ActiveBatch by Redwood Reviews

We have connected this automation tool to our SAP ECC system. All the ECC batch jobs are scheduled via this tool.

We had configured the alerting mechanism so that whenever we have any job fails/long-running jobs, we get an immediate email notification which helps in monitoring the jobs.

The best part of the tool is the submit frame and time window where we can schedule jobs as per the customer's requirements.

As this has a quality environment, we connected this tool to ECC QA, and before making any changes to production, we are able to test the new requirements in quality then we can move to production. 

It helped to schedule and monitor the SAP ECC batch jobs.

It reduced the workload.

It can connect to a number of third-party/legacy systems. Once the job is scheduled, no manual interruption is required. Therefore, once the job is scheduled, there won't be any interruption to the job.

As we support the different countries in the project, we need to schedule jobs in different time zone; this tool helped to schedule the jobs as per the respective time zone because this tool contains almost all the time zones. We can schedule jobs as per the regional/country time.

The best feature is the alerting mechanism.

We had configured email alerts for many scenarios so that whenever a job fails/is long-running, we get an immediate email notification. There is no need to log in to the system every time and do the monitoring based on the email alert. We can inform the respective team and take action immediately. It helps to avoid business impact.

We get the best customer support; whenever we are doing any testing/facing any issues/during any new requirement, we can raise a ticket to the support team, or we can schedule a call with them so that we get an immediate response and solutions.

The monitoring dashboard could have been more user-friendly so that in the monitoring dashboard itself, we can see the total number of jobs created in the system and how many were currently active/scheduled/chained.

The reports could have more pre-defined options, such as killed/failed jobs from the current month. That way, we can get the reports quickly and help the audit process.  

Whenever any job fails in the system, it should be listed based on the priority of the job incident and should generate and assign it to the respective job owners.

I've used the solution for one to two years.

We did not use a different solution. 

The solution is easy to set up.

It offers very good value for money.

The license renewal activity is easy; the support team will provide the query we need to run it.

We use ActiveBatch Workload Automation primarily for managing work schedules.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation improved the organization I worked in because it's able to manage complex workflow automation even with a lot of cross-dependencies and hundreds of processes running. ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a very good tool in the Windows environment.

I found ActiveBatch Workload Automation to be a very good scheduling tool. What I like best about it is that it has very less downtime when managing many complex scheduling workflows, so I'm very impressed with ActiveBatch Workload Automation.

An area for improvement in ActiveBatch Workload Automation is its interface or GUI. It could be a little better.

There isn't any additional feature I'd like to see in the tool, except for the GUI, everything looks good.

I've been using ActiveBatch Workload Automation since 2009.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation has very good stability.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a scalable solution.

The technical support for ActiveBatch Workload Automation is very good.

We didn't use a different solution before using ActiveBatch Workload Automation.

The initial setup for ActiveBatch Workload Automation was straightforward.

Our deployment for ActiveBatch Workload Automation was done in-house.

I've seen ROI from ActiveBatch Workload Automation. It's a very good tool.

I don't have information on the licensing costs of ActiveBatch Workload Automation because a different team handles that.

We evaluated other solutions, but we went with ActiveBatch Workload Automation because it suits our environment.

I'm using version 12 of ActiveBatch Workload Automation.

Ten to fifteen people use ActiveBatch Workload Automation within the company. Between three to four people take care of the deployment and maintenance of the solution. Right now, there isn't any plan to increase the usage of ActiveBatch Workload Automation.

My advice to anyone looking to implement ActiveBatch Workload Automation is that it's a good tool for small requirements, for example, a few hundred scheduling workflows. For that, it should be a good tool, with good stability.

I'm rating ActiveBatch Workload Automation as eight out of ten.

We have roughly 8,000 jobs that run every day and they manage anything from SaaS to Python to PowerShell to batch, Cognos, and Tableau. We run a lot of plans that involve a lot of constraints requiring them to look at other jobs that have to run before they do. Some of these plans are fairly complicated and others are reasonably simple.

