Tidal Challenges Dominant Job Schedulers

Tidal Software on April 23 will step up its challenge to the dominant players in the job-scheduling market when it launches the next major release of its Tidal Enterprise Scheduler. Tidal, historically a Windows-based, job-scheduling provider, brought its brand of automation for scheduling batch processing jobs to IBM z/OS mainframe environments, completing its quest to support a broad range of platforms.

Tidal Enterprise Scheduler 5.3 now automates the scheduling of jobs across Windows, UNIX, LINUX, z/OS as well as Web services, databases and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) applications from SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft.

Tidal's aim is to eliminate the requirement to use multiple schedulers across different platforms and deliver greater levels of automation to better optimize the use of application resources.Such cross-platform support allows Tidal to compete more effectively with dominant players such as IBM/Tivoli and CA.

"The New York Stock Exchange, which is migrating from the mainframe to distributed environments, replaced its existing CA 7 job scheduler and IBM's OPC scheduler with the Tidal Enterprise Scheduler," said Steve Hirsch, vice president of technology at NYSE Euronext in New York. "It's nice to be able to build dependencies across different processing tiers," he said.

Version 5.3's support of IBM z/OS mainframe environments brings a greater level of flexibility to the task, according to Rod Butters, senior vice president of marketing for the Palo Alto, Calif., firm.

"On the mainframe, it's important that you don't touch or change certain things. We can interact with and build dependencies on existing processes in the mainframe, such as handing off results of one job on a mainframe to a UNIX server for the next job. We can watch the mainframe job execute and at a particular step in the process generate an event back to the scheduler to kick off other types of jobs," he said.

Customers at Tufts Health Plan are consolidating the different job scheduling tools they used for different platforms onto the Tidal Enterprise Scheduler, according to Jerry Lovasco, manager of computer operations and the data center in Watertown, Mass.

"Having point solutions per platform that do the same function is costly and requires a lot more management and support," added Patrice DeVoe, director of infrastructure services at Tufts.

The market for job scheduling is growing between seven and nine percent annually, and between 60 and 70 percent of transactions today are still batch processing-based, according to Milind Govekar, research vice president at Gartner in London.

Govekar attributed the growth to the proliferation of packages applications that require job scheduling, the movement toward event-based scheduling away from time- or data-based scheduling and the use of job scheduling to link islands of automation across different applications.

The New York Stock Exchange uses the Tidal Enterprise Scheduler for that capability.

"We use Tidal to manage our data flow from the trading system to the back office and for data dissemination," said Hirsch. "We needed data to be controlled from a central point, and we want to easily switch between servers running processes," he added.

Version 5.3 also includes enhancements to the graphical user interface, improvements in the automation of scripting, simplified management of Windows recovery and integration of scheduling with application performance management. It is available now.

Copyright 2007 by Ziff Davis Media, Distributed by United Press International