Since implementing the SPS product line at AOL as a strategic solution for managing our Business Systems Production environment on Stratus computers, we have noticed a significant increase in our system reliability, recoverability and overall improvement in the integrity of the many systems we manage.

Upper management has commended us for automating and securing the Stratus environment and for eliminating many of our on production problems/issues. We have also received rave reviews from our end users who appreciate the ease of use and friendliness of the SPS software

The SPS/Menu System with its extensive security features allowed us to reduce the risk of human error as well as audit our operators and end-user activities. We were able reduce our training overhead to a minimum and allow new employees to safely work on our production machines without the typical risks involved.

The SPS/Production Control System has assisted us in managing our production network. Job scheduling, nightly batch cycles and process management are now fully automated. The job dependencies feature has helped us in simplifying our command macros which are now all integrated with SPS. The added functionality of viewing application output from a job run has reduced tremendously the amount of human time otherwise required to locate the files.

One of the most critical features for us has been the implementation of the SPS/Logs and Alerts Manager (LAM). SPS/LAM scans our job output and matches it against our own customized filters to alert us to conditions which require our attention. This implementation has shortened our response time to critical errors and helped us detect serious problems which may have otherwise gone undetected. A valuable addition to SPS/LAM is the option of attaching notes by the operator to alerts, outlining what was required to resolve the problem. This has helped us in pinpointing weaknesses within our system and in planning future solutions. The comprehensive reporting and charting of system resources (such as disk space and CPU usage) has helped us in identifying and tracking potential performance bottlenecks.SPS allows us to be proactive to our system performance and capacity planning issues.

Overall, our experience with the product has been extremely positive.SoftMark's technical support and responsiveness is outstanding. Their continued advice and close involvement with our project has made the integration of this product into a very large production system a manageable task.

Alex Tulchinsky
Director - AOL Corporate Business Systems Operations