Enabling Optimization of Workload Processing: Terma Software, a Strategic Solution for DevOps, Sets Eyes on More Markets, Deeper Reach

We have brought together a team of industry visionaries and thought leaders in order to develop innovative solutions that help customers leverage analytics for workload automation while optimizing their workload processes and operations: Shane Hade

Running a business is often compared to gambling. Instinct is the word for business acumen, and chance the most powerful factor that determines success or failure.

Whoever first came up with this analogy had business all wrong.

The truth is, business can be predicted. The outcome of business can be forecast, much like the weather station warns us of an upcoming storm. This is possible through predictive analytics, a science that identifies future scenarios by reading, processing and analyzing historical data.

Terma Software, an enterprise software development company, focuses on workload automation analytics and aggregation, and provides a solution to bridge the gap between workload environments and the technology markets of business service management, virtualization, and data center automation. The solution supports any size workload automation environment. It is utilized by many large enterprises around the world to support their mission critical workload processes and to ensure that their processes execute and complete as expected. The company offers TermaUNIFY, a workload analytics solution that offers business, predicative, real-time, and historical analytics. It is a workload automation broker that includes business service management, and a methodology for monitoring and measuring IT services from a business perspective.

Terma’s workload automation analytics and aggregation platform includes support for CA Autosys and CA 7, IBM Workload Scheduler (IWS) and Tidal Workload Automation job scheduling products. These vendors’ products provide event-driven automation and policy-based management of mission critical workload processes that are the foundation for business operations in most large organizations. Terma also provides an integration capability that allows the product to easily integrate with any workload automation engine from other vendors or ones that are custom developed.

The company was incorporated in 2003 and is headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, with offices in Boulder and Manhattan

Interview Excerpt: Shane Hade, CEO

Why was the company set up? How did you select the vertical and decide to be a part of the global platform?

Terma Software was founded to address fundamental challenges that customers have with their workload automation platforms. These include service level management, cross scheduler monitoring, predictive analytics and monitoring, reporting, and the ability to understand execution trends and identify patterns that lead to processing issues. The company has been a long believer in using artificial intelligence techniques and applying machine learning approaches to workload automation. The solution enables a platform for development, IT Operations, and the business to interact on the design, development, management, execution, and monitoring of mission-critical business processes. Terma is a strategic solution for DevOps.

We focus on the enterprise workload automation market (aka, job scheduling) a sub market of the $20 billion-plus (according to Gartner) IT Operations Management (ITOM) software market. Our products integrate with leading workload automation products from companies such as IBM, BMC, CA Technologies, and STA Group (Tidal) to fill the critical needs of their customers. The solution also supports other vendors’ products, open source automation tools, and customer-developed solutions.

What were the grounds on which you have expanded your company and its offerings over the years?

We have expanded our software portfolio through the development of two additional products, TermaVISION and TermaINSIGHT.

TermaVISION provides the ability to easily build custom monitoring dashboards based on a set of processes that have similar characteristics. TermaINSIGHT is a workload intelligence solution that allows customers to build their own reports and analytics dashboards to support specific business requirements for a customer.

If you have to list five factors that have been/are the biggest asset to your organization, what would they be and why?

• The continued growth and adoption of automation by companies, and the realization of the benefits it brings both financially and risk-wise.
• The growth and complexity of our customers’ workload automation environments due to new business requirements, more dynamic markets and customers, zero downtime requirements, fewer resources to manage this growing complexity, and the need to improve efficiency while reducing operational costs.
• The growth of dynamic and hybrid computing environments, such as cloud, and the requirement to more tightly manage the service levels around them. Dynamic computing environments require analytics to help drive them. For example, understanding a workload’s resource needs prior to and during execution requires predictive analytics to drive the provisioning mechanism and provide the right amount of computing resources.
• The growth and maturity of DevOps. Operations and Development are two key roles for workload automation. It includes the developers who design and build the processes and the operation analysts who must support it in real-time. Our product provides a common platform for developers, operators, and business application owners to communicate about their processes. It addresses the complexity created by multi-platform, multi-vendor, and cross-business workload processes. With many customers, development and operations can also be across two different organizations due to the popularity of outsourcing. The outsourcing model tends to create more challenges than it solves without the right tools and processes in place.
• Service quality and the need to get new applications operational quickly and with a high level of confidence. This relates back to the design and testing process for new workload processes. It also includes the requirement of assuring the health of current application processing through real-time predictive analytics and historical analysis to identify patterns that might evolve into performance issues and unplanned downtime, aka, proactive management. It’s exactly the same way that companies use Business Intelligence (BI) to identify new market opportunities, market changes, and manage risk.

What do you feel are the reasons behind:

Your product popularity – The growth of complexity in workload processing, the lack of or inability of large software vendors in this market to address the challenges due to their own focus and investment requirements, and the evolving face of the IT organization have all driven our products’ popularity and need.

Your consistent growth as an organization – We have only tapped a very small segment of the $2 billion-plus workload automation market, and that with relatively low competitive pressure from other vendors. In fact, many vendors who could be competitors have chosen our solution for their customers instead.

Do you have any new products ready to be/getting ready to be rolled out into the market?

We have several new products and capabilities coming out. Besides supporting new vendors like BMC and IBM, we are developing a new product called Application Landscape as well as several new analytical models within our current solutions.

Application Landscape will provide customers with an aggregate, real-time view of their workload processes. It will show how workload relates to and impacts the overall business landscape. The new analytical models will provide predictions based on industry specific processing characteristics, for example, variations in processing load due to business cycles. Along with the models we’ve developed a “plug-in” capability allowing customers to easily implement the models we develop.

Where do you see your company a couple of years from now?

We expect significant growth due to the evolution of our solution and target market expansion. Due to our advancements in analytics and automation, and the continuously evolving IT landscape with our customers, the need for analytical solutions that can influence dynamic workload and resource management together will be a top requirement. Evolving both our AI and machine learning capabilities will help us address these requirements more rapidly and efficiently.

The Man Behind the Operation: A Brief Background

Shane Hade, CEO: Shane Hade is a seasoned Business and Technology Management Professional with extensive experience in healthcare and financial services and significant depth in line-level and executive-level knowledge. His prior companies include Avanti Health Systems, PriMed, Hackensack University Medical Center, JP Morgan Chase & Co., System Arts, ChartScape, and SendWordNow (mission critical notification services for Time Warner, Walmart, U.S.P.S, others). His strong leadership qualifications, coupled with a hands-on technology approach and a focus on bottom-line results, have enabled him to formulate and implement advanced technology and business solutions that have been successfully used to manage vital data flows, including banking and trading transaction data. His superior record of delivering simultaneous large-scale, mission-critical systems on time and under budget affirms the effectiveness of his team-based approach to management. Mr.Hade has extensive experience in building emerging-growth IT service and product firms and has worked with venture capitalists in raising funds and assessing the technologies of companies seeking funding.

“We have expanded our software portfolio through the development of two additional products, TermaVISION and TermaINSIGHT.”