Terma Software: Enabling Optimization through Workload Analytics

Shane Hade, CEO and Board Member

Established in 2003, Terma Software is the brainchild of the founders of the company who built one of the largest scheduling software products in the market. Terma originally started by supporting just CA workload products, and then extended its support to include any job scheduling engine, among them CA AutoSys, CA7, IBM Workload Scheduler (IWS), and Tidal Workload Automation. Over the years, the company has been responding to customer needs, and strives to build solutions which solve emerging market demands.

We spoke with Shane Hade, CEO and Board Member, and Jim Anderson, VP, Corporate Strategy, to help our readers understand the strategic innovations that Terma Software brings to the market.

1. Please elaborate on the market challenges and the rising industrial trends today.

We would like to look at the challenges from three perspectives—People, Process, and Technology. While complexity continues to grow in organizations, adding people is not necessarily a solution. This leads to questions such as how complex environments can be managed with the same number of human resources. This is where we come in to bridge the gap. It’s not just human capital in terms of the number of people or their skills, but also their inherent limitations.

We also bring significant value by simplifying complex technology. Through our platform, products, and toolsets, organizations can achieve greater clarity and insights into their very complex environments.

On the operational process side, we support our client organizations in managing the processes in real time with predictive analytics and alerts. This allows organizations to determine quickly and efficiently whether potential business processing is being negatively impacted, so that they can take action in advance of problems arising.

We continue to see the predictive capabilities of our platform addressing specific needs in the market, allowing our client organizations to become proactive, rather than being typically reactive. If an organization doesn’t have adequate visibility, then environments are exceedingly challenging to manage.

2. Could you please shed some light on Terma Software’s innovative solutions and how they are helping your customers?

Often, service level requirements have a financial impact if they are not met, and so it is imperative that these environments be managed adequately. Many of our clients manage huge environments, up to or exceeding hundreds of thousands of jobs, providing enhanced automation and cost-effective operation.

Increased visibility throughout reduces risk by surfacing hidden root causes. Our foundational platform, TermaANALYTICS, is an analytics solution which collects performance data and turns that into actionable insights. TermaUNIFY, is an analytics product that works in real time using historical information to provide predictive analytics and predictive monitoring. With this unified tool set, we provide dashboards that display high-level views, reporting, and historical indicators. Using our analytics data, you can then address processing anomalies.

Jim Anderson, VP, Corporate Strategy

TermaVISION, our dashboard-based monitoring product, allows users to look into their processes from different angles—for example, based on jobs, groups of jobs, machines, or groups of servers. We also provide customizable dashboards for end users, developers, and operators.

Finally, we also offer TermaINSIGHT, which provides customizable reports and analytics, and UNIFY-CONNECT, which extends integration between customers’ own applications and our platform.

Through our platform, products, and toolsets, organizations can achieve greater clarity and insights into their very complex workload environments

3. Please share a case study that highlights Terma Software’s value proposition.

Over the years, we have assisted a wide variety of customers. In one instance, we worked closely with a large financial company that had gone through a systems implementation, resulting in a significant number of changes to their production processing. Because of the complexity of their workload environment, the implementation of these changes introduced unforeseen issues which then resulted in a negative effect on their service levels. They had no way to test their changes effectively, nor to anticipate any potential adverse effects their changes might introduce. We started working with the company after this failed systems implementation, investing significantly to recover from and correct for these production processing issues. We started by providing them a complete dependency visualization of all their processing to identify workload interrelationships. We then put this through an optimization process which surfaced an understanding of the impacts of change and change management. Ultimately, we deployed a simulation and modeling solution where they could test a simulated full production environment containing any proposed changes in their actual production processing. This effort began with our customer missing critical service levels, and ended with them not missing even a single service level requirement, once they implemented our solution and used it to facilitate change management and monitor their production workload.

4. Can you give us some insights about the roadmap?

We are continuously innovating and adding new capabilities to our solutions. We will soon be introducing a product which provides more business-centric, high-level views of workload environments, allowing users to monitor their processing specific to business areas. We are also coming out with a full universal simulation system where we can model any production environment, thereby simulating changes to an environment, and running through a full overnight workload cycle. This simulation can run in minutes—contrasted with a typical real-time eight-hour window. Users can then simulate and view changes and refine them until they get the desired result.