Automic Workload Automation Reviews

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.

It is basically for workload automation. Automic has also got other features, but we are not using them. We are just sticking to workload automation. We basically do batch processing through automation. We mostly have nightly batches and cyclical batches during the daytime.

The reason we went with Automic is very simple. We were using ESP, which was a Broadcom product. So, Automic happened to be a natural fit. It was a much easier transition from ESP to Automic. We had familiarity with the vendor and the product.

There are pain points, like anything else. Sometimes, things they say work, and sometimes, they don't work. You need to find out why they don't work and then go back and have them fixed. 

We have been using it for close to a year.

Like any product, there are glitches. We had used ESP for almost 30 years. So, we were very familiar with the tool, and it was pretty stable. This is an agent-based solution. So, sometimes, the agents don't respond and triggers don't work. Those kinds of issues are still there.

Workload automation is not heavy stuff. When things have to happen, they just wake up and do the work. It is not like an E-commerce solution where your workload is going to increase by X factor and then you add X servers. It is not that way. So, from a scalability point of view, it is scalable.

They're pretty okay. We worked with CA before Broadcom bought them. So, we've got a long working relationship with them for over 20 years, and their support is pretty okay.

They work with a partner to help you with implementation and migration. The partner had tools for migration from ESP to Automic, which was helpful.

Its price is way up there with BMC. It is a little bit on the expensive side.

We only use it for workload automation. We haven't explored the tool as such. It claims to have a lot of features, but we have just touched the surface of it.

From a workload automation point of view, there are multiple tools. You've got BMC. You've got Automic, and you've got Stonebranch. Stonebranch is the smaller of the lot, and from a solution perspective, their agent can work with any other automation tool. Cost-wise also, it is much cheaper than the others. If you are a small enterprise and don't have an existing tool, Stonebranch wouldn't be a bad option.

I would rate Automic Workload Automation a seven out of ten.

I use Automic Workload Automation for SAP-related use cases. They are primarily functional and nonfunctional job executions for SAP Windows Unique. So, mainly for a business process or business functions, job execution, and creating dependencies related to retail like Oracle and SAP jobs execution.

I like that Automic Workload Automation has many features compared to other products. There are a lot of good features, and architecture-wise there is a valuable client concept. The architecture and the multi-tenancy is a multi-client concept. That is also useful.

The manage file transfer area could be better. The file transfer area needs improvement. Other products like Control-M have some good features in this area.

I have been working with Automic Workload Automation for the last ten years.

Automic Workload Automation is a stable solution. It's good because, architecture-wise, it has high reliability. So, we recommend it to our customers and ask them to use two or three-node architecture. If one goes down, the other should be up. So, two or three-node architecture is stable.

Automic Workload Automation is a scalable solution. Scalability depends on the architecture. We are currently running 10,000 jobs or 20,000 jobs with two-node architecture. If we want to add one node or if we're going to add more resources, you can do it online. You do not need any downtime. You can run thousands of pages and millions of jobs.

Technical support is good. I worked with a particular dedicated client, and we had to reach out to Broadcom once or twice a month for help. Whenever we raised a ticket, they responded within a day or the next day. Most of the time, it wasn't even an urgent issue.

Nowadays, they have very helpful knowledge articles. If I have an error and they share some knowledge articles, I get the solution through those articles. They are helpful.

The initial setup is straightforward. It hardly takes half an hour or one hour, but small components like agents must be installed later. The initial fresh installation will take about one hour.

I'm not sure about licensing costs, but I know the base price is about $3,000, and you can get some kind of discount per node.

I would tell potential customers that they must use third-party software like Control-M, Stonebranch, AutoSys, or Tidal to migrate to Automic Workload Automation. 

If we compare it to any market-leading software, like Control-M BMC, Automic has the same capability, but Automic provides everything as a bundled product. Others like BMC sell their products in different modules. So, you have to buy the license, and on top of that, you have to buy the separate modules. 

I would also tell potential users that with competing products, they need a job-based license if they plan to scale up and avoid penalization. But as Automic is node-based, there will be no penalty if you are running 5,000 jobs today and 6,000 jobs tomorrow. It'll be the same.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Automic Workload Automation a seven.

The primary use case is workload automation in our SAP area. The performance is fine.

We have seen improvements in time efficiency and cost resources, because we are mainly focused on the SAP area, and its automation in that part. We also have some other complex areas where we help the applications with their processes. Unfortunately, we do not use it in the automation of those parts in the infrastructure, like other companies have talked to here. Therefore, our company is still meant to be for SAP Scheduler, and not given the necessary management attention. 

It helps in the usual business, though it does not help us get in front of our competitors.

• Flexibility
• Easy to use
• Stable automation engine
• We do not have to use a broad variety of agents to connect to different types of systems.

• We would like to have some features with the AWI with the founding technique, which cannot currently be delivered. 
• We would like some advantages, which we had with the Java UI, with the automation engine.
• One topic, which we would like, is to be able to have more differentiate in the reorganization of SAP to more precisely view which types of objects and clients would be reorganized and archived. The archive file is not helpful for us. If we write the archive file, we do not use them because in the past the tools were not that satisfying. 
• Improvements also would be good in the area of performance measurement.The system overview and performance are not being measured because we can't derive any concrete information.