We also pull information from SharePoint and load that data into Greenplum, which is our main database. SharePoint provides the CSV file and we then move it across to Linux, which is where our main agent is that actually loads into the Greenplum environment.

Source systems acquire data that goes into Greenplum. There are a number of materialized views that get populated, and that populating is done through ActiveBatch. ActiveBatch then triggers the Tableau refresh so that the reports that pull from those tables in Greenplum are updated. That means from just a bit after source acquisition, through to the Tableau end report, ActiveBatch is quite involved in that process of moving data.

We have 19 agents if you include the Linux environment, and 23 if you count the dev environments. It's huge.

It's on-prem. We manage the agents and the scheduler on a combination of Windows and Linux.

We have some critical processes in ActiveBatch that go to finance and to the auditors in our organization. Those processes are highly critical because that allows us to trade. If those reports don't get to them, we get penalized by the government or by APRA or by some financial institutions. ActiveBatch, in this particular case, is absolutely critical for getting those reports out.

We have SLAs requiring us to get reports out by a certain time of day or by a certain day of the month, by a certain time. We're judged on whether those reports go out. ActiveBatch, being as stable as it, is only impacted by external factors like the network and database performance. But otherwise, we are quite comfortable with the way ActiveBatch is able to handle these jobs without our having to look at them.

Because the connections between ActiveBatch and other tools are automated, it gives us more time to do other things, and more interesting things. If something goes wrong, we can go back and have a look in the logs that are produced and that explain what's going on, and we can then repair it. It's an enabler, and it provides us with more time to get on with other jobs. It's something that's critical and it runs by itself and we're really happy it does that. We have that time available because we're not actually manually babysitting processes.

It provides a central automation hub for scheduling and monitoring, bringing everything together under a single pane of glass, absolutely. There is finance, sales, marketing. Pretty much every department has a job that we deal with. It's quite heavily integrated into our whole stack. As an insurance company, our major events department, for example, is critical because every time there's a storm or a hail event or a cyclone somewhere, those reports must get out in a timely manner. I can't think of any department that isn't impacted by ActiveBatch, running some report for them.

The single pane of glass helps the DataOps team manage all of the processes that are supported by ActiveBatch as the main scheduling tool. We've created a dashboard which pulls information from ActiveBatch, information that we can share with the organization. They can look at jobs and the schedules and, if necessary, run their own jobs from that point. It's like the lungs of our company.

Overall, it has helped to improve workflow completion times by 70 to 80 percent, easily. Once you've built a job, it just runs and no one has to concern themselves with it doing what it's doing. They will get the notification or the file or the email that says it's processed and they move on with their day.

In addition, we had a guy who was spending seven hours in a week to extract, compile, and then export information into a CSV file, and then another few hours to get it transferred to another department. We were able to build a PowerShell script, with a query that could easily be updated, that was automated through ActiveBatch. It takes 10 minutes to run. What that guy was doing in hours, we are now doing within minutes.

One of the valuable features is the ability to tie ActiveBatch into other applications using API calls. The native integrations and REST API adapter for orchestrating the entire tech stack are very good and user friendly. We have a product called ServiceNow, which is a call tracking system. If a problem occurs, ActiveBatch will send an API call into ServiceNow, and it will raise a ticket to say that there's a problem. That gives us an auditing process. We're also using API calls for Tableau and we're also using some API calls for SharePoint. We tie ActiveBatch into a lot of different applications.

Also, the overall ease of use is brilliant. It's easy to pick up. We can get a newbie up and running within a day, using ActiveBatch. It's not to the extent where that person will know some of the more complicated issues, but in terms of being able to build a job and export or run the job, it's within a couple of hours. Within a day, people are quite comfortable with the application. We've just signed an agreement with ActiveBatch which gives us all the education materials now. That means we'll be applying more advanced features. It's really good as far as ease of use goes.

