An Inconvenient Truth ...: About Enterprise Job Scheduling

Since the 1970s, job scheduling solutions have been adapting to the ever-changing landscape of information technology. Initially, job schedulers were monolithic programs residing on mainframe systems, providing end-to-end scheduling for mainframe environments. With the rise of distributed systems in the 1990s, new job schedulers were created to address automation challenges on these platforms. ERP environments, with their own built-in schedulers, increased the level of scheduling complexity, and integrations were required to bridge these systems. Mainframe products were quick to adapt by simply adding a network communications layer and agent architecture. One could control the enterprise - from the mainframe. In turn, distributed systems products also adapted, with the creation of z/OS agents. People could now control the enterprise - from a UNIX or Windows server.