What’s new in Workload Automation 9.5: Docker, Folders, renewed Web Console and more!

HCL and IBM are proud to announce the release of Workload Automation 9.5 that introduces disruptive innovations and drastically simplifies the automation world. 
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You will be impressed by our latest release! The goal of this article is to drive you through the main capabilities and enhancements of version 9.5, revealing the value-add that it can bring to your business: take control of your Workload Automation environment with more powerful tools and speed up the product adoption process, increase time-to-value, simplify the administration and empower your line of business. ​

A glimpse of Workload Automation 9.5 new features!

Docker and script-based installation: the nightmare of configuring dozens of environments via GUI installers is over now! 

Now you can automate the installation of ALL product components using dedicated scripts that provide you the possibility to choose how accurate should be the product’s configuration. Leveraging the automatable scripts, enable you to reduce the risk of human error and deployment is easier and faster. 

If you would like to speed up the deployment of Master Domain Manager, Dynamic Workload Console, Dynamic Agent components further, then... it’s time to star using Docker and deploy the provided out-of-the-box images! 
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Docker infrastructure provides an easy method to replicate environments quickly in development, build, test, and production environments, speeding up the time it takes to get from build to production significantly. Compose your environment according to your needs by using Docker and integrate it with the existing on-prem components. 
 
Increase Business Agility with Folders 
Gain greater business agility and enforce the security organization of your jobs and job streams in Folders to fully supports Line of Business users! 

Administrators will be able to define folders on Workload Automation environment and delegate to other users or groups of users the organization or management of a specific line of business as well as targeted monitoring query to get a look on the status of applications of a specific folder! 

If you are upgrading your environment, your objects will be automatically moved into a default ROOT directory. 

Renewed Dynamic Workload Console ​

Dynamic Workload Console ends up with a completely renewed look and feel and usage experience to become more near to user’s needs, from navigation simplification to new dashboarding systems the goal is to empower users: 

• Fully customizable and sharable dashboards to make real-time data-driven decisions and keep control of your entire business using the full set of information and data-sources of Workload Automation 9.5 plus the integration with 3rd party data coming from RESTful services
• Simplified menu navigation and page organization per user needs 
• New roles and security management 
• Customizable start-up, favorites and pinned pages

• More powerful reports (with BIRT native integration)

Mainframe Modernization 
Mainframe modernization is another hot-topic of Workload Automation 9.5 and brings these main evolutions to the product: 

• Define date and time on jobs for automatic completion and alerts​ to enable customers to have full control on late alerting and automatic actions; 
• Workload optimization: Global policy to optimize the submission of non-critical jobs in a time ​ avoid CPU consumption peak defining a global policy to prioritize urgent job and define a global maximum submission rate 
• Analytics: Enable integration of IWSz logs with CDP for analytics (IOAz, Splunk, Elastic)​ 

 
Can’t wait to learn more about 9.5?  Join our webinar on April 16! 

Webinar Registration

Agnese Berellini, Technical Writer 
Agnese is an enthusiastic information developer for HCL Workload Automation in Rome, Italy. She likes to analyze new features, describe them and improve her knowledge about technical components. Currently, she works together with her team  to improve the Workload Automation documentation and creates videos to promote new features and products. 

Francesco Brillante, Senior Software Developer 
Francesco is a senior full-stack web developer. He has worked in the Workload Automation area since 2013 and is currently based in the HCL Products and Platforms Rome software laboratory working as technical leader of Dynamic Workload Console.  He comes from southern Italy and is a pizza expert, rock music lover, JavaScript geek and SSC Napoli supporter! 

Marco Cardelli, Offering Manager 
Marco has been working with IBM since 1990 and on IBM Workload Scheduler for z/OS since 1995. He started on IBM Workload Scheduler for z/OS as a L3 support specialist and then joined the development team as chief designer starting with IBM Workload Scheduler for z/OS 8.3. In 2015 he became architect of the IBM Workload Scheduler for z/OS product. In September 2016, as part of the new partnership agreement between IBM and HCL, he moved to the new HCL Products & Platforms division. Since January 2017 he left the development team and joined the Workload Automation Offering team. 

Paolo Pisa, Senior Software Developer 
Paolo joined IBM as Software Engineering working on using  Full Stack technologies  and covering technical leader roles. ​ Starting from 2017 he works in HCL  as Technical leader of WA’s Deployment Team with main focus in  Dockerizing  javaEE-based applications. ​

He has a strong background in computer  science technologies, data structures, algorithms and distributed computing. He is the subject-matter expert of  IBM Liberty server runtime environment.