We use the solution across all sorts of organisational branches. It's used for SaaS and SAP, which is finance. We have fraud and Salesforce, which is for the sales group. It's also used with marketing and major events because, when there's a storm, we need to know what's going on. We also have the ability to pull from external sources, meaning external vendors such as Guidewire. So ActiveBatch is widely utilised and probably more widely utilised than the executives realise. It's well embedded in our company.

We have moved to version 12, and I believe that interface is more of a "webbie" look and fee. 

A nice thing to have would be the ability to comfortably pass variables from one job to another. That was one of the things that I found difficult. Other than that, it's all good.

I've been with this company for over 10 years and it was already here before I arrived.

The most valuable feature is its stability. We've only had very minor issues and generally they have happened because someone has applied a patch on a Windows operating system and it has caused some grief. We've actually been able to resolve those issues quite quickly with ActiveBatch. In all the time that I've had use of ActiveBatch, it hasn't failed completely once. Uptime is almost 100 percent.

With those 8,000 jobs that run in a 16-hour period, the majority of the time we're spending about an hour of the day with ActiveBatch, repairing problems. There are issues where we have to re-run a job because of it exceeding its runtime. Or when a job fails, even though the alert goes out to the end user, we still have to tap the user on the shoulder and say, "Did you look at this alert? We've got a problem here, can you please fix it?" Other than that, it pretty much runs itself. Overall, ActiveBatch saves us a huge amount of time, being as stable as it is.

If we were having to repair everything, on an ongoing basis, we would be spending more than five or six hours a day, so we are saving at least five to six hours a day by using this tool. The improvement to the business is quite substantial. People aren't having to manually do anything that would normally take them two or three hours to do. Those things are being done within a matter of minutes and then passed on. And those five or six hours are just for us in our department. You can multiply that by the number of people who would normally have done something manually and who now have it done through ActiveBatch in minutes.

We're looking at more than a 98 percent success rate for uptime and for running jobs. The only time that something falls over is not to do with ActiveBatch itself, rather it's to do with problems with either the network, the database, or developers.

The scalability is brilliant. We've got 23 machines. We have redundancy integrated into this environment. 

If a server goes down, we can turn that queue off and re-queue those jobs to another server, while we get a new image spun up and restarted. In that situation, the delay is in getting the IT guys to spin up the image. If we could get an image spun up when it failed, it would be a matter of five or 10 minutes to be back in business with that server. As it is, once the IT guys do spin it up, we kick off from there.

The main interface is used by about 12 people. The dashboard that we've built on top of it is probably used by 70 to 80 people. But the number of people it affects is in the thousands across the entire organization.

It's heavily utilized across a number of departments in the organization and they really do rely on ActiveBatch to stay up and stable and to provide their reporting mechanisms.

We've had a couple of issues where we've had to log a defect with ActiveBatch. But the guys at ActiveBatch are really responsive. We had things fixed in 24 hours, and they're in a different time zone. The response time is exceptional. This is one of the few vendors that I can say is highly responsive and that shows a level of commitment that I don't think many other organizations show.

Positive

ActiveBatch replaced Windows Scheduler, Chrome jobs that had been running on some servers. There was also another scheduling tool that popped up somewhere but that data was moved into ActiveBatch. The scheduling from Cognos was also moved into ActiveBatch because it was more convenient, and some of the Tableau scheduling was moved into ActiveBatch as well.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's super-easy to install and super-easy to set up. Even on the Linux box, it was really easy to install and set up and run. There was no real complexity in the installation process.

Most of the time with setup or upgrades is spent testing. We usually deploy agents within 20 minutes. The scheduler and the database might take an hour and a half, but because the agents are on virtual machines, we have an image and we just spin that image up. If something goes wrong, we can just spin up a new image and get that agent started straight away. In terms of testing, when we do disaster recovery, we redeploy to a disaster recovery environment and then we test that the connections are working, the jobs are running, and that there are no problems. That's where most of the time is spent, not in the deployment itself.

