Automic Automation Reviews

We have many clients in financial services. We install, implement, and configure this solution for them. They use this solution to automate financial processes.

We have roughly 100 users, using this solution. We expect to increase the number of users of this solution.

There are some monitoring features that could be added. For example, when we have some external dependencies from processes that were run the day before or one week before, these dependencies are always complicated to configure.

Workload Automation should also have better RPA features, too. I think that would definitely improve this solution. Instead of having to have a separate solution for RPA, it would be nice if Workload Automation could handle it, too.

I have been using Automic Workload Automation for more than 10 years.

Both the stability and the scalability of Automic Workload Automation are great.

Usually, we only contact support when we have issues with bugs, etc. I think some users have support for installation and configuration.

I have used plenty of automation solutions. 

I made the move over to Automic Workload Automation as many other solutions weren't compatible with REST APIs. For me, it was a matter of evolution. The new solutions come with more features, more updated technologies that I can use. 

The initial setup, installation, and configuration are very straightforward.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight. If they added some additional features for monitoring, I would give it a higher rating.

If you're in need of RPA capabilities, this may not be the solution for you. RPA can be applied for some processes, but not for everything. 

We use it for batch automation and site switching. It has performed great for us, and we have had very few problems. We have done a full upgrade in the last 12 months where we went from an AIX to a Linux platform, and this was a massive change for us.

We are a big organization. We have 7000 employees. We are spread across Ireland and the UK, with operations elsewhere. Therefore, it is about where can we use Automic to create efficiencies. We know there are a lot of things that we are doing which are time and resource intensive. We would like to leverage Automic for these tasks.

We have been using Automic for more than 10 years.

We have about 40 million jobs and workflows go through our organization's Automic instance every year, from our Treasury functions to our SAP functions. We use it in approximately 30 to 40 applications. It is very important to us.

• Stability
• Versatility
• It is integrated across all our IT platforms in our infrastructure, which is a big plus.

• While the cost is competitive, there is always room for improvement.
• It has a very complicated interface, which could be made to be more user-friendly.
  

It works. It does not fail. If something fails, it is not Automic. It is a script or something else.

We are an electricity company, and we issue hundreds of thousands of bills to customers every month. Automic is key in getting the billing files ready, so they can be sent out to the customers. We are heavily regulated by an Irish regulator. Therefore, if there is any delay with bills going out and the process around it, we can be heavily fined. Thus, it is crucial that we have software that makes everything run smoothly.

One of the areas that we are looking at is using Automic in the cloud. Diversity is actually more important to us than the scalability at this point. For example, where can we leverage Automic to automate and improve efficiencies in our organization?

The technical support is excellent. We have gold support for Automic, and are happy with it. That is really key. If we invest with a company and its product, then we make it a critical condition that it can't fail, essentially. If it does fail, then we need to know that if we pick up the phone, someone is going to fix it for us.

The only time that we needed technical support in the last few years was when we were doing an Automic platform migration. We were on an AIX system and migrating it to a new operating system. For the migration, we relied on Automatic to assist with the transition. Apart from this, we generally do not have issues with Automic. 

Mostly, it is the jobs or scripts that we request Automic to run where we see issues, which is fine. These are fixed elsewhere.

This was before my time. I suppose we had an operations function that was shift-based. We would have a team that worked around the clock, and they would be performing the batch functions manually. Then, when Automic came in, we could operate 24/7 because Automic was doing the automation, but we only needed a team 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, in the office. This cut down on the need for a rolling shift. However, this is probably going back about 10 years ago.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

One of the key reasons for implementing Automic was to cut down on manual tasks: Workflows, jobs, the way it can work across multiple platforms and different operating systems, stop and start services, transfer jobs, and file transfers. This has all greatly increased our efficiencies and productivity, and reduced the amount of human interaction required. The key to this is the stability. 

We feel that we get a good deal with the price.

We recently renewed our Automic contract last year. At renewal time, it is not about looking for an alternative product, because we can't find one. Also, Automatic is heavily integrated in our organization. The cost to change would be a huge factor for us, and we have not found any other product that is better out there.

We have not found another product that can do what Automic can do. 

We are looking for use cases to utilize it within our organization. Basically, what we are looking to do now is to automate as much as we can within the organization.

