Patrick de Blende, iSeries Product Owner at Atlas Copco – a global leader in industrial manufacturing based in Sweden – has been immersed in the IBM i platform for nearly three decades. With 28 years of hands-on experience, there’s little within the IBM i environment that Patrick hasn’t mastered.
In 1998, while working for another company, Patrick was faced with a high-stakes challenge to implement a new ERP system in just a few short months. He knew that he couldn’t do it alone. The complexity of BPCS, the ERP’s backbone, was daunting. Patrick recalls, “We had no clue what jobs were required to run, in which sequence, or how to run them. BPCS is not a simple call program with a few parameters. You can have a command with a parameter string consisting of 1024 bytes that you need to define in a job – but that’s not easy, because a lot of these characters aren’t readable.”
Patrick was familiar with Robot, Fortra’s suite of IBM i systems management software. He knew that the Robot software could get him over the hump. What he didn’t know was that this seemingly straightforward software purchase would turn into something far more valuable: a reliable companion and strategic partner along his IBM i journey.
Patrick Achieves a Lights-Out Operations with Fortra
Patrick’s initial success with automating key jobs using Robot Schedule was just the beginning. Encouraged by the results, he steadily expanded his use of the Robot suite until the enterprise-wide batch processing was running without any manual intervention. What started as a tactical fix quickly evolved into a strategic transformation.
“We needed help defining parameters, so that was the moment we started using the learn function in Robot Schedule. We automated hundreds of BPCS programs into Robot that way. Then, of course, we brought Robot Alert into the picture for event management and Robot Console for the message handling.”
“From there, we linked these products together for a lights-out operation. We were running unattended batch processing during the nightly hours, during the week, and during the weekends when no one was on site. Everything was and is fully automated. We have complete trust in all the Robot tools.”
“After a while, it’s kind of taken for granted that Robot is monitoring the servers and running the automation.”
When Patrick joined Atlas Copco in 2008, he brought his trusted Robot tools with him, applying the same automation strategies to drive efficiency across new consolidation projects.
Robot Network Facilitates Multinational IT Management
When the number of logical partitions (LPARs) that you’re managing climbs into the triple digits, the complexity multiplies fast. At that scale, you’re faced with a choice: build out a larger team or find a way to consolidate control. For Patrick, the answer was clear. Robot Network offered the visibility, coordination, and control he needed to manage dozens of systems from a single interface.
“I got involved in a large consolidation project where we brought all of our IBM i systems across the globe to the US. I had to manage 100 LPARs. For that, I have Robot Network. In my eyes, there are two features that I consider to be the most important within Robot Network.”
“First is the centralized monitoring. You can direct all your systems towards one central location by escalating from your local notes to a single center. This is essential for monitoring teams because we have people that are looking at those systems and are reacting to the messages that are popping up in the global network status center. And based on the system and the country there, they know what to do and how to do it.”
“The second most important thing is the packet distribution. Robot Schedule and Robot Console are defined as product masters in Robot Network. So you can bring automation scripts from Robot Schedule and Robot Console to your product masters. You can distribute them to more than 500 systems in one shot. This is very efficient and saves my team a lot of time. And of course it reduces the possibility of human error.”
Atlas Copco Enlists a Lifelong IBM i Ally with Fortra
The Robot product line is designed to be an IBM i administrator’s best friend. This suite of solutions provides end-to-end monitoring and automation, allowing IT to run critical jobs outside of working hours and freeing up time for them to tackle other projects.
Patrick agrees, stating “If you automate something and you do it right the first time, you know that it will execute correctly every subsequent time. This saves you a tremendous amount of time in eliminating errors and their accompanying delays.”
With Robot, the time savings extend beyond just the operation of the products. “Fortra tools are very easy to install. Once they are installed, it takes hardly any time at all getting them into an active position where they’re ready to use. In terms of support, it’s always been excellent. Whenever you call, there’s a person on the phone. That is really helpful and has saved time over the years. Of course, global support is challenging and Fortra has handled that really well also. But more than anything, it’s the knowledgeable people on the support team that really make Fortra’s support an asset.”
Want to Learn How Robot Can Assist Your IBM i?
The Robot product line is designed and developed with operators in mind. Our modern interfaces and enterprise-class functionality make it possible for even novice IBM i teams to manage the system by exception.
As Patrick stated, “If you can find something that is not possible via Robot, let me know.”