We usually have two people involved in the process, one who is the primary and one who is the secondary. And then we have a couple of people on standby. The primary does the installation and the secondary is looking over their shoulder for learning purposes. Then we have a few people on the IT side in case there is a problem with the operating system or the network that we have to deal with, but they're not involved until there's a problem. The DBA is also on-call just in case there's an issue with the database.

Maintenance-wise, it's only if something happens that we go and look. We have a job that looks at the health of the database that ActiveBatch uses. It's pretty much all automated, so it looks after itself. We have another job that pings the servers to make sure that all the ports that it needs are running and open. We also have jobs that look at the network latency so that if the network latency is beyond a certain point, it notifies IT and us. It also looks at the operating system and the actual directories. Unless we schedule it for an upgrade, which we do every six months, we don't look at maintenance for that six months unless there's a problem.

ActiveBatch has been implemented in-house.

It pays for itself because it gives the DataOps team more time to be involved in other projects. It allows the organization to move forward without having to worry about doing anything manually. ActiveBatch is performing a huge service to the organization in terms of reducing the number of man-hours required to do manual tasks.

If you compare ActiveBatch licensing to Control-M, you're looking at $50,000 as opposed to millions.

ActiveBatch isn't the only scheduling tool that we have. There's also a product called Control-M, but control-M is a lot more expensive and mostly manages mainframe. ActiveBatch is at a very modest price for running a very complex process.

We can expand ActiveBatch more readily than Control-M because, with Control-M, you pay for X number of runs in a run book. If you want to extend that run book, they want half-a-million dollars, or more, for 500 jobs. We can expand ActiveBatch. We could go to 10,000 jobs and it wouldn't cost us any more. It's only if we were to add more agents to load balance that we would be charged any more, and it wouldn't be anywhere near what Control-M charges.

I've mainly been involved with ActiveBatch and it's hard to compare another vendor when there hasn't been a vendor to compare against. As far as performance is concerned, Control-M and ActiveBatch are on par, but they're not the same because Control-M is really just moving files and running programs on mainframes, whereas we're running against Windows and Linux environments.

The other one that's being utilized at the moment is Apache Airflow, but that's more for the developers because they like to be able to program the backend, rather than to use a frontend interface. We've been looking at how that works, but we haven't seen it to be very stable for a production environment. You can't compare Airflow with ActiveBatch, in effect.

My advice would be to jump on it straight away. With the ease of installation, the expandability or scalability of the product across multiple servers with different agents, the ability to not only use Windows but Linux as well, and the fact that you can build complex plans that have multiple constraints, multiple types of scheduling, and multiple types of alert mechanisms, it's highly expandable. You're going to have a lot of fun with it.

It's highly flexible and easy to use. In terms of what we can do, we still haven't gone to the Nth degree of what we can't do with ActiveBatch. It's incredibly flexible. We're running shell scripts that run Python scripts. We've got PowerShell scripts and batch scripts. We tie into different applications. We still haven't exhausted the potential of ActiveBatch. That's what I've learned.

Predictability is something that is out of the control of ActiveBatch. We can set a job to run against a database, but it's really going to be the network or the database that will impact ActiveBatch. ActiveBatch will continue to run. There is an average run time that we look at, but if the network has high latency or the database is under load, the time will increase. ActiveBatch will continue to run as normal. The frequency of ActiveBatch failing is quite rare.

