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You know I love Jobtrac. Everybody I met who ever worked with Jobtrac always thought it was the best out there. Easily the most compact mainframe scheduler, taking the fewest resources out of the system. I'm not sure what you mean by "reaching the end of its useful life span", unless you're referring to non-mainframe platforms. Jobtrac can still get the job done on the mainframe.

With regards to the vendor chain, the halcyon days of Goal Systems were unfortunately all too short-lived. After Legent and then CA gutted the developers, the Goal Systems products languished for a few years. While SYSVIEW survived, Jobtrac never recovered (but then again SYSVIEW blew away LOOK, while Jobtrac's advantages over CA-7 were only understood by Jobtrac users who had used CA-7 in the past). EPIC was also mercifully euthanized.
Runtrac was eventually replaced by CA-11, a virtual non-event since both products were pretty much functionally equivalent.

CA clearly opted to push CA-7 and Scheduler over Jobtrac. When I asked a sales guy why they wanted us to switch, they muttered some vague phases about "scalability". I think they were talking about how you have to scale your CPU upward after installing CA-7. After you and I worked some of the kinks out of JFST erroneously re-scanning the checkpoint, Jobtrac was an absolute screamer. It also handled some scheduling situations that CA-7 and Scheduler could not deal with (remember when we needed over 2000 auto-sched jobs a day with the same name?). After some bug fixes and enhancements to the 2.2 beta, Jobtrac handled that stuff with ease.

I'm interested in seeing your feedback to this issue. Please keep me posted.

Regards,
Thomas Conley, President
Pinnacle Consulting Group, Inc.
P: (585)720-0012
F: (585)723-3713
http://www.frontiernet.net/~pinnacle

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I have been involved with Jobtrac since 99, although it's been licensed here since 91, I believe.

I had a brief encounter with CA7 but was never involved with it long enough to actually compare the 2. The only other scheduling product I was involved with was AUTO off the CBT tape, back in the 70's.

It took me a while to see the potential in Jobtrac and to actually get "fairly" relaxed with using it but once I did, I became more impressed every day that I used it. The schedulers don't scratch the surface of it's capabilities. I created a version for the applications people to JCLcheck their jobs before it went into production, but most of them don't use it and neither does the scheduling group. It's a shame, the JCLTRAC facility is great. The schedulers said you couldn't schedule jobs that ran on a cycle. I found out they weren't using ANY form of calendar :-) . They said you couldn't schedule a job that ran on an interval. did that. Piece of cake. They said you couldn't schedule a job based on the creation of a dataset in another job. Been there, done that.

But I still didn't have any other scheduling product to compare it against. For reason's I'll explain later, I installed ZEKE, ZEBB. We've been calling them the "dimly lite garage" software ever since we started to install them. That's where they look like they were written. They look like 1960 and 1970 software, talking about the CORE they use etc. One of the other guys here made the comment that he never thought he'd call Jobtrac the Rolls of schedulers but after seeing the Z products he says they are like a Yugo in comparison. :-)

The issue here is CA. They've managed to REALLY upset the boss and he's determined ALL CA products are out of here. I agree with the reasoning but I disagree with getting rid of Jobtrac. There's just no ROI, IMHO. I haven't tryed to use it from other platforms, but it appears the interface is there. Like I said, it's a CA issue, not a Jobtrac issue. ZEKE doesn't even have a fraction of the capabilities of Jobtrac. They are trying to get ZACK working on an MVS platform again but all we've had is promises since late last year. It is NOW suppose to be in our mits (as BETA) in mid August. The CA contract is up in Sept. (and the boss wants to go production before the contract is up). He's never been involved with BETA software but ASG has him convinced it's going to be a cake walk. Simply amazing. We've all voiced our opinions but all he sees is a 20% savings in budget. I hope Jobtrac stays around for a   L O N G  time.

BTW, my job is Systems Programming  NOT scheduling but I have a TECH schedule in place that does the things the schedulers don't seem to be able to handle or at least correctly. :-)
 

Bill Ball [wball@kent.edu]

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We started with JOBTRAC and RUNTRAC from Goal Systems. We used them and were pleased for many years. Just this year, however, we replaced Jobtrac with Cybermation's ESP. The only reason was open system pricing from CA. Had CA been reasonable with pricing for the server agents, we would have not even considered switching.

Jobtrac is and will continue to be an excellent mainframe scheduler. If only CA hadn't gotten their hands on it....

Chuck Kreiter Lead Systems Programmer State Auto Insurance

Kreiter, Chuck [Chuck.Kreiter@StateAuto.com]

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I want to add my experiences and opinions about CA Jobtrac to your survey.

I'm the production scheduler for American Greetings Corporation in Cleveland. We got CA-Jobtrac in 1993 when it was owned by Goal Systems.
We went to Jobtrac when support was be dropped on our previous scheduling package and it was being phased out. We reviewed numerous other scheduling products and found Jobtrac to the most robust, user friendly, and adaptable to our environment as any product on the market.
I was involved with the conversion process and have used Jobtrac since we brought it in. Our shop runs nearly 20000 jobs per day. We have 2700 schedule members and 18500 jobs defined to Jobtrac. We use AIX & Sybase on the distributed platform and use CCI to communicate between the Client Server world and the Mainframe.
Jobtrac is a strong scheduling product with great functionality. I serve a Jobtrac user representative on an advisor council with Computer Associates and am please to have a small voice of support for such a great product. Jobtrac is a real work horse. I consider it the best in the business.

Dave Swartz
American Greetings...Our Creativity Says it Best CMSS - Scheduling Services
(216) 252-7300 Ext. 1914
Dave.Swartz@amgreetings.com

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I installed and maintained JOBTRAC at two different sites for previous employers. The only serious issue I ever had was a JOBTRAC data set that was a bottleneck...I think it was some kind of checkpoint file or something. I ended up moving it to solid-state disk to avoid issues with other data on the same volume (this was the days before large cache was available).

I always thought it was very easy to install and maintain...an elegantly simple solution. The operations staff liked it because it was easy to understand and easy to change. Overall, we were very happy with the product. We evaluated competitors before we chose it and several times while using it. We never found a product that matched it.

Support was always first-rate (of course, that was in the Goal Systems days).

Ned Hedrick [hedrickn@TSAINC.COM]

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