We are probably not using it as much as we can, but that is on us. Any issues we have ever had with the product have been resolved. We are only using Automic more, rather than less, in the organization. It is as integrated in our company as it possibly can be. It is crucial to us. We would not put that this type of time and investment into a product if we were not sure of its capabilities and stability.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

The product has to fit. The vendor has to be willing to work with us and tailor their product to suit our needs, then offer that level of support to us. The company that we work in, we can't have downtime or outages. Automic and similar products are critical to our business and our internal business functions. Thus, support is key, if there is an issue, so we can get it fixed quickly.

Do your own proof of concept. Make sure you know what you want. Be clear about what you want the product to do for you. Go out and meet with the vendor, then test it.

This solution has many use cases because it's automation, so the sky is the limit. It can be useful for any workloads—DD operation, disaster recovery, data center automation—required by the customer. 

This solution is deployed on-prem. 

The most valuable features are its robustness, it's highly scalable, and it's easy to implement. 

This solution's out-of-box automation sets could be improved. They could be industry standardized out-of-box, or even runbook automation processes could be useful—just some plug-and-play automation processes out-of-box. It has many integration capabilities, from APIs to databases, but if the customer sees some out-of-box automation processes in it, it could be useful. 

As for additional features, a best practices library could be good. Also, maybe more technology connectors, in order to connect and run the automation, so more out-of-box integration points. 

We have been dealing with Automic for around three years. 

This solution is highly scalable. In our country, we have more than 30 customers using this solution. 

I would rate support an eight out of ten. From a customization point of view, it requires some technical knowledge. 

The installation is very straightforward. The time it will take depends on the implementation and the size of the project—it can range from one day to five days. A team of one to three people could be enough for deployment. 

We implement this solution for clients. 

They have changed the pricing on their licensing, and it's cheaper than before. 

I rate Automic Workload Automation a nine out of ten. I recommend this solution to others. 

We have several corporate solutions that need to be integrated with our ITSM products.

Automic facilitates integration to ensure the correct execution of ITIL process workflows. The first was to create service offerings for provisioning virtual machines in both private and public cloud environments.

The creation of virtual machines would have to contemplate the current process of changes, releases, and configurations. Our service catalog should make service offerings available; these involved diverse operating systems, different hardware configurations, and some functioning web services.

An approval process would also be contemplated, where the main steps would be the registration and closing of the change tickets, as well as the registration and deactivation of the generated configuration items.

We have several solutions, but we opted for Automic following the natural evolution of CA Process Automation. The fact that it has native integration with ITSM solutions was also an important factor in the decision. Due to the various possible integrations, all of them need to be in accordance with the ITIL process. This would facilitate the actions that would come in order to implement a DevOps culture in the organization.

The service support is acceptable and response times are fast, whether from the manufacturer itself or from partners.

Due to the fact that we have several solutions to be integrated into the ITSM processes, the possibility of having multiple client areas is important because it favors organizing integrations and automations.

We have other products from Broadcom (CA Technologies) in operation, and integration with these products was very smooth. It integrates easily with CA Service Desk Manager, CA Service Catalog and CA Process Automation, and more.

Adding that to the various packages and plugins available at Marketplace, the learning curve to make automation work was very fast.

We found that some Actions Packs and plugins do not have documentation, are incomplete, or are of poor quality. In most of the packages available, it took time to study and gain knowledge of the features and resources due to poor documentation. This time could be reduced if the documentation was more complete.

If the documentation is not well built, there will always be extra time for testing and some of these generate doubts that turn a simple job into something complex. With the project's schedules in progress, it is difficult to set deadlines, even if they are adjusted for more.

I have been using Automic Workload Automation for two years.

The product demonstrates excellent stability, regardless of whether the installation has high availability or not. We have not seen any problems in this regard.

It is a product that scales easily, but with a short aggregate in its version with high availability.

The most experienced support team is international. Some professionals at the time of implantation are no longer available. The service responds quickly to doubts and so far we have had no difficulties in this regard.

We have also used CA Process Automation, MS System Center Orchestrator, and Control-M.

Complexity only exists when installing high availability. Support from the manufacturer was required.

It was through a Broadcom partner. The team was very experienced in the product, including with use cases in a company in the same area in which our organization operates.