We use the ActiveBatch interface up to a certain point, and then we start looking at running Python and shell scripts. That's why we have the Linux agent. We call a shell script which runs a Python script that does some manipulation and passes that information back. And then there are a number of plans that manipulate the process. In this particular plan, the CSV file is created and it's dropped into a file location. ActiveBatch is polling for that location. It sees that file. Then a Python script runs and creates an MD5 hash. When you download a file from the internet, there's an alphanumeric number that indicates whether that file is valid or not. The MD5 hash is generated on the file and when it's moved to another location, another MD5 hash is generated to determine whether there was a change in that file when it moved from A to B. It's a validation to make sure that no data was corrupted during the movement from where the file was dropped to where the file landed. Once it has been validated, the file is then moved into another location where it's uploaded into the Greenplum database and a notification is sent to whomever was involved in that particular process. It's quite involved.

If a job fails, we have set it to wait for a few minutes and to then re-run. If that fails, we can trigger another job to continue on in that process flow, if the failed job isn't critical. Some of the plans are quite complicated and have a certain amount of logic involved, but that enables us to navigate around problems that might otherwise need a developer's assistance, if it doesn't affect the overall plan process. As long as there are no constraints involved that require the next job to run, and it can move around that job and continue on, that's how we set it up.

We're looking forward to version 12 to see how that goes as well. We've also mirrored the database, the backend database that ActiveBatch uses. We have a failover process which was just recently installed. If one database fails, we can switch over immediately to the other database in real time.

Overall, we're really comfortable with how ActiveBatch is performing and with what it's doing.

Mainly we have used ActiveBatch for automating the deployment of different environments like production staging and QA. Earlier, we used it to have different software for each environment. This used to consume a lot of time, however, after using ActiveBatch we can manage everything under a single piece of software. The monitoring and alerting features are a great help to get complete insights and hassle-free for work. 

With the help of ActiveBatch, we have come up with cool automation starting from file transfer and pipelining the scripts with more test cases, had helped our company to grow many folds with the same resources.

Earlier, we had around four to five different tools to manage our automation which was all replaced by ActiveBatch. It is great. Even the resources required to manage those tools were reduced to a great extent and now, with only two employees, we are managing end-to-end automation. 

Our team is mainly into the automation of the entire application which usually takes around 20 minutes to complete. When ActiveBatch was used, it was done in less than five minutes. We were able to complete it before the deadlines we had and even our clients are happy with the results we produced.

Almost all the features are great. That said, if we wanted to select the best, then the monitoring feature which gives complete insights in a single dashboard is the most helpful. It helps to detect immediately if something goes wrong instead of waiting for someone to report it. 

The ROI of the application is more than what we used to spend for the entire year and its reasonable pricing has helped us to use it to its maximum. 

We are able to integrate it into multiple third-party tools like email, backup, tracking systems, SharePoint, Slack alerts, etc.

The help center and documentation are not that helpful. If we had some more user-friendly explanations and more video tutorials about how to set up and debug items, that would be ideal. 

The preset job step types make designing easy, while the steps of the job that allow scripts and code to be run allow for a wide range of additional functionality. This can be made better with more example scripts and pre-coded samples. 

If a few AI tools can be integrated with the product, it would enhance the entire product setup time and debugging issues.

I have used the solution in a previous company for more than a year. In my current company, I've been working with it for the past six months.

The product is very mature. There are a few bugs however, none of them are roadblocks. It can be resolved by some workaround.

There are no scalability issues. It easily can be used in a company with more than 1,000 employees.

They have very good customer service. We had an issue while setting up and we connected with their support team. They were able to help us and fix it on the same day. Their response time has been great.

Positive

I previously used Selenium, however, it's all bits and pieces, so we had to switch to ActiveBatch automation.

It was straightforward to set up. Only in the end, when we were importing files, did we feel a little more documentation would have been required.

We had an in-house team for the implementation. I would rate them eight out of ten.

It has helped to achieve a 20% to 30% net revenue increase in the last quarter.

Setup is easy and can be done within one or two days. The pricing is reasonable when compared to competitors. There is no need to worry about licensing as it's taken care of when you choose the plan.

Since I have worked with ActiveBatch in my previous organization, it was my go-to option. I did not evaluate others. 

Overall, it's the best product that fits perfectly to most of our use cases. That said, it can be made a little more budget-friendly.