The stability is fine. There are always a few little parts or points with issues, but overall, it is very stable.

It is quite stable in terms of size and requirements. The stable environment does not matter that much. However, the product, with it types of agents, and the sizeable automation engine, seems to be highly scalable.

We have been satisfied with the technical consultants. We ordered them for special situations. 

Technical support is different. Sometimes it is fast and very helpful, sometimes it seems to be bureaucratic and slow. It depends on the questions. Over the last few years, we have noticed it worsening. Ten years ago, there was more personal contact. We had the feeling that the support was much more involved in the system and better informed in the topics. Because of the very high speed of growth, there are only a few dozen of people with ten years of experience, which is another problem of size.

Initial reason was the projects which from SAP R2 to R3. That was the reason why they looked for a different scheduling system. 

Meanwhile, we are controlling nearly all SAP systems that we have, so it has a three digit number. In this area, no one has any idea of using a different tool for it. The another direction where we hope that we can move into other directions, but without the necessary management, it can't.

The people involved in the initial setup were convinced that they had the right product and absolutely satisfied with the setup in 2001.

I know that it was evaluated against other tools in 2000, but I do not know which ones.

Have a look at following:

• Technical functionality
• Attitude of the vendor
• The way that they are in contact with their customers. 
• Flexibility of the solution.
  

Most important criteria when selecting vendors: Our company wants to have strong partners. Therefore, they change the direction from selecting specific small companies for a specific question or task to have more global partners for big areas, where they can rely on the necessary knowledge in the company in terms of enough people with this knowledge, not only one specialist, and no one else can take over in the case of any problem, holiday, or leaving the company.

We use Automic Workload Automation to schedule the batch processes for all systems within the University of Colorado. We use file transfer jobs to send or receive files with each incoming file authenticated through Automic. We code Automic jobs to update PeopleSoft run controls automatically, continuously run processes for real-time results, bounce application servers, and we notify all process failures through text and email.

In 2014, we saved over 9000 hours on an annualized basis when we removed the manual updating of Run Controls. Removing manual updating also improves efficiencies, productivity, and human errors.

Another example of how Automic has improved how we function is the ability to automate our abend notifications. This ability has improved our work/life balance during the weekends when we are on-call. Instead of being tasked with monitoring the system during the weekend, the abend notifications are automated to send a text to our cell phones. That enables us to go about our daily lives and only log on if something breaks. This has also enabled us to staff 24/5 instead of 24/7, saving two FTEs who would otherwise work 12-hour shifts throughout the weekend to just monitor batch.

Currently, we are in the process of rebuilding our student information system jobs in Automic. The reconstructed jobs will use Automic capabilities and coding to automatically update college terms, financial aid years, census dates, etc which will fully automate our data processing. The code uses a calendar and variable tables to update the run control values as necessary depending on the date. Fully automating term changes will eliminate 90% of our ticket load and remove the manual updating of 7000 Peoplesoft run controls per year. This will also improve our customer's end experience, they will no longer be required to submit cumbersome tickets detailing run control changes. 

An important feature is the ability to modify PeopleSoft Run Controls at run-time. We run all of the batch processes for the Student Information Systems, Finance, and HCM, which use Peoplesoft in our shop. The ability to modify dates, query names, batch numbers, etc., is paramount to my team. The ability of the Automic script/coding is also a valuable asset as it provides a way for us to meet any customer's requirements, no matter what it is, we can do it with Automic scripting.

There are some scripting elements that could be added like being able to reset a task in a schedule through Automic scripting. 

Also, some of the things we don't use are mainly because we don't know how to use them. Hands-on training can be expensive, so we find other ways to work around things to forgo the hands-on training. It is also an issue because we are a Linux shop and most trainers are Windows-based.

The product itself is very stable; we have not encountered stability issues with it.

No issues with scalability.

The technical support team is fantastic. Any ticket submitted is worked on quickly and professionally. The team is very good about following up to make sure the solution worked and, if it didn't, they will work with you until the issue is resolved. They are hands-down the most efficient support team I have come across and they are the one team that will always provide results.

We ran our Finance, HCM, and CIW processes through Unicenter. I don't believe that Unicenter was very user-friendly and they found it difficult to integrate with other applications.

We ran the Student Information System batch on the mainframe using CA7 as the batch scheduler. We switched from Unicenter to Automic and from the mainframe to Automic, mainly because Automic can integrate easily with any other application or service. When we got off of the mainframe and moved the student side to PeopleSoft, it only made sense to use Automic as the batch scheduler.

The initial setup of Automic is simple and easy. As long as it can talk to what it needs to talk to, there are no issues with the installation.

Initial setup was with a support representative. I can't say the level of expertise because I was not there when it was first installed. I can say that since I have taken over this department, any contact with Automic support has always met or exceeded expectations and any rep has always been well skilled at most things, other than Peoplesoft. 

