KMD: Simplifies Automation Landscape by Replacing IBM Agent Technology

With 3,200 employees in Denmark and 500 in India, KMD is one of Denmark’s leading IT service and software companies. For more than 40 years, KMD has played a significant role in helping Denmark’s public sector become one of the most efficient and digitized in the world.

KMD has developed and currently operates more than 400 IT systems that support the Danish government by processing billions of Danish kroner each year, equivalent to more than 20% of Denmark’s GDP.

Since 2008, KMD has relied on workload automation technology from Stonebranch. Until 2016, however, their distributed batch processing was still handled by IBM Agent technology. Driven by increasing licensing costs; challenges in handling, finding and managing job output; and the heterogeneous IBM agents portfolio, the company recognized the need for a new agent solution.

KMD had been using Fault Tolerant Agents (FTA), SAP extended agents (x-agents) and z-centric agents. The company now needed to update its existing environment to improve visibility, simplify usage and enhance operational efficiency.

“The deciding factor for choosing Universal Agent from Stonebranch was the experience we gained from working together in the first eight years of our partnership. In addition to an excellent quality of service, the licensing policy and the pricing model are unique and offer future-proof scalability.”

BIRGIT JENSEN
Head of Application Operations, KMD Denmark

“The deciding factor for choosing Universal Agent from Stonebranch was the experience we gained from working together in the first eight years of our partnership. In addition to an excellent quality of service, the licensing policy and the pricing model are unique and offer future-proof scalability,“ says Birgit Hansen, Head of Application Operations at KMD.

KMD’s complex scheduling environment, based on mainframe and IBM TWS schedulers, included 98% SAP processes, such as ABAP processes, process chains and restarts, and modify variants, as well as various additional individual settings.

The project timeline for conversion was very condensed — just three months — to meet expiring license agreement dates. “Stonebranch‘s implementation was fast and to the point,” says Torben Leonard Olsen, Senior Specialist Infrastructure Outsourcing Central at KMD. “It took the experienced Stonebranch team only two and a half months to convert all 26,000 existing jobs. Stonebranch once again demonstrated its professionalism with this outstanding performance. Issues relating the individual setup and the variations in the agent technology were solved in close collaboration, with quick and thorough responses.”

“With Universal Agent, we can process 12% faster than before. Using Stonebranch we have immediately eliminated job failures, reduced complexity and improved the usability of our distributed batch processing. And no additional staff training was needed.”

TORBEN LEONARD OLSEN
Senior Specialist Infrastructure Outsourcing Central, KMD Denmark

Using the Stonebranch solution, KMD was able to consolidate its agent landscape, reducing the number of agents by 45 and streamlining job scheduling with a massive decrease in the number of overall jobs.

KMD began the conversion process with 125 IBM agents running 26,000 jobs. Today, KMD runs only 80 Universal Agents and has decreased the number of jobs to 15,000 as a result of the conversion project with Stonebranch.

“With Universal Agent, we can process 12% faster than before. Using Stonebranch we have immediately eliminated job failures, reduced complexity and improved the usability of our distributed batch processing,” says Mr. Olsen. “And no additional staff training was needed.”

Stonebranch Universal Agent is the only independent, vendor-agnostic scheduling agent technology that works with any third-party scheduling solution. This is a big advantage for KMD, which is able to entirely preserve its existing scheduling landscape.