We don't have enough time to calculate ROI yet, but we are optimistic.

There are different licensing fees for cases where high availability is important. There is also a certain complexity in this type of installation.

We only evaluated Broadcom (CA Technologies) products.

Overall, the user experience is extremely good. The monitoring and troubleshooting features are rich and with the dashboards and other features, automation work is made easier.

We are working with telecoms to automate workloads. The use cases include automation from inception to activation. Some use cases also deal with professional services.

Our use cases are reflected in the cloud-based Workload Automation.

The ease of deployment makes it easier when it comes to the development and testing of the automations.

It integrates well with the CICD pipeline.

We would like a way to test our cloud-based automations on-premises, and then migrate them to the cloud after they have been tested, without needing an additional license. As developers, this would help us.

In the future, I would like to see a system where each developer works on their own changes, and they are submitted to a controller. At that point, the controller has the option to accept or reject changes from each of the developers.

I have been working with Automic Workload Automation for about four years.

I use many tools in combination with this product including Jenkins, GitHub, and GitLab.

This is a very stable product and personally, I have not had any issues with it. Our vision includes continuing to use it in the future.

Automic Workload Automation is scalable. I have experience with larger companies in different regions and I can say that a high number of IT staff, between 70% and 85% use automation tools.

For this product specifically, there are between 40 and 45 users.

Personally, I do not have experience with technical support. However, I think people in our team have been in contact with them.

We did not have a plan to adopt this product and didn't even discover it right away. Rather, we followed the new technologies and came up with new strategies that led us to it.

The initial setup is easy.

The first time we installed it, the process took between 30 and 45 minutes. After that, we replicated the installation and to deploy it takes no more than 10 minutes.

My team is responsible for the deployment. One person is enough for the task. For the implementation from end-to-end, it should take between six and twelve hours.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

This is absolutely a product that I recommend.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are a system integrator and Automic is one of the workload automation products that we implement for our clients.

This tool provides a great versatility of options for effective digital business automation. Integration with different platforms, ERP systems, business application, microservices, big data.

We are supporting multiple customers and their environments. Some of the most common uses are : SAP, SAP BW, Avaloq, FileTransfers, FTP/SFTP, Datastage, Informatica

It has its own scripting language which allows you to be even more flexible with the objects and create your own unique environment. You can easily have a single object with smartly defined parameters (variables) and reuse that object in many different workflows, passing different values to achieve different purposes. 

The vendor support is really bad and should be improved. The engineers taking our vendor tickets are not knowledgeble enough of the product and occasionally not helpful at all. Tickets usally are bouncing back and forth with very little helpful information or investigation from their side for a issue we are experiencing/reporting.

I have been working with Automic Workload Automation for at least five years.

This is a stable product and we plan on continuing to use it in the future.

Automic Workload Automation is scalable, although it can improve on the database side. When it comes to workload automation tools, the database is always at the back of the list.

My team has approximately 25 people in it, and we have teams in America and Germany as well.

The technical support is slow, and the people that take the cases are not really familiar with the product. Most of their answers are simply "Did you check the official documentation? Did you check the knowledge base articles?"

If we are at the point that we are asking for support, most times, we would have already checked everything place that we can.

Basically, they should be faster and more knowledgeable.

In our team, we are using four workload automation tools including Automic, Control-M, Autosys, and TWS/IWS. We are supporting all of them but I concentrate on Automic because it's the one that I like the most.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is pretty easy to install this product anywhere, regardless of whether it is an on-premises or cloud-based deployment. Usually, deployment takes four hours at the most.

I have done the deployment several times, myself.

This is a good product and I can recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We are a reseller and solution provider, and this is one of the products that we provide for our customers.

This is a conversion product, and we use this solution to assist customers who are converting from another product. Our primary focus is one-for-one migration, bringing it up to the next level and getting it ready for the next phase.

This solution saves our organization time, in terms of management. It is also more systematic and gives us more control. It is easy to learn.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the scheduler.

The workflow is object-oriented.

The source code is centralized, rather than being deployed to the individual servers.

There are always ways that technical support can be improved.

I would like to see more types of Calendars in the next release of this solution.

In terms of stability, so far so good. We have not encountered any bugs in this solution.

Our proposal matches the average, so we have not needed the solution to grow.

