Automic Automation Reviews

We have all of our payroll being done in the platform. There are a lot of different processes that need to be taken care of, and they all need to be linked together. When you put them into a workflow, and you know that you've built logic into that workflow, and you have alerting, it's something you can step back from. You don't have to be worried about every single piece of that puzzle. If something goes wrong, you have confidence that some alerting will let you know. It streamlines, it makes things go faster, less eyes on glass.

This product has really helped Comcast and the organization streamline a lot of independent jobs that we might have had. We can take something from crontab, something that's very nitty-gritty and low-level, and be able to put it into a nice interface, and be able to track it at every junction along the way, add alerting, all kinds of stuff, interdependencies. The list goes on and on.

I'll start by saying, one of the big features that they did implement, that a lot of people, us included, were asking for for a long time, is the ability to do zero downtime upgrades. They have introduced that. We haven't gotten to that version yet. That's the dream. 

Honestly, this is a hard question for me to to answer because we're so far back. I just want to get to the point where we can see and use the features that they have added, that we just haven't even been able to touch yet.

All products have downtime. In our specific example, the product has become so critical for our organization that taking the necessary plan-maintenance, to do patching and upgrading, that has become a challenge for us. We're several versions behind now. 

Outages that we incur are at least partially our fault at this point, because our reliance on the platform has become so much that it's a struggle to even upgrade. That aside, we see some downtime from time to time. But I think some of it is self-incurred. We would do ourselves a favor in working on this, to get the platform upgraded to get to the more stable, bugs-are-fixed, and things of that nature.

I just saw a session here (at the CA World conference). We're nowhere near this, but the vendor - CA, Automic - they just increased scalability way more. Like I said, we'll probably never get to this, the point that they've increased it to. 

It's very scalable. We have two nodes that are highly available. You can add new nodes if you need that. You can take a node, a total node, down and still be operating fine. It has a lot of scaling to it.

Initially, is it hard to set up? I don't really think so. I've been working with it for a while now. Once you understand how something works, it becomes pretty easy. 

I'll say this, support team there have been really great, very enthusiastic. Will answer your questions, and that helps a lot. A lot of it is, you don't know what you don't know. Once you do, you've got it figured out.

In terms of upgrading, it's very database-driven. You have to upgrade the database, and then just replace binaries, new software.

When selecting a vendor, support is really important, cost is always a factor. The licensing model can play into it. My team works with several tools, other CA tools and some other company tools. The licensing model can really be a burden, and just takes a lot of time and cycles away from other work that you want to be doing. Things like that. But yes, I think support's a big one. Definitely being able to work with them, knowing that they're there, knowing that they have the aptitude.

I'd rate it an eight out of 10 probably, being honest. I don't have a lot of experience with other tools. 

I think it's great. I think it does what we need it to do. Again, reliability. I think we hurt ourselves a little bit. But they take the product very seriously. They're improving it all the time. I get a lot of excitement. It's hard not to be excited being in this environment (at the CA World conference) and seeing the people that work on it, and seeing the TED Talks, etc. I'm excited to get to the next level. I'm tired of not being able to get there.

Workload automation. We are using it for job scheduling and automation of our internal business processes to eliminate a lot of manual workaround.

It is performing very well. We are getting ready to upgrade to version 12. We have been running 10 for the last four and a half years, and we have had a really good experience with the product. 

It has made everybody more efficient and productive. So, it eliminates a lot of the manual workaround processes, which enables our business to get more out of its people, which is always good. 

The ability to be able to automate more of our business processes: 

1. It gives us a lot of leverage in terms of what we can do with the product. 
2. The predictive analytics portion, which is the reporting capability, gives us a lot of useful data.

Keep enhancing the analytics piece. We are just getting involved with that, so we have not had the reporting functionality previously in version 10. We have seen and heard a lot of good things about it. In talking with other customers as well, they would like to see a few enhancements done where you can pull in outside data sources to get a cumulative view from one centralized place.

I think this is something that they are currently working on. This is exciting news for us, because we are definitely looking forward to it.

Stability has been very good. We have not had any major issues or very much downtime at all. If we have had downtime, it has been planned. So, stability has never been an issue for us. 

