Advanced Systems Concepts, a provider of workload automation and job scheduling software, announced a new series of upgrades to its business intelligence and data warehousing automation software. Service Pack 3 for ActiveBatch, now in Version 8.0, offers ActiveBatch support for a range of platforms, including IBM Cognos 8 BI, IBM InfoSphere DataStage, Teradata Integrated Data Warehouse and Data Appliances, and Oracle's PeopleSoft suite of business performance software. The new product support in Service Pack 3 adds to existing ActiveBatch support for BI and data warehousing solutions including Informatica PowerCenter, Netezza, SAP Business Objects and SAP Crystal Reports.
Service Pack 3 helps customers address the challenges they increasingly face around big data, Colin Beasty, product marketing manager at Advanced Systems Concepts, tells 5 Minute Briefing. "The complexity and format of data, the amount of data, and the number of disparate data sources is only increasing and as a result of that, we see customers of ours who are looking to automate their data warehousing and BI processes from A to Z," says Beasty.
With the release of ActiveBatch V8 SP3, users can automate the execution of mission-critical BI and data warehouse jobs across multiple disparate systems and applications from within the central ActiveBatch console. Previously, users had to rely on custom scripting to accomplish these tasks, the vendor says.
The new ActiveBatch Extension for Cognos BI adds scheduling capabilities for many IBM Cognos job steps including the creation and updating of IBM Cognos analytic cubes, execution of reports, and more. Cognos users will benefit through the use of ActiveBatch's core scheduling capabilities that include constraints, event triggers, monitoring, alerts, and audits, as well as the integration of Cognos with other data sources, applications and processes.
In addition, Service Pack 3 provides an ActiveBatch Extension for DataStage within its Jobs Library that automates and integrates DataStage resources and tasks within the larger data warehousing/BI environment. Tasks include listing, running and stopping DataStage ETL jobs.
ActiveBatch Extension for Teradata, also part of Service Pack 3, provides scheduling capabilities including constraints, event triggers, monitoring, alerts, audits and more for Teradata database, data warehousing, and analytics applications. With the extension, users can natively schedule Teradata tasks, and build workflows that integrate them with other data sources, applications and processes, all without the need for custom scripting.
The ActiveBatch Extension for PeopleSoft puts the execution of PeopleSoft jobs and processes in a single, cross-platform scheduling interface.
Without automation, building a workflow that automates the data warehousing/BI process from beginning to end "is a pretty long process that involves a lot of different steps" says Beasty. "It can be very time-consuming and it can be error-prone." With ActiveBatch and the job steps we provide, says Beasty, now organizations can automate the whole process and more importantly, they create an event automation trigger to automatically start the process so reports are kept up to date in real time, he says. "That is really the gist of what we are trying to get at with this."
ActiveBatch V8 SP3 is available for all ActiveBatch users participating in the company's ActiveBatch Version Upgrade program. ActiveBatch Extensions are separately licensed.
For more information about ActiveBatch V8 or the new Service Pack 3, go to www.advsyscon.com.