The primary use case would be for monitoring the servers along with alerts and logs. Earlier, I had to do a lot of work on this manually and it was very time-consuming. Since the ActiveBatch Workload Automation has been implemented,  everything is smooth.

Also, we use it for job scheduling and server maintenance. This has been good. More than anything, when managing workload balance and multiple platforms, this solution helps me to avoid switching across platforms and keeps an eye on them as the tool automatically takes care of it.

Apart from this, the integrations for APIs have been very helpful as well.

Implementing this solution has been a real improvement in the work we do. This tool helps reduce the manual workload, and operational skills have been reduced as well. Now, the focus is more on developmental and deployment work.

Also, since this work has a multiplatform tool for scheduling, the jobs across platforms have been easy to handle. This has reduced a lot of micro-managing on these apps, and the amount of manual work is also reduced.

Plus, since the scalability is also automated, the team has benefitted when growing.

I use this product for multi-purpose functions. Some of the best features are:

• Workload processing
• scalability
• intelligent automation
• administration console
• workflow management
• service management
• proactive workflows
• error alerts
• service management
• job scheduling
• API integrations
• integrations
• multi-platform scheduling

Since I started using this product, I have been able to easily track everything as it mainly monitors, alerts, and looks after all the services - even across platform scheduling - which has helped me immensely.

The only issue I have is the price. It is a bit high compared to the other similar tools, yet the use case has been brilliant compared to others.

An additional feature would be the easy download of the data. I'd like to see that in this as a tool. 

Except for the GUI, everything looks good.

I have been using this product for around nine months.

The solution is very stable and dependable.

This is a good product. Since the scalability is automated, we do not have to wait on the alerts and manually increase the size.

Technical support offers great service.

Positive

I did use AWS and ServiceNow, and the switch is due to the fact that this has improved my time management very efficiently.

The initial setup was not much of an issue.

We did the implementation via an in-house team.

This solution is really worth the money.

It is worth the money; go for it.

We ask the company to please try to reduce the cost and provide it as a tool rather than a web interface. 

We used this solution for automating our batch processing which includes data load, refreshing data marts and refreshing the Power BI reports. We were using it for end-to-end automation, primarily for data delivery to reporting. We used every end-to-end process. The company is a customer of ActiveBatch. 

The solution is easy to configure and it's simple to develop new features, batch processing, or set up new process automation. It's also user-friendly for the operations team. I had experience on both sides working initially in operations, supporting the batch processing, and later on in development. Configuration is straightforward and it's easy to integrate with any system. All systems can be connected under one product rather than having to buy different tools to automate batch processing. The PowerShell feature or automatically using VBScript and the like offers good value. 

We haven't explored the cloud aspect of the solution because it's very costly. I think it should be provided as a free feature, which would be wonderful for organizations unable to take on the added expense of moving to the cloud. 

I used this solution for eight years up until a month ago when I moved to a different company. 

Yes, it is a stable solution but there are ongoing legacy issues that have carried through over the last few versions and which haven't yet been resolved. If there is too much batch processing happening some processes don't run properly. It doesn't happen all the time and we're able to manage it. 

The solution is scalable. We had around 50 people in the company using ActiveBatch as a tool. It was embedded more into the business side so it was used by the finance department, and the risk department, and it was used in customer marketing.

Customer support was helpful in providing the workarounds. Their knowledge base is very clear and they were very helpful for us in terms of creating more options. They provided a lot of the APIs and we were able to do our own DIY kinds of things. We created our own solutions using ActiveBatch and did our own monitoring so we could get enriched reporting. They were very helpful and provided us with good information.  

The product can be installed on any machine and it's very straightforward. If you know what you're doing it doesn't take long at all. Our implementation was all carried out in-house.

I'm unaware of the licensing costs but I know there is an additional fee for connecting to an SAP environment. 