Scalability scales up and down. We are a fairly small shop right now. I would say we are scaling. We are slowly growing, but we are not anywhere on the scale of what the product can handle, especially talking with other customers that are much bigger than we are. 

We have had no issues with the scalability so far.

On a scale of one to 10, I would say, probably a seven. 

We have had some issues recently going through the process of trying to upgrade from version 10 to 12. Working with support, we have gone back and forth a lot, and a lot of that has had to do with resources not being available either on their side or on our side. 

From that perspective, it could probably improve a little bit, but overall, we are very satisfied. 

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I have been involved in the current upgrade process.

The current upgrade process is straightforward. They have made the process much simpler. After we get to version 12 and any subsequent versions going forward, it should not require any downtime at all. It should not require any system reboots for the upgrade of other components outside of the engine itself, such as the agents.

No. We just decided to stay with what we had because we have had really good luck with it and we are very satisfied with the product. 

We are very satisfied with the solution as a whole. There is a lot of new functionality that we are excited about. We have not had any real major problems systematically with the solution. Overall, with the product, we are very satisfied. There are a few areas that we feel like, from CA's perspective, could be improved, one of those being support. The other being new additional features and functionality that we as customers are looking forward to. 

Consider what you are trying to accomplish with a product like this. Definitely list out all the pros and cons of solutions. Make sure the solutions you are looking at fulfill your business requirements. There are a lot of solutions in the marketplace that have a lot of bells and whistles that may or may not be of benefit to certain companies. Make sure when you are looking at solutions and potential partners that the solutions that you are looking at fit your business needs.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• The level of trust. From a customer perspective, it certainly factors into that.
• The relationship with account managers. 
• How attentive they are to our business needs and how we are evolving as a company as a whole. 
• The overall functionality of the solution that the partners provide. There are a lot of other competing products in the marketplace, so that certainly factors into it as well. 
• We are looking for specific needs and requirements from our business partners, and that certainly throws a big chunk of how we interact and consider what solutions we are going to bring in for our business. 

Primary use case is for scheduling of our LCM, our Loyal Customer Mailers. Mailers go out with coupon packets for different households. Automic is used for scheduling all of the jobs that build those mailers, and send them off to the printer.

Performance-wise, we do run into problems sometimes, because we've only had it for about a year and a half. We're still working out some kinks as far as performance goes. But overall the performance of the tool itself has been pretty good. At first, it was a little bit slow, but we've worked out a lot of those performance issues over time, it's working a lot better now.

For me the biggest one is flexibility. It allows you to do so many things on so many different platforms. We have an Oracle shop that runs off of Oracle packages that are executed from Linux boxes. With that, whatever platform it touches, it can allow you to do so many different things. We can take the power of Linux, the power of Oracle and, inside Automic, we can just build our own little packages, and our own little toys, to go out there and do things.

For instance, one that I'm working on right now is to build test data to run extracts against production data. To build smaller tables, subset tables, for the development teams on the test side. It's a little bit like building my own version of TDM. But Automic allows me to do that, and to be able to schedule it, to go out on its own and do copies of these tables, on a regularly planned schedule. It makes it very powerful.

Number one, A+, is the scripting language, and the ability to go in, and take an already robust, consistent, strong tool, and turn it into an incredibly scalable, flexible tool, that you can literally do anything you want to with.

Back in the old days, I would think, "Okay, if I need a specific job done, I would think, what type of Shell script, or maybe a Python program, would I have to right to get this done?" Now I can do everything inside of Automic itself, using Shell scripts, or using the Automic scripting language itself; makes it very powerful.

A problem we've had is where file transfers are being kicked-off from one server to another, without us doing it. It's something internal to Automic that's doing it. And it is costing a little bit of performance, and it's a time issue, on the zero client. But otherwise, it's not affecting the other product issues.

I would also like to see a little bit more connectivity, more, "Play nice with other toys." For instance, we have IServ as our primary tool for our service request tickets. In order for it to play nice with Automic, we had to actually create a file and put it somewhere, where Automic can see it. I would like to see more connectivity with other tools, or more compatibility with other tools.

A little less button clicking, in the navigation of the tool itself would also help. There is a lot out there, and I understand that's what keeps the tool robust. It keeps our options open, but it's a bit click-y sometimes. To get where you need to go, you have to go through 10 levels.

