Johannesburg, 03 Nov 2014
SPI, the African distributor for utility software products and services to the open systems segment of the IT industry and the sole sub-Saharan Africa distributor for Help/Systems, today announced that Bayer Italy has simplified its IT management with Skybot Scheduler.
"Our IT group ensures optimal management of IT services to our end-users," commented the IT System Architect at Bayer Italy. "Our work is measured in terms of quality, business value and efficiency. That's a big challenge for any IT group, but especially for our 70-person IT team that services 2 500 employees who work across four locations in the country and contributes over EUR1bn to one of the most recognised brands in the world.
"The IT group is organised to focus on two areas ? demand and supply. The demand area is tasked with maintaining customer satisfaction by defining needs, creating development plans and investment strategies, and implementing technologies. The supply area ensures business continuity by maintaining the infrastructure and applications."
At the centre of both demand and supply issues are 120 Windows production servers that run Bayer Italy's data warehousing, business objects, and CRM system, along with local applications that access Microsoft SQL and Oracle database platforms. Efficiently managing those servers and operations along with thousands of end users is only possible through automated job scheduling.
"We were managing about 4 000 jobs with a task scheduler that only worked on UNIX and although it had the features we needed, it wasn't very user friendly. As a reorganisation had moved us to a SQL platform running on Windows, we now required some cross-platform job scheduling software.
"Using Skybot's checking and monitoring capabilities, we've increased the level of control we now have over job flow and scheduling and saved ourselves a lot of maintenance time," continued Bayer Italy's IT System Architect. "It was a 'pleasant surprise' that Skybot Scheduler offered all the features we needed and featured a modern, user-friendly interface, in that it is very intuitive and dynamic changes are easy to make."
"Easily automating critical, yet time-consuming tasks is always a benefit for busy IT departments, but even our end users have noticed service improvements. We can now see any bottlenecks at a glance from the Schedule Activity Monitor and quickly hold, run, or release a job as needed.
"Moving to Skybot Scheduler required little effort and minimal technical support and gave the IT team an opportunity to reorganise tasks and adjust flow scheduling to increase efficiency," concluded Bayer Italy's IT System Architect. "While Skybot has become an essential tool at Bayer Italy, we know that its limits have hardly been stretched and thus we'll continue to use it to manage scheduling flows for all of our new servers and applications."
For further information, please contact Chris Anderson at tel. +27 11 234 1560; fax +27 11 234 1387; e-mail chris@spi.co.za
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