This is a very good tool and I'm really missing it in my new company because I don't have a robust enterprise-wide scheduling tool and a really good tool for automating end-to-end.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

ActiveBatch Workload Automation is a standard scheduling tool that you have on the market. The ultimate goal is to run everything powered through ActiveBatch Workload Automation, but we are always constantly trying to move from our legacy processes, which always takes a lot of time and effort. However, all of the new processes we are focused on implementing through ActiveBatch Workload Automation.

One of the most valuable features of this solution is the versatility of the prebuilt jobs.

Any product is going to have some room for improvement, no matter what. I see the company has already ventured into AWS and they're constantly trying to improve the managed file transfer which they have recently improvised. I think they bought a software called JSCAPE and they're trying to improve it, which is good. 

I am not sure if JSCAPE would be part of the base product but currently, you have to buy a separate license for it, which doesn't make sense. If it was Microsoft, ServiceNow, or integrating with other software vendors, I would understand but JSCAPE is now in-house and I'm not sure if they can justify having a separate license for JSCAPE. I would probably expect them to be packaging JSCAPE into the base product. They did switch over from a perpetual license model to a subscription model, which hurt the company a little bit. Nobody is offering the perpetual model anymore. As long as the transition is fair for both the companies, I think it should be fine and not burn us out.

I have been using ActiveBatch Workload Automation for a few years.

ActiveBatch Workload Automation is scalable.

The scalability of the solution is good.

The technical support was difficult if you wanted to escalate the issue, it takes a little bit longer to escalate. Their service model does not allow for everybody to be on the hotline all the time. I understand that, but unfortunately, with a production system, that's what it is. If there is a bug, you want that hotline as soon as possible, because we don't know the impact of it. If it can widespread, if there is an issue, or if it's contained within one or two jobs. Luckily this has not been the case. 

It's all same architecture and framework of which you built upon several things. If there's a problem with it, you want to know it way before it impacts the other jobs.

I like ActiveBatch Workload Automation's licensing model because they're not holding you down on an agentless model or agent model, where every server needs to have an agent. That's the main selling point of the solution and I hope they stay that way.

I have evaluated other solutions, such as Control-M.

I rate ActiveBatch Workload Automation an eight out of ten.

I rated ActiveBatch Workload Automation high because the licensing model is way better than other solutions, such as Control-M or other companies that charge a lot more. I like their agentless model because most of the scheduling companies put in the rules saying, that for each server you touch, you need an agent. Otherwise, they cannot communicate, and will not work. This is a large advantage for ActiveBatch Workload Automation their Agent model is great.

We provide parking enforcement support for cities around the USA. So, if you are a municipality, then you may have a contract with us. We would provide you with services that would range from parking enforcement to tollway enforcement. It really depends on the end user and what the community's business is.

All of our automation runs through ActiveBatch. We have probably close to 2,500 jobs running each day that provide support for different municipalities around the US. All of our clients' data comes to us via a scheduled set of file movements within the arrangement of ActiveBatch. At midnight, every night, we get every ticket that a municipality issued in the last 24 hours, then we put that into our database so the municipality can ensure that they get that money collected within a reasonable length of time for collection purposes.

Each community has its own set of required rules that have to be followed, e.g., what kind of delay can happen before you make sure you collect on the debt from the citizen for having had a parking violation to when the next time you are going to go out and try to double check if they have not paid their fines.

It is deployed via our own internal network connections. It is a locally-sourced platform for us. We don't have a lot of really complex job flows. It just isn't the nature of our business, because you can't really take municipalities data someplace else. However, our data is shared in a data center in Wisconsin and a data center in Indiana, thus our data is in both locations every day.

ActiveBatch supports 250 municipalities around the USA for parking enforcement. In addition to that, there are almost another 200 that we support. They just go out and find out who owned the vehicle that had the violation, whether it be a toll road violation or a parking violation. There are a lot of moving pieces which are supported by ActiveBatch every day.