The stability of the tool is fantastic. In the year and a half, it's really only gone down a couple of times. The tool itself is very stable.

What's nice is that it splits it up into clients. We have our own client where we do our own work. We don't have to cross into the path of other people; they can do their own work on their own client. From an organizational standpoint, that makes it very easy to use. The stability of the piece itself, has been proven pretty well.

The scalability is out of this world. We're a shop that has about 40 clients. When I say "clients", we have our own group, our own area to work in - production - and a couple of test environments. That's three clients. We've got about forty or fifty clients in our company. Different groups have their production, test, and development areas. But we can scale that out to 300 or 500 clients if we need to, without changing anything. It's a logical division, not a physical one.

The scalability of the tool itself, is really fantastic. It lets you work in your own silo, and you can have as many silos as you want.

We changed out from Chronicle to Automic in 90 days, without a single outage to our business. That has never been done with Automic. The Automic people were even saying, "How the heck did y'all do that?"

But we had some people from Automic, this was before CA bought them out. Some guys from Automic came over to our site, stayed in Cincinnati for a couple weeks, to help us with this initial setup, because it was such a time crunch. We had 90 days to get it in, and we had to pull the switch on Chronicle, or else it was going to cost us $1.5 million. It was a big time crunch, and they helped us get it in, get it working. We did not have any outage, we did not miss any Loyal Customer campaigns. Nobody missed the coupons because of our switch to Automic.

In terms of selecting tools, the important criteria are 

• the fit of the tool
• cost of the tool
• support of the tool. 

That's the one, two, three I think everybody would answer.

Do the demo, and don't be scared of the Automic scripting language, because it's easy, if your team is technical at all. It's good to learn, it's easy to learn, and it just makes the tool explode with possibilities.

Typically we use the product to automate the delivery of the files that we pick up from clients and use for processing. Once processing is over, we use it to deliver results downstream to the client's delivery center.

So far, it has been outstanding. We haven't had any issues with it. It has saved us both money as well improved our overall quality.

Cost savings, productivity, the overall quality. When we do have an issue, it's typically not the software that we're using.

It's hard for me to say how it improves the way the company works, because I've only been here for about six months. I know that we've come to rely on it as a standard feature, as to how our processes are designed.

Doing more with less. It's allowing us to increase our overall volumes of data that we're working with, without actually increasing the overall amount of team that we need to monitor it. Since we can rely on its availability and quality, it has not been an issue.

It seems still very technical to get the full features out, which is fine when you're an IT-based company. But once you get to some of the leadership levels, such as myself, you don't have time to go digging into it. It would be nice to have some additional performance features such as reporting, analytics, that kind of stuff.

I've not had any issues with the stability, at all. None that I'm aware of.

I don't know about scalability yet.

I do know that because of what seems to be a simple solution, we are looking at Automic and, CA in general, for ways that we can leverage the technology in our other areas.

I have not used technical support personally, but my team has used it. We've always found them very helpful.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are, overall: 

• reliability
• experience
• references.

There are a lot of good ideas out there, not a lot of proven ideas, this one seems to have proved itself.

If I were to give advice to a colleague who is looking at similar solutions, I would have them have a general idea of where they see the company now, and where they're hoping that the company can be in the next two to five to seven years. Then, look not just at this one product, but the suite of offerings that they have, in making the selection. It seems to me that if we work with Automic and it works very well, the same reasons why we enjoy that product would also apply broader to the company CA.

We use it for scheduling our batch systems and interfacing with our developers and our test systems.

It has performed very well. We've had the product for a number of years, since 2013, but before that we had another product called AppWorks for a dozen years or so. And then AppWorks was acquired by Automic. We keep moving up.

The new release is web-based, so that's a big, big improvement. A lot of our products that we use right now are going to that platform.

It's easy to train other people. A new developer could come in and learn it very quickly.

Better escalation process for alert notifications. When there's an error or a problem, the automation part of it could be easily programmed to escalate it up to the developers or whoever is going to work on it. We had to home-grow that within the product because third-party products are so expensive. Having that would be a wonderful improvement.

It's super. It's solid. Never goes down. For me as a user of it, it's solid.

