We performed a comparison between OpCon and Stonebranch Universal Automation Center based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: OpCon is praised for its flexibility, integration capabilities, self-service options, reduced human error, intuitive graphical user interface, database functionality, deployment concept, testing environment, on-demand access, MAS assistance, reliability, and strong automation capabilities. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is lauded for its performance, excellent graphical representation, intuitive solution, regular upgrades, job dependencies, rerun function, GUI, task monitor, stability, scalability, and helpful technical support.
OpCon could enhance its web-based interface and Solution Manager while upgrading to newer versions may be complicated. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center would benefit from cloud availability and improved analytics capabilities.
Service and Support: OpCon's customer service receives positive feedback for providing timely solutions and a strong dedication to effective resolutions. Stonebranch's support is highly regarded for its expertise, efficiency, and consistent availability to assist customers.
Ease of Deployment: OpCon's initial setup requires collaboration with SMA Technologies and training, however, with the help of SMA consultants, it is considered smooth. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center's setup is generally easy, however, the complexity of the infrastructure may pose some challenges.
Pricing: OpCon has a high initial cost and is intricate to set up, necessitating a learning curve. Nevertheless, it is viewed as a valuable and high-quality product. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is comparatively less expensive, making it a favored option for businesses.
ROI: OpCon has proven to be highly effective in generating return on investment through its task automation capabilities, time-saving features, and error reduction. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center has demonstrated significant cost savings of 40-50% when compared to previous tools.
Comparison Results: OpCon is the preferred choice when compared to Stonebranch Universal Automation Center. OpCon is highly praised for its flexibility, integration capabilities, self-service feature, graphical user interface, and reliability. Users appreciate the ability to automate tasks according to their specific needs, reducing human error.
"The stability of this solution is awesome. It's the only product I've ever seen that you can actually build to fix itself if it has a problem. You'll build something and, if you find an issue, you can say, 'Hey, if this happens again, do this to correct it.'"
"There are three features which are valuable: the automated calendar functions; the notification process for failed jobs or unscheduled events occurring, via email and text messaging; and the ability for the scheduling package to communicate across multiple platforms."
"The end code response allows us to evaluate how a process finished, set the termination/end code appropriately, and then trigger further processing based on how it ended."
"It is so simplistic that it gives us peace of mind. Before, we had all these processes that were run manually, such as different file transfers and jobs running for our core at certain times. Now, all that stuff is done automatically."
"Having the jobs laid out while attaching dependencies is a nice addition to the program."
"It seems like it would scale well."
"When a lot of jobs are scheduled on different platforms, without any interaction possible between them, it's very difficult to manage things. With OpCon we avoid this difficulty. It's very visual."
"It's very scalable. Right now we're barely scratching the surface of what it can do. I've looked at Symitar's instance of OpCon and they're running something like 13,000 jobs a day with all the clients that they have. So it can go from small use cases like ours to enterprise-level."
"The support is good from Stonebranch Universal Automation Center."
"The ability to monitor tasks that are on the open-system side as well as our mainframe side gives us a one-window view of all our processes."
"When it comes to agent technology and compatibility with other vendors, from a platform perspective it was the one vendor that fit all the platforms that we have, from your old platforms - mainframe, NSK, IBM i - to the new ones, going into cloud and container"
"I like the dashboard and the various workflows."
"Stonebranch performs well, and the graphical representation is excellent. Overall, it requires more technical effort from our teams, but the solution is intuitive, so anybody can use it."
"The tasks are incredibly capable, and as long as you name them with a nice, uniform naming convention, they are very useful. You can create some interesting workflows through various machines, or you can just have it kick off single tasks. All in all, I really like the Universal Task. You can do some mutually exclusive stuff, such as an "A not B" kind of thing. It has a lot of capabilities behind the scenes."
"I can name the aliases on the agent, so if we need a passive environment for an agent, that's one of the nice features. If our primary goes down, I can bring up the passive one and I don't have to change anything in the scheduling world. It will start running from that new server."
"I love the Universal Controller. It's been great for us. We host it on-premise... It's High Availability, meaning there's failover from one server to the other if one goes down."
"We are still in the early stages of our implementation, so at this point, I cannot see any needed improvements or features."
"Upgrading to newer versions remains complex."
"The calendar interface and the frequency interface is a very powerful, yet complex, section of OpCon in which all our staff have made mistakes. They have implemented what they believed was logically correct and then afterward discovered that their logic was flawed because OpCon did it a different way. That part, which is incredibly useful, is also incredibly dangerous. The interface or the ability to directly do more functions within the frequency definitely has room for expansion. As good as it is, it can be a lot better."
"I'd like to see the product include a view where you can see everything about a specific job on a single screen."
"I would like OpCon to implement a reporting feature on the dashboard that displays historical data for specific jobs. Ideally, this feature would allow us to view the past seven days or the next seven days, but with a specific focus on highlighting instances where a particular job has historically failed, particularly on Saturdays over the past year."
"What can get complicated is if you're doing anything more than just the built-in jobs. If you're using the more advanced features, troubleshooting becomes extremely complicated."
"Do your first install, your first upgrade, with SMA. It's simple, it's as per the manual, as per the training, but you need that little bit of confidence."
"I would like more web-based training from SMA. That would be nice. Our primary OpCon representative is phenomenal, but we would like some training opportunities for learning on our own. When I started utilizing OpCon, the sheer breadth of it made for a very daunting task. I was almost fearful to start, not to mention fearful to go change things and possibly hinder a job."
"Occasionally, we have an agent that doesn't come back up after patching. That doesn't happen very often... It's really just a restart of the agent and it comes back up. But that might be one thing that could be improved."
"It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability."
"It can be hard to manage the task monitor."
"One hiccup we've had is due to the fact that we have other internal scheduling tools. We're able to talk to them, but we have trouble with some of the networking between them, so we're still trying to work out the kinks there."
"I would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex."
"There is room for improvement with its connectivity with the Microsoft SRS system. It is very weak. They keep telling us it works with it, and technically it does, but it does not provide a lot of visibility. We have lost a lot of visibility migrating to Stonebranch, compared with just running tasks on the SRS server. That's really about the only thing that is a sore point for us."
"It can't handle negative written codes."
"The Universal Controller is decent for the money it costs... It needs some work to have full features, compared to other products that are out there, specifically IBM's Workload Scheduler."
OpCon is ranked 9th in Workload Automation with 56 reviews while Stonebranch is ranked 16th in Workload Automation with 26 reviews. OpCon is rated 9.2, while Stonebranch is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of OpCon writes "Gives us the ability to schedule dependent jobs across different mainframes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Stonebranch writes "Allowed us to develop workflows without having to train and develop very specialized skillsets". OpCon is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Automic Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation and UiPath, whereas Stonebranch is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs, ESP Workload Automation Intelligence and IBM Workload Automation. See our OpCon vs. Stonebranch report.
See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.
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