BMC’s Workload Automation team
continues to deliver innovative solutions that create customer value, such as
Control-M Application Integrator with the added benefit of the Application Hub
community exchange. Everyone understands the problem as the world of digital
business continues to grow; the number of critical business applications is
exploding. Nearly all touch the customer whether internal or external.
To be successful, the customer/consume must be provided an exceptional
experience, which translates to the need to monitor and manage to optimize that experience.
App developers understand this
with the result that many are now pro-actively including some level of
management functionality, such as scheduling, optimization, etc. in their programs. Compared to the
days when management was a long-delayed, often minimally considered
after-thought, this is progress. Unfortunately, there is a downside.
In his Meditation XVII, John
Donne said that ‘no man is an island, entire by itself.” The point being that
every person’s life is part of a larger whole, interacting with and dependent
upon others. That is also true for today’s applications; they are rarely
complete unto themselves. The provider
of each app will include functions, make assumptions and operate in ways unique
to the ingenuity of its creator. When the app is introduced into your data
center, operations will want to include it as part of a workload automation
solution. They will also want to use the management tools unique to the app.
Unfortunately, even once IT has
learned how to use the tool, the result can be mayhem as it is unlikely that
the app’s creator had your unique environment in mind when creating his
scheduler. Therefore, the ugly work of integration on an application by
application basis must be undertaken. (Hence the last part of the quote “never
send to ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”) In short, there is a
lot of work ahead to get the most from the app.
BMC’s Control-M Application Integrator
is a web-based design tool to address that integration problem for data centers
running Control-M. BMC has developed native integration for about 40
widely used applications, e.g. SAP, ERPs, retail apps, etc. See the details here. BMC has not neglected any of the other apps running and
being developed. The tool is self-service, so that with relatively few steps
e.g. identifying the interfaces available with the new app and
how to access them. Then, Control-M can learn how to control and manage the
app. Of course, you will still have to specify the workload process. The integration self-service tool is available
for all Control-M V8 FP7 (Fix Pak 7) users with no additional charge.
BMC went a step further,
recognizing there exists a near infinite number of applications that benefit from native integration. While BMC will continue to develop for larger apps, they
realize the demand far exceeds what they can deliver. Therefore, they set up an
open community for users, the “Application Hub”. It is open to any one that is
part of the BMC community, employees, customers, partners, VARs, etc. The
members can develop and share their code through this network. Those with early
access to the site have been very enthusiastic.
So, BMC has announced the
Application Integrator which is easy-to-use, automatically deploys and is highly integrated with Control-M. They have
set up the Application Hub to allow “crowd sourcing” of control module development
to rapidly increase number of applications supported. This sounds like a
win all around. Congratulations to BMC, we predict that the customers using the Control-M Application Integrator and Application Hub won’t have to worry about “for whom the bell tolls”!
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