.

Historically, depending on the size of your IT infrastructure, process automation has been dealt with in one of two ways: via an enterprise job scheduler, or by combining application specific job schedulers with scripts and in-house programs. However, in the last five years, the computer room environment has changed radically - from being  fairly homogenous to becoming a  heterogeneous environment that includes not only a diverse set of operating systems and databases infrastructures, but also includes connectivity to external cloud-based services. This modern day environment complicates how you manage and optimise your production cycles, and highlights the limitations of the current automation solutions as they are stretched to their limits and therefore cannot easily adapt to these new requirements. In addition, the pressure to leverage the investments and exploit newly generated data to produce timely information for line managers and executives at the start of every business day has sky rocketed.

Let's face it, the traditional approach to automating your processes to support your production cycles has become antiquated. Why? Because they do not deal well and interact well with modern day heterogeneous and disperse computing environments. Because they require in all cases a highly specialised IT individual with specific business application and database knowledge to be able to string all the processes together. Because they do not deal well with complex event dependencies that are required to create an optimal and rouged process workflow that can deliver an effective production environment.

The most recent Gartner reports on the subject predicts that today's enterprise job scheduler will evolve within the next two years into a more dynamic, connected and visual tool to better meet today's enterprise needs. But why wait? The next generation automation tool, 'The next big thing', is available today and is being marketed as a Business Process Automation (BPA) tool. These tools provide the shortest route to automation by exploiting an intuitive visual interface rather than relying on deep knowledge of business applications and databases to produce code and scripts.  They allow the seamless integration of heterogeneous processing environments via a set of predefined and configurable tasks that can be linked and orchestrated via events, while also providing control capabilities without programming, thus making it usable by any level of technical staff. Available since 2004, the BPA tool such as our flagship product agileWORKFLOW, offers a simpler intuitive interface and connectors to popular information management and business intelligence applications.  These tools can be used directly by non-specialised qualified staff to completely integrate, centralise and orchestrate all the processes that you rely on to run your business.

In addition to being able to optimise visually your process workflows and reducing operation risks by its centralize approach, our tool provides the ability to build into your process workflows contingencies and intelligence by allowing you the capability to deal with complex event dependencies and define custom events and tasks. Another key factor in building efficiency and ruggedness into your production cycles is the ability to connect and exploit native capabilities and functionalities of commonly used enterprise information management applications and business intelligence tools. Oh, and did I mention that all this is self-documenting and can be audited down to every task executed?

According to Gartner, the current economic climate continues to drive the need for lower operations costs in the computer room by reducing human error and streamlining automation tools for enterprises of all sizes.  agileWORKFLOW is ready to respond to this need both in its capabilities and its pricing model. At agileDSS, we are sensitive that purchasing and implementing a new tool can be expensive and time consuming. This is why we offer a free, complete and ready-to-use version of agileWORKFLOW. As I like to say, modern day IT Directors need to become the conductor of their own symphony of processes, and we are ready to enable them with the best orchestration tool for the job.

About

agileDSS CEO Martin Bérubé  is a 15-year veteran and expert in data warehousing architecture. Bérubé  excels and has a proven track record in assisting large and medium customers in implementing data warehousing and business intelligence solutions they can rely on to run their business. Bérubé  is also the architect behind agileWORKFLOW.