The term “Job Scheduling and Monitoring” is a remnant of the mainframe era, where data centers still consisted of IBM System/370, compatible and suitable machines, or even Siemens BS2000 computers.
But why was it so important? At night, batch jobs would be running and transfer data from silo to silo. It was always a catastrophe if a job would halt unexpectedly or if it was caught up in a deadlock. IT managers tried to prevent such crashes with the “right” scheduling and monitoring.
SAP’s proposed real-time computing based on the database platform Hana does not need batch jobs and should technically be immune to such crashes and deadlocks. Therefore, it should not need job scheduling and monitoring either – because everything works in real time, right?
Harsh reality
It’s not that easy, however. In reality, even in the era of Hana and cloud computing, users still have to move data, and programs still have to exchange messages. SAP Data Hub could technically prevent customers from having to transfer major data sets, but this solution itself needs regular scheduling and monitoring.
Maybe better than anyone else, SAP customers know that whether it is system copy, transportation order, or release change, the old saying still holds true: to trust is good, but to control is better.
In recent years, SAP heavily neglected “Job Scheduling and Monitoring” in favor of cloud computing. However, especially customers leveraging a hybrid IT architecture with on-premise datacenters and multi-cloud need scheduling and monitoring more than ever.
Many cloud strategies of SAP customers become impossible without the right tools to monitor their architecture and systems. SAP’s own tool, SolMan, cannot rise up to the challenge.
SAP customers will have to wait and see which SAP partner will be the first to offer a sustainable and comprehensive hybrid cloud monitoring solution.
Ryan Smith’s attempt to explain what Qualtrics is shows the root of the problem.
To transform a coffee roastery into a company which sells coffee with (supposedly) European flair was a stroke of genius.
Smith wants customers to believe that something like this becomes possible by leveraging his processes.
Qualtrics can certainly help you to become better at what you are already doing, but it cannot help you to come to the conclusion that you should do something else entirely.
Not Qualtrics or similar methods gave Apple the iPhone, but Steve Jobs.
TL;DR:
Qualtrics is the solution to a problem which has yet to be defined.