Why Now Is the Time to Finally Migrate from ASG-Zeke — and How to Do It

Why an ASG-Zeke migration might be the best thing for your business.

There is a saying you hear across many organizations all the time: This is the way we’ve done it based on past protocols.” But when it comes to technology, IT teams tend to be ahead of the curve in recognizing the limits of existing tools. They’re the ones with direct insight into what limitations in the infrastructure and software is creating roadblocks to executing business processes more quickly and efficiently.

With IT operations, relying on an antiquated job scheduler severely limits the capability to achieve great results for the business. There’s not enough integration with modern apps and not enough event-driven workflow capability to handle different needs and contingencies in an increasingly complex IT system. The modern solution is a Service Orchestration Automation Platform, or SOAP, according to Gartner.

Download the 2020 Gartner SOAP market guide here.

Are you regularly frustrated by trying to make ASG-Zeke work effectively as a mainframe scheduler? For jobs that run on platforms such as UNIX, Microsoft NT, AS/400, HP/MPE, and VMS platforms, how often do you run into problems? Does the lack of innovation in an antiquated scheduler keep causing integration issues?

At the end of the day, most companies need a job scheduler that can do more than just run mainframe tasks.

They need a solution that can run, monitor, and report on all the automated processes in their IT systems — beyond mainframe to cloud-hosted applications. They want self service automation that gives IT and non-IT personnel access to complex, powerful workflows. Most of all, they want a flexible platform that is continually evolving to solve new technology challenges before they become a roadblock.

At this point, we are seeing more and more firms make the switch in order to stay competitive. The message from 2020 was clear: relying on inflexible automation tools is no longer suitable for most modern, digital brands. (Please note that many older mainframe and midrange systems are still highly efficient business tools, they just need a better automation platform to break the silos and integrate them with modern 3^rd party apps.)

Still, even some companies that know about better solutions can be hesitant to make a change. They need to keep the trains running on time, and they fear extended downtime and a long implementation phase.

This doesn’t have to be the case. SMA Technologies has developed a proven migration framework with minimal disruption. Recently, a very large financial institution asked us to assist to help them migrate from ASG-Zeke to OpCon. We have also successfully migrated clients using Control-M from BMC, Automic and CA7 from Broadcom, and many other workload automation schedulers.

Our migration framework is successful — offering reliability with intense scalability — because we follow an established, repeatable plan that takes you through the following steps, making sure each one works before moving on:

1. Discovery and planning
2. Optimize framework software
3. Migration loop
4. Import final definitions
5. Optimize workflows

Being able to run the jobs you need is, of course, merely table stakes in any migration. What will ensure the success and considerably reduce the implementation time is by choosing a vendor that works as an extension of your team. A migration is a complex technical challenge, and collaboration between your IT Ops team and your automation vendor is critical to ensuring it’s as painless as possible. If you run into a vendor who won’t even examine the challenge without asking you to break out the checkbook, then you may want to look at other options.

No migration is easy or painless, and we’re not going to pretend they are. What SMA Technologies can promise you is our process minimizes the risk, cost, and implementation time of a migration. Our low-code platform and training program speeds up onboarding to get your team ready to take over and create their own workflows, taking full advantage of OpCon’s robust automation capabilities.

Ready to have a conversation about migrating to a modern automation platform? Fill out the form below and we won’t leave you waiting.