We have a lot of legacy systems and we're implementing new systems and applications to take over the old things. We're an insurance company so we have claims, and policies, and AP, and financials, and payroll. Old systems get old, and as we're implementing new systems, AppWorks or Automic now, just fits. It's just the best there is, so, it was a no-brainer. 

We had such success with AppWorks. And then we went to this big RFI to figure out what we were going to change to because we didn't want to upgrade AppWorks anymore. But the success that we had with AppWorks - and then when Automic bought it - it was like a no-brainer. We would just go with them.

It was good. We had customer support who came onsite to install it and to train everybody and I was right there. It's mainly a product for our department, and then, as an administrator, we assign everybody, all the users and train them.

The whole thing is just a great product. We're really happy with it. 

In terms of selecting a vendor, I'm not the one who does that but they go through a pretty extensive process of looking at the cost, the reputation. I would think it would be a combination of things including reviews. Management takes care of that stuff.

Do your homework. Do your research. The product we have is the best. I don't know what you can afford or how big your company is, and what your needs are. It might not fit into every company, so do your research.

Monitoring Oracle jobs.

Performance is great.

It's huge because I was a user in a subdivision that got bought or came into the single instance of Emerson. We brought, at the time, UC4 with us. We saw it was a value even for Emerson as a whole to have it.

Being able to script, create something I want the software to do for a specific job. This allows me to do that. Very powerful.

It's a scheduling tool on steroids. We can have a job run at certain times. If it fails, reset it a number of times and then send an e-mail. Send e-mails on any type of event. Calendar creation, schedule things on certain days, year-end stuff, period end. It's endless, really.

I don't know if they have it now, but a mobile version would be good so instead of logging in on my laptop to see something, I could just go in through an app and see if a certain job is running or not. That would be pretty slick.

Stability is good. We just upgraded, so there are a few things we're working on, but otherwise it's pretty stable.

The scalability is good. We've got more than Oracle jobs, we've got Windows and SQL Servers so we can do quite a bit.

They're responsive, because we've had the tech people on the phone during upgrades. They've also been teaching us, because we're learning the new version, so I guess I could say I've worked with them. They are very knowledgeable.

The older version wasn't performing as well because we pretty much maxed out what it could handle with our thousands of jobs we run a day. So, the Automation solution was brought to us and we said, "Well, this thing could supposedly handle it," so we've gone to it, and so far so good.

I'd say complex from the side that I don't know, where they have to set up, from our operations group, the servers and all that. That's beyond me.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor, I would say, are

• tech support
• the knowledgability
• their track record with other users 
• the size of the users too, to see where we compare with them.

Go for it. I love it because I can move around in it and I'm very comfortable with the software. So I'm not scared of it, you could say.

Primary use case is to automate our batch processing for our DNA applications, which is our core banking application.

It has helped us automate our processes. It has taken the human factor out of it, so it has improved accuracy, speed, and coordination of our batch processes. It has allowed us to have a hands-off approach to our batch processing and automate complex processes amongst different systems. 

It is very scalable and robust, and it keeps growing with us.

We are working on the 12.1 release right now. It has a lot of things that we have been asking for. I do not have a wish list right now. 

The stability of the platform has been excellent. They are very quick to reply to any issues that we have, and release any hotfixes to fix any issues we have had. We have not had any stability issues with the platform. 

When I joined my company, we were using an application from AppWorks. I was part of the decision process to do the beta with One Automation when UC4 bought them, and then became Automic. I was also part of the decision to stay with the platform and to continue to renew each year.

I was involved in the initial setup. The software itself was pretty straightforward. We converted from the Application Manager Platform to the One Automation Platform, and it was a little complex to get our jobs migrated over. Once they were migrated over, it was pretty straightforward. The software itself was pretty straightforward to install and get going.

Really take a look at Automic. They are a great company to work with and they have the best automation package out there. We did look at a lot of different packages when we were out there. I was not part of the initial decision process, but I did see the use cases that they did, the companies that they looked at, because they made the decision shortly after I came.

They looked at BMC and Tivoli. It was quite a while ago, but they were able to come and do a proof of concept very quickly with our use cases and really show value quickly.

