All Systems Go: Integrating with Big Software

Posted on March 31, 2017

 

 


 

In this edition of “No Stress Job Scheduling with Jared Dahl and the Automate Squad,” we’re discussing integrating your job scheduler with big software. Modern organizations are complex, and it won’t suffice to have your systems and software working in isolation. Your data, your job scheduling tool, your ERP system—they all must work in concert with one another to make your organization as efficient as possible in meeting your customers’ needs as well as your own innovation and production goals.

But how does integrating your job scheduler with big software work in the real world? We’ll show you.

Connecting Your Big Software With a Job Scheduler

There are three main types of software that people will generally work to connect with their job scheduling tool.

The first are your CRM and ERP systems, what Jared considers to be the big, overarching software projects that manage a large portion of the work that your company is doing. This includes products like SAP and PeopleSoft. With regard to SAP, in particular, there are limited scheduling options for the CCMS, which is why companies benefit from integrating their SAP system with a more robust job scheduling tool. Because these applications play a major part in your finance, human resources, and manufacturing divisions, it’s important that they can “talk” with the rest of your enterprise.

Secondly, it’s beneficial for your job scheduling software to interface with your big data and ETL tools, like Hadoop and Informatica, which are working at a more technical level within your organization. There is a big need for connecting your ETL tools with your job scheduler; because these tools push data across your systems, a job scheduler ensures that the data can participate in the production job streams that require the data to produce necessary outputs. These outputs continue to drive the enterprise job schedule as dependencies within the job stream.

The third type of big software that can usefully integrate with your job scheduler is your workload automation tool. These tools automate business processes that are driven at the departmental level, but don’t necessarily garner the attention of the IT staff. Though they may not require specific coding, it is useful for your automated business processes to integrate with your job schedule because that makes for a far more efficient automated enterprise. A perfect example of this type of enterprise-wide automation is the integration of AutoMate—a business process automation tool—and Automate Schedule. The Enterprise Process Automation Suite bridges your business process automation and your job scheduling to give you a complete automation tool that automates from the server down to the end user’s desktop from a central console.

Methods for Building Integrations

It’s nice to know that big software should integrate with your job scheduler, but how does it actually work? Again, there are three primary methods by which your big software implementations can interface with your job scheduling software.

The command line is the most primitive method, which has been around since computers were born. Generally, the software product will have a few programs that are stand-alone, and you can directly call them from your job scheduler from the command line interface. Typically, it’s very easy for job scheduler to deal with this type of integration.

High level language APIs are a set of code written in languages like C #, Java, or C++. Language APIs allow a user to write their own custom code, which is used to call the software system form the job scheduler. A good example of this is SAP’s API, which is essentially a set of Java classes in which you can write your own custom code to control your SAP implementation.

Web services are another good way to build an interface between products. The nice thing about Web services is that they are completely language- and operating system-agnostic so that you don’t have those types of requirements interfering with building the interface. Web services are a set of APIs that you call using your standard Internet and Web protocols, like HTTP. You send a request out and a response comes back—it’s a very simple program for integrating your job scheduler with other applications across your enterprise.

How Tightly Integrated Are Your Products?

A direct interface between your products means that your enterprise job scheduler knows about the other product—say, Informatica—and can work directly with it through Web services. A job scheduler like Autonate Schedule can call Informatica’s Web services directly to complete a pre-requisite and, once it’s completed, the job stream will continue on to the next step.

A standards-based interface means that a product has a great Web services-type of interface and you can code directly to that in order for your products to connect. Finally, there’s a “code your own” approach, which means that you can write your own software to integrate between your job scheduler and your ERP system.

Automate Schedule's Application Integrations

Automate Schedule is a robust enterprise job scheduler that easily integrates with your business critical applications. Automate is platform- and application-agnostic, so it provides you with interfaces to SAP, Informatica, Oracle, MS SQL, Windows Task Scheduler, and more to help you build a flexible and interactive job scheduler that makes the most of all of your resources. Perhaps most importantly, Automate Schedule’s central monitoring capabilities give you a central console from which to monitor, manage, and create your enterprise job schedule, making it the glue that links all of your processes together.

Automate Schedule is an incredible tool that makes your applications work seamlessly across your enterprise. Don’t let your applications work in isolation—make them relevant to your whole organization by giving them enterprise capabilities that bring their contribution to the macro-level. Experience the benefits of Automate Schedule in a free trial to begin monitoring your dynamic job flows from a central console.   

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