Automation software tools enable IT managers to deliver both visibility and control of IT processes in a secure and reliable manner.  Historically, IT has extended automation through job scheduling software to automate batch oriented job streams based on time and date dependencies. The advent of more powerful computing complexes, combined with the growth of more affordable distributed applications and the rise of heightened regulatory standards, has increased the demand for job scheduling systems to take on ever more sophisticated capabilities, including eventdriven triggering, where time is considered just another type of event. For example,  hanges in the state of an IT service, the arrival of a specific message in the queue or the creation of a file are all events that job scheduling systems must recognize as potential events to trigger job streams. Enterprise job scheduling systems give organizations the ability to control IT processes while making them consistent, transparent and reproducible. Organizations have quickly found the use of heterogeneous job scheduling software products help them achieve the higher levels of information quality, process repeatability and audit trail documentation required by SOX.