IT Workload Automation

Drag-and-Drop Integration

Organizations striving to gain, and maintain, a competitive advantage must leverage legacy applications by integrating them with other existing systems, as well as other emerging technologies, such as:

• Application hosting environments, such as Web services, .NET, and J2EE
• Enterprise business applications from SAP, Oracle, and Peoplesoft
• Message-aware technologies, such as MQSeries

Middleware solutions focus on real-time and near-real-time integration requirements. Each of which spawn, on average, ten batch integration requirements. Unlike ASG solutions, middleware solutions are not designed to handle these batch integration requirements, and traditional scheduling solutions do not offer the architectural flexibility and integration capabilities.

ASG solutions, on the other hand, bridge this important gap without writing code or scripts. This significantly reduces development and maintenance costs. The result is seamless, non-invasive IT workload automation and integration.

How do we do it? The ASG-Zena process whiteboard allows the mainframe, distributed, enterprise applications, and automation objects in newer technologies to be graphically defined and linked. The result is advanced IT process automation with drastically reduced complexity and cost.

Here is an illustrative example of how a company can improve its IT workload automation process by using ASG-Zena.

Using the old process, a packaging company, first, receives an order from a new client on their Web site. Then the company’s order entry application (SAP fulfillment) must submit the new order to the batch shipping application (XML based). There must also be communications with the order entry application to confirm shipment with the client on a batch basis. Without batch integration, a programmer using the old process would be required to tediously write code enabling communication from the order entry system to the shipping application and from the shipping application back to the order entry system. Additional code would also be required for sending a shipment notification to the client.

Improving this process with ASG-Zena, the application developer would simply point the SAP fulfillment application to the XML-based shipping application to enable batch application integration. The application developer would then point the shipping application to the order entry system to schedule similar application integration. ASG-Zena replaces the need for new code with a simple point-and-click operation.