The solution has performed excellent for us. However, the interface with the DNA platform and the partnership with Pfizer has not been as smooth as we would like it to be, but that is not the software's problem. The software itself has been very good.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: partnership. We do not like to have vendor relationships where we just hear from the vendor every so often. We like to have that partnership where they listen to what we need and work with us to fix our solutions. Every company has their own issues they need to solve, and we want somebody that is going to work with us to help us with our growth and what we are facing in the industry.

Our primary use case is automating and integrating different workloads and systems to populate data warehouses and different applications.

It allows us to free up developers' time from not having to set up environments, but actually using different environments. It allows us to have accountability and traceability of changes. It also allows us to be in the mainstream with what a lot of other companies are using, so it is easy to get a transfer of skills and be able to collaborate with other people in the field, because we are using a more popular tool. 

1. The modulation of some of the things, like how the things are connected and disconnected. You have different login objects that you can quickly put to other different objects and other objects that you create, which makes transporting things very easy from one environment to the next. 
2. I like the documentation that is out there. It is very good and the community that comes with it is really good. It provides a lot of different use cases similar to ours that people have for specific things which we can go out, look at, and receive some help on. 
3. It is very technology agnostic. It fits with pretty much all the different types of technology, different types of servers, and different other types of languages that we use; it fits in very well with everything.

There has to be a better way to visualize things in the application without having so many windows open. That is just an on its face type thing. If you get in deep into some of these processes, you may have 20 windows open, and there has to be an easier way to manage that. The actual components that they have are great. Just the presentation of it; sometimes I feel like there is too much on the screen and I want to simplify it. I want to get to the information that I need to without wasting my time trying to expand this window or trying to click this and do all that. So that is my one downside the tool. They need to figure out how to reduce the number of windows that you can have open. It is more of an aesthetic thing, but it helps your functionality out because you get to the crux of problems a little quicker when you do not have to surf through 20 different windows.

At my company, if there is a limit, we are going to find it. Everything has a finite limit. No matter what people tell you about any type of software, it is always a finite limit. However, compared to other competitors' software packages, this has been a lot more stable, but no software is completely stable. If there's a limit, we're gonna find it. Our company pushes the envelope when it comes to the data we process, display, and publish to our users, so sometimes we find those limits. Overall, especially since we have dealt with the competitor for a number of years before we switched over to Automic CA, it has been pretty stable. 

It seems very scalable. 

It is one of things, where there are a 100 ways to do something, and that is a good thing and a bad thing. You can do it the bad way and it will not be scalable, or you can do it the better way and it will be scalable. So, on its face, it is very scalable, but it definitely depends on how you implement it. 

They have been pretty good. We have had the professional services company uses some of the budget to bring some of those guys in to work on specific problems and they are very interactive and very responsive. 

I have not really had any issues. However, if there is a limit, we are going to find it. It does not matter what, and whose name is on the technology.

I was heavily involved in the initial setup. It was December 2015 that we had to migrate our entire workload automation suite of 1000s of jobs. We are publishing petabytes worth of data into this big relational data warehouse, publishings, all these different applications. We probably received 2000 files per week, and probably had 5000 jobs per week. Therefore, we had to migrate all that from one solution to another solution in 60 days. It was a contract thing that was going on, so we had to do it and I was heavily involved. We had some professional services people come down and we found out about it in mid-December and we were done by the first week of February. So, it was a heroic effort, but we did it.

I got brought in when they signed the contract.

There are some things that could be more intuitive in the tool. There is a lot of functionality, but the presentation of it could probably be better. It is a very powerful tool which allows for portability of code through different environments.

Get out there and research what the community is doing and different use cases. Take a look at the community and look at the feedback that the community is giving. It is a very user driven community. It is not driven from CA. It is driven from the users themselves, so I definitely go take a look at the user feedback, then think about the management and the implementation of this tool, which are very important. 

Back to the first thing, "There are 100 ways to do everything." Therefore, you have to come to a consensus on, "This is the way we are going to do it", and have some standards upfront, because it is going to be a harder once you get into it using the tool. With any workload automation tool, it is the backbone of your organization. Once you start using, it is hard to change. Think about the implementation and best practices upfront and listen to the feedback from the user community.