Softimage stopped selling and supporting BatchServe back in late 2006/early 2007, so I never had the pleasure of supporting that product 😉
Here’s some BatchServe screen grabs and a quickstart video from the XSI 3.0 Experience CD (so this stuff is from early 2003):
eX-SI 
BatchServe was great. Was really sad to see this tool quietly go unsupported and finally dropped. To me, seeing this very useful tool get axed while a specialist tool like FaceRobot was “green lit” signified a time when devs were allowed to run free and ignore the needs of their clients. Always scratched my head at these types of choices… choices like the development of Behavior and FaceRobot; products that served almost no clients.
BatchServe, Bahavior and FaceRobot are all from the same group of people, the special project team in LA. They pretty much just wrote stuff and then moved on to the next things, depending on which client they were working with. BatchServe ended up a difficult project to productive because it depended on all sort of GPL stuff, and mySQL, which has license issues.