The Magic Quadrant, an AI agent, and a game about batch windows
JAMS Software
JAMS orchestrates IT and data processes with control, visibility, and reliability.
Once a month we send what changed at JAMS, what we have been writing, and a few things from elsewhere that we thought were worth your time. No product pitch dressed up as a newsletter. If a month goes by and we have nothing useful to say, you won't hear from us.
July was not one of those months.
Bobby Schmidt // VP of Marketing, JAMS Software
01 / Analyst news
Named a Niche Player in the 2026 Magic Quadrant
JAMS was named a Niche Player in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms, published August 5, 2026.
Our take, and it is ours rather than Gartner: a Niche Player position is not just a recognition to us, it is a strategy. Vendors across this category try to be the automation platform for every industry, every region, and every deployment model at once. JAMS Scheduler gives IT teams centralized, intuitive orchestration, without the months-long rollout or the dedicated architect to keep it running. We feel our placement reflects a company that has stayed close to that mission instead of drifting away from it.
The full report is available at no cost, including the quadrant graphic showing every evaluated vendor on Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision.
02 / On the calendar
How to Measure Your SQL Server
With Brent Ozar / Wednesday, August 19 / 10:00 AM Central
This one is tomorrow morning, so consider this short notice rather than advance warning.
Brent has spent twenty years telling people their SQL Server is slower than they think and then proving it. This session covers the three metrics actually worth tracking, how to pull them, and how to tell the difference between a server that is struggling and a server that is simply busy.
Free, one hour, recording sent to everyone who registers.
03 / What shipped
JAMS 7.9.0
Two AI capabilities went generally available in July, and both ship at no additional cost as part of the new JAMS Web Client.
JAX is an AI agent inside the new JAMS Web Client. It finds jobs, diagnoses failures in plain language, and answers how-to questions grounded in the JAMS user guide. It acts only when you ask. Reads flow freely. Every write pauses for your explicit approval before it runs.
JAMS MCP is a connector built on the open Model Context Protocol standard. It brings JAMS into Cursor, VS Code with Copilot, Claude Code, Claude Desktop, and Codex, so you can ask JAMS questions without leaving the tool you already have open.
There is no elevated AI account. Both act as the signed-in user with that user's exact permissions. You pick the model, including one running entirely inside your own network, and JAMS never trains on your data.
Also in 7.9.0: the IBM i Agent moved to 6.2.11 with TLS support between the Agent and JAMS Scheduler, and certificate and TLS verification logging got clearer. The Misconfigured Agent state now surfaces when an Agent and the JAMS Server do not share a common encryption type, which should save somebody a long afternoon.
04 / New product
JAMS Incident Management is in customer early access
Alerting, escalation, and on-call, as a standalone product. Voice, SMS, push, email, Microsoft Teams, and Slack. Policy-driven escalation, two-way sync with ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Azure Monitor, and flat tier pricing published on the page rather than quoted on a call.
It does not require JAMS Scheduler. If you do run both, a failed job can open an incident on its own.
Customer early access opened August 1. Public launch is September 1, and there will be more on it here next month.
05 / What else we're reading
Not ours. Just good.
An eight-hour outage caused by a notification rule nobody meant to break. Firetiger published a genuinely unflinching postmortem on a March ingest failure. The technical root cause is interesting. The reason it took eight hours to notice is more interesting: an engineer testing a notification feature left a policy document in a state that quietly hid alerts from the team's incident channels. The monitoring worked fine. Nobody was listening. blog.firetiger.com
The leap second may become a leap hour, and soon. Scientific American on the proposal in front of international timekeepers this year. The short version: Earth has been spinning faster, a negative leap second is now a real possibility before 2035, and no production system has ever handled one. If you have ever written a scheduling assumption that time only moves forward, this is your reminder. scientificamerican.com
An annotated archive of famous outages. Ten of the loudest failures in computing history, each broken down the same way: what broke, why, when, and what changed after. The framing on the homepage is the best sentence we read all month, roughly that postmortems are the literature of operations. Worth an hour. semicolony.dev/postmortems
06 / Worth reading
Is Your SQL Server Normal, or Is Something Wrong? Most performance complaints are not performance problems. They are the absence of a baseline. A practical walkthrough of establishing one before the next escalation. Read it →
What IT Teams Report After Replacing Legacy Schedulers with JAMS. What teams actually said after a migration, including the parts that were harder than expected. Read it →
07 / One more thing
We made a game. It is called Dependency Hell.
We could have written another whitepaper about batch windows. You get a queue of jobs, a couple of lanes, and a window that closes at 6 AM. Most jobs wait on something upstream, a few have hard deadlines, and the bank's FTP server runs thirty minutes long every single night, the way it always has.
Place them by hand, hit run, and watch anything you scheduled before its upstream finished sit there burning your window. Then the game runs the same jobs again, triggered by dependency instead of by the clock. The difference between the two times is the entire argument.
Twelve nights, each tighter than the last, plus a mode where you type in your own batch and watch your real night play out. Free, no signup, works on your phone. Level 12 is not kind.
Peter, our CEO, has the current high score. Go beat it.
Next month: the public launch of JAMS Incident Management, and the first episode of In Production, our monthly live session where we do the thing on screen instead of talking about it.
See you next month.
Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms, 5 August 2026, by Hassan Ennaciri, Daniel Betts, Chris Saunderson. Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.
Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
