SMA Comes Out of the Blue with IT Automation Tools

By Alex Woodie

"We're the best company you never heard of," began Will Pulley, the director of customer relations for Software and Management Associates (SMA) at a press conference during the COMMON show earlier this month. Whether the Texas company makes the best IBM i job scheduler and message automation tools is debatable, but there's little question SMA has some work to do if it wants to appear on the radar screens of North American IBM i shops.

The appearance at COMMON was a good first start for SMA, which has roots in the IBM mainframe world, as well as NASA, which SMA did work for decades ago, according to Pulley. While most of SMA's 300+ customers (such as the IRS) are mainframe shops, about 40 of SMA's customers (including Carnival Cruise Lines) use its software to automate processes on IBM i servers, said George Loose, the company's technical product manager for IBM i.

Labeling SMA's flagship product a job scheduler does not do the product justice. While scheduling batch jobs across multiple platforms is its core responsibility, OpCon/X5 does a whole lot more, SMA officials say, including: monitoring message and spool file queues; initiating and executing file transfers; executing commands through replay scripting; monitoring resources and forecasting; and automated report scanning and data capture.

SMA's customers rely on OpCon to automate a range of tasks in their data centers. For example, First National Bank of Edinburg, Texas, uses OpCon to automate the transfer of transactions between its IBM i-based core banking system and third-party products running on other platforms. The bank, which uses software from Jack Henry & Associates , previously executed the transfers manually, and spent many human hours every day verifying the transactions were posted correctly.

One process that FNB developed with OpCon enables totals from the IBM i-based system to be automatically verified against batch emails processed on a Windows computer. If there's a discrepancy in the totals, OpCon automatically sends out an alert. "OpCon/xps has mitigated the risk of human error by reducing manual intervention while speeding up daily processing with accuracy," the bank's IT manager, who was only identified as "Mr. Johnson," states in a SMA case study.

OpCon/X5 runs on a Windows server and stores its rules and dependencies in a SQL Server database. The software reaches out to other platforms via agents, called local schedule activity monitors (LSAMs) that install on the outboard server. The company offers LSAMs for a number of platforms, including IBM i, Windows, Unix, Linux, z/OS, MVS, Open VMS, OS2200, MCP, and Unisys platforms. Its LSAM for IBM i is written in RPG.

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