The Risks of Out-of-Date Automation Technology Part 2: Beware the Hidden Costs

In the first post of this three-part series, we examined the wider issues that can arise in terms of sustainability and complexity. This week, we’re looking at the costs of relying on out-of-date workload automation (WLA) or scheduling technology.

The need for a business to be responsive is – as we and those wiser than us have noted many times before – crucial. Whether it’s customer-facing functions or back-office nuts and bolts, the ability to respond immediately to changes is a constant. That’s the reality of expectations in the digital world.

And that’s a reality that IT must be able to dynamically support by running tasks at any point. We discussed in the previous post how the sheer inflexibility of many WLA tools set to rigid daily schedules can cause problems in a process-centric world.

However, another risk is that these aging and out-of-date scheduling tools can also get really expensive when they don’t have to. One of the key reasons for this is that solutions like Control-M, for example, tie the cost to opaque licensing and per-definition charges. For an initial deployment, this doesn’t present too much of a problem, but as time passes, the cracks begin to show.

Scaling automation solutions based on the number of process definitions in use can quickly send project costs spiraling out of control – and ultimately lead to misdirected disillusionment with automation more widely, in some instances.

And that’s before you factor in the unexpected license audits and all the wasted definitions you end up paying for during testing.

It’s an out-of-date pricing model that’s ill-suited to today’s cloud- and the service-based world. It’s one that all too often means customers end up paying more than they expected. And it’s one that you won’t find with Redwood RunMyJobs® scheduling, which means no nasty pricing surprises for our customers.

Transparency and visibility are things that we consider central tenets of our approach at Redwood. They’re supported by our per-usage product pricing and our central web-based dashboard that simplifies process automation across silos of both legacy and new applications (which, incidentally, also reduces the costs of running those processes).

We hear many complaints about rival products from new customers who migrate to our process automation solutions. While we could point out all the ways in which those other products truly cannot compete, we’d rather give you the chance to see for yourself how Redwood RunMyJobs goes beyond your current process automation expectations.

Get your own free, no-commitment Redwood RunMyJobs scheduling trial here.