The combination of time scheduled events to running the import of data into our in-house databases is always critical, and that happens every day. Critical individual pieces for us are timed events.

ActiveBatch can automate predictable, repeatable processes very well. There is no real trick to what ActiveBatch does. ActiveBatch does exactly what you would expect a scheduling piece of software to do. It does it in a timely manner and does it with very little outside interference and fanfare. It runs when it is supposed to, and I don't have to jump through a bunch of hoops to double check it.

The reporting needs improvement. There is a real need for the ability to generate audit reports on the fly. It needs to be a lot easier than what I can do right now. This is a major item for me.

We are starting to look at doing tablet and mobile device support. An easier interface to set that up would be nice. However, at the same time, part of that is my own firm's requirements. It is not easy internally to support signing up and configuring remote access, if anything, making that easier would definitely be a plus.

We have been using ActiveBatch since 2012, and I have been part of the company since 2014. So, we have been using it for a reasonable length of time.

I find the solution very stable. 

I run jobs across two domains, all US time zones, and I have not found an issue where I couldn't run a job across a specific time zone yet. So, I think it's pretty scalable. It does what I am looking for it to do every day, and I have not found an issue where I couldn't do something. I don't have to chase after anybody to help me figure out, "How do I make the software do X, Y, and Z?"

A team of four of us, including myself, configure and monitor the software. I can't tell you how big the IT team is that supports the agents, which is how ActiveBatch runs, but there are a number of folks in that position. As a firm, we are not very big in numbers, but we respond pretty quickly if there is a problem somewhere internally that needs to be looked at and something has to be jumped on.

I find ActiveBatch very user-friendly and responsive. We are a pretty small company, as far as numbers go, and if it couldn't support what we're doing, then I would find another solution.

If I have issues with it, then Advanced Systems Concepts, Inc. (ASCI) has been very supportive with assisting us. They would jump in and help resolve the issue very quickly. They have been a joy to work with. I really haven't had any major issues with them. I have always walked away with, "Oh, here's the solution for the immediate problem." From my standpoint, that is always what I am looking for first, so I have been very happy.

I have been involved in automated scheduling software since 1989. I find this to be the easiest product that I have ever used, especially compared to Robot Schedule and CA AutoSys as well as an in-house scheduling software that I had designed and developed at one time.

I was not involved in the original setup.

We support an awful lot of clients. I look at what happens within our scheduler every morning for a review, and it is running 2,500 different workflows that probably have on average seven to eight job steps. On a normal day, I may have five that I have to worry about. If something went wrong, then I may have to rerun a job from earlier on, but that's it. There are not a lot of failures in the product.

We run an awfully lean group to accomplish all the work that we have to do. So, there is not a lot of extra time spent running a job. The job runs when it was designed to run, and that's pretty much every day. It does save us a lot of money, certainly more than doing it manually.

The decision for ActiveBatch was already in place when I joined the company, and there hasn't been any movement to go outside to some other solution.

Jump in and really look at what you are looking at, i.e. don't be afraid to question the vendor, and say, "Can it do this? Can it do that?" So, when you make the decision to use the software, you have done your due diligence and this solution will work for you. I personally think far too many people jump into the decision to buy an automated software piece without really understanding what they are asking it to do. You really have to know, "What am I looking for this software to do for me?" If you don't do that, you are probably going to find yourself unhappy at some point in time, saying, "Well, this really isn't what I thought I was getting." Then, that will end up being your own fault: The more effort you put in ahead of time, the better off you're going to be. Know ahead of time, "What am I going after here that will work for me?"

I may not know when a client municipality is going to deliver a file to us. So, a lot of our jobs run as events, not by time. In other words, it may run at three o'clock tomorrow morning or may not run until five o'clock the next morning, because the municipality wasn't ready to send us the data yet. It is a combination of what we have scheduled, as opposed to what we react to when a file is delivered to us.

I would rate this solution as an eight and a half (out of 10).