BMC Debuts Newest Batch-Management OfferingBMC Debuts Newest Batch-Management Offering

BMC Software Inc. on Tuesday will introduce its latest batch-management product, the Batch Impact Manager (BIM), which the company says will let customers manage processes in accordance to their importance to the company.

"When we say batch, people think of something they remember from 20 years ago when they'd run backups at 10 o'clock at night, and think it's not something relevant to today's climate," says Gur Steif, director of application management at BMC. "The reality is more than 50% of all transaction are still using batch data or batch interfaces."

BIM, available immediately, is a step beyond BMC's Control-M batch-scheduling system, Steif says. While Control-M helps in batch-management scheduling, BIM proactively detects potential delays, as well as errors in the batch process, and can take corrective actions to ensure that the most critical functions aren't affected. Customers can use BIM to define and manage batch flows at a business-process level rather than at a job level, and intuitively translate business requirements into job definitions, he says.

The software identifies the most critical business services, their related batch processes, and the batch jobs that facilitate them. Once identified, BIM can track the status of the jobs and provide notification of potential delays before they impact the business service, Steif says.

In addition, BIM provides the ability to prioritize the handling of failed business processes, enabling a customer to focus on recovering the most important processes first. BIM also allows for the defining of a "must complete by" time for critical jobs, scans chains to determine and analyze critical paths, and provides early notification of potential delays.

"Our objective has always been to bridge the gap between IT and business," Steif says. "This product provides true, predictive service assurance."