The plan is to increase usage once this solution is stabilized. We are hoping that this is in the near future.

I have worked with technical support, and we are pretty happy with them. The response time is long, but they have been ok so far.

Prior to this, we used other products from the CA Automation family, but with different branding. We used the AutoSys d-Series Edition.

With respect to migration or conversion projects, the compilation is done with a conversion factory. This is done on-site, and after that, there is testing and production. The deployment time for a project is between three and six months.

Many of the things are handled by the CA Compilation team. We are on-site, assisting the technical team. We migrate across from the remote site to the client site.

There is a lot of coordination that has to be done with the customer. The environment, including the data, has to be ready.

Two or three people are required, on-site, for the deployment. One of them is an architect and two of them are engineers.

Once this solution is deployed, the customer takes over the operation, including the maintenance.

When our customers have a lot of manual processes, the automation will reduce the number of human errors that occur. This will reduce the cost.

I began using this product just after it was acquired by CA. We have four to five people who have been trained on CA Workload Automation across all of the developing nations.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to carefully look at the environment. Some manual processes can be converted, but some are best left done using human manual input. If this is the case then you have to convert these into a scripted document image.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We are currently doing a migration from Dollar U to ONE Automation for 815 applications for one of our clients.

We have used ONE Automation to make a platform for one of our clients using two clustered Oracle Databases and web services, with an Automation Engine. 

We made another platform for backup using Data Guard and two web services with two Automation Engines and one Oracle Database, so if there is a problem with the first platform, functionality can pass directly to the second platform.

I have found new methods for converting scripts from Dollar U to ONE Automation. For example, I take the dynamic library from Dollar U and put it in the dynamic binary library in ONE Automation. This enables us to use Dollar U scripts in ONE Automation.

It's easy for integration, not like BMC Control-M. It's clear when there are errors or bugs. We can just go to the logs and read the error code and find what needs to be done.

There were many bugs in the last version. For example, we could only use capital letters for searching for agent names. Also, we had a problem with ONE Automation where we couldn't use the PGA and SGA in Oracle Databases for resolving RAM because the last version didn't have this capability.

We can use ONE Automation with many other applications like ServiceNow and Jenkins. This is the scalability for me, that there are many possibilities with this tool. We can use it with many other technologies. It is really good.

The company where we are doing this work is looking at expanding into banking, and that would happen in many countries. Of course, this would give us more work with Automic Workload Automation. The objective is that all applications for this client are within ONE Automation.

I do not contact CA technical support but my colleague does for many bugs and other security and system requirements. We need to change many things in our platform for security needs. We open cases with ONE Automation to help us with the skills for integration, development, and administration. Tech support has been helpful.

I used Dollar U. There are really big differences. Dollar U has decentralized methods and tools. ONE Automation has centralized tools. It is really strong and really easy to use ONE Automation. For example, for organizing, for creating applications and clients, for manipulating the agents, for the servers, it's really easy. You just put the agent in the server application with the LI and it directly connects with the Automation Engine Server. It's amazing.

The initial setup required us to do an analysis of the Dollar U environment for conversion to ONE Automation. We have special tools for converting the session and the UPROCs from Dollar U to jobs and workflow in ONE Automation. We have developed macros with VBA to convert all the information in Dollar U to ONE Automation.

When we start an integration for the first time, we create the client and we attach the agent for the application, because every application is a "client" for us. We use Red Hat Servers for this. Of course, we use Windows servers, but 80 percent are Red Hat as well as iX and HPE servers.

Each application takes a different amount of time. For example, there are applications for factoring or financial applications. We need one year for their implementation. Smaller applications take a few months. We start with the small applications and then move to the more difficult applications. We have a team working on this and every person has ten or 15 applications to do.

You should know configuration and scripting in Shell because Automic only gives binary, which you can adapt for your environment. You can the Automic with PostgreSQL, but it's not good. I prefer to use it with Oracle Database and to use clusters to create a solid environment.

I have installed many packages, such as for WebSphere, for chat bots, for SSH, and for using programs like Excel, and Word. I'm trying to learn many things about development with ONE Automation.

It's a good tool, really strong. It needs some new features, it needs to evolve, but it's really good. I really like it. And now, with Broadcom in the picture, it's a strong company.