IT services had evolved independently at the various campuses and centers of the University of California System (UC System), and multiple tools were often in place to accomplish the same task. Starting with IT Production Control, the UC System wanted to consolidate job scheduling functions on a single solution to eliminate confusion and inefficiency, allow sharing of services across campuses and reduce costs.

The UC System implemented the BMC Control-M Workload Automation job scheduling software from BMC Software (NASDAQ: BMC) to accomplish these goals with a solution that met the needs of disparate internal clients.

“We had half a dozen or more identified scheduling packages. The biggest challenge for us was to get that into a single view so we could understand how the business was being impacted – how to optimize and make better decisions. Control-M was the tool of choice,” said Dax Johnson, lead technical architect at the University of California, Berkeley.

Johnson added, "It’s going to improve the stability of the production control environment and enable better service level attainment due to jobs completing quicker or within their service level time.”

The Challenge

The UC System needed to create a Center of Excellence for Production Control. To do that, it was necessary to consolidate on a single scheduling solution that would serve the needs of multiple campuses and centers, provide a single viewpoint of operations, and eliminate confusion resulting from using many tools to schedule batch processing jobs. Ease of use and minimal training requirements were also important considerations.

The Solution

After comparing the various tools in place, the UC System chose the BMC Control-M software. The solution was a substantially more mature product that was easy to use and provided a single-pane view into batch processing operations to increase efficiency while improving the stability of the production-control environment.

Benefits

After being selected, BMC continued to make on-site visits, conduct “health checks” and ensure that the solution was going to meet the university’s needs.

With BMC Control-M, the University of California has already experienced better service delivery and anticipates a number of ongoing benefits, including:

• Reduced costs by eliminating licensing and support agreement fees as well as extra staff training requirements for multiple products
• More efficient use of the production mainframe
• Higher service level agreement compliance levels
• Reduced risks to operations by eliminating the need for manual monitoring and intervention

For more information on the University of California’s implementation and BMC Control-M please:

• Watch the University of California video
• Access the BMC Control-M Community
• Visit the On the Mark blog
• Follow @BMCControlM on Twitter
• Become a fan of BMC on Facebook

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