The overall cost of Automic is minimal compared to what we can do with the product. Our return on investment far outweighs the cost each year.

Certain licenses can be a bit expensive. The PeopleSoft agents, in particular, are a bit pricey. We are using agent groups in our development environment which allows us to switch between the different Peoplesoft instances without having to change the host names in the jobs and without the need for multiple PS licenses.

I believe we looked at BMC and other CA products but chose Automic because of its ability to easily integrate with other applications and services, and because of how user-friendly it is.

It is hands-down the best product out there. You might find others that are cheaper, you might find others that sound better and cost more, but in the end, the best automation product on the market is Automic. Save yourself some time and start with the best first. It is easy to install, easy to maintain, reliable, stable, user-friendly, and versatile. One can achieve great automation with Automic.

We don't use it in my company. We implement for our customers. They primarily use the solution for workflow automation and work close with oracle. 

This is an easy-to-use, user-friendly product. The user interface is very simple and straightforward. 

It scales well. We can increase or reduce the number of nodes as needed. 

It is easy to set up. 

The solution is stable. 

The support could be better in the future.

They should work to reduce pricing. 

I've been using the solution for around two to three years.

It is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. I'd rate the stability nine out of ten. 

The solution is very easy to scale up and down by increasing or reducing nodes. 

I'd rate the scalability ten out of ten. 

Our clients are quite sizable, at least in Thailand. They are all enterprise-level organizations. 

The solution was recently acquired by another company, and since then, support has suffered. They need to work to bring better support services back to the product. 

Neutral

I am also well-versed in Stonebranch Universal Automation Center.

The setup is pretty straightforward. I'd rate it eight out of ten in terms of ease of implementation. 

Deploying the solution only takes about one day. You simply have to install and configure, and you are ready to go. The process is fast. 

We have a team of five that can handle deployment and maintenance tasks. 

This is quite expensive. It's one of the most expensive on the market. That said, I can't speak much about the exact pricing. I would rate it six out of ten in terms of affordability.

We are partners. 

I'd invite anyone to try the solution as it is user-friendly and has an easy user interface. It's functional and scalable. Overall, the product is quite good. 

I'd rate the product nine out of ten. I'm very happy with it in general. 

We use it to schedule our production workload.

We scheduled our database maintenance jobs through ASP and when we did this, we scheduled them in a certain defined way that we expected them to run. And when that was initially set up, there was no consideration for a database not being available so if the jobs tried to run when a database wasn't available, obviously they wouldn't work and an operator would have to intervene.

The plan was that people would open requests to have jobs held at that time. When there were only one or two databases, that wasn't hard to maintain and people did it. When we grew to many, it became harder to do that. Then with the change in how we're doing stuff, everything happens more, servers get booted more, more changes.

We use features of the product that allow us to determine if the database is available and to only allow the jobs to run when the database is available. So that saves a lot of manpower in the one group that was opening requests to hold jobs, and in the other group which had to implement the request to hold the jobs. It eliminated all that and provided a more dynamic environment for when these jobs can run, without operator intervention. 

That is something we started about two years ago. We fully implemented it last year and we've noticed a big savings in manpower.

It's easy to use. When you schedule jobs, if you can speak English you can schedule them easily and correctly.

There's a lot of flexibility because the product allows you to do many tasks, in multiple ways, so you can choose the way that works best for your environment.

How they handle cross datacenter failover, because they have a really good High Availability solution that works well within a single sysplex, but in our environment, since we have two main datacenter locations, we have two separate sysplex. And, while when everything is working ASP can control jobs both here and in the other location, the current product does not support High Availability across datacenters. That is something we would like to see the product have.

Currently, what we have is we have a homegrown solution, because we're required to have that kind of resiliency, because it's our enterprise job scheduler.

When everything's working, we're invisible. When it's not working: "Why aren't you working?"

Stability is a 10 out of 10.

Scalability is a 10 out of 10.

Tech support is a 10 out of 10.

When I started, we were already on this product, but I do know that they were using a competing product before and they felt that this product had more of what they wanted. So they converted from the competing product to this product.

When the company chose this product, it was actually pre-CA, and then CA acquired the product. But for the most part, they've kept it what it was. While it has a new owner, it's still the same product.

I believe it's pretty straightforward. It's a complex thing by nature so it's not going to be super simple, but it's not like you can't do it either.

I believe experience helps. And in our case, we had a lot of help from the vendor, so while we, per se, didn't have the experience, there were people helping to get us going that did have the experience. So maybe I'm underestimating how much that was important, because it was available, even though it wasn't coming from me or one of my team members, but somebody else was providing it.

I'm really the technical guy. Pricing is not something that I deal with so I can't answer that question.

That would have been 20 years ago, so the market is a little different than it was back then. There are solutions today that did not exist back then. Pretty much all of the big players still exist today. But we're definitely in a different place today than we were back then.

No advice other than the normal stuff that you would do when looking at any product: Does it fit what you need? 

I would recommend doing a proof of concept before signing any contract. Everybody's stuff sounds good on paper and everybody's stuff can do everything, but what happens when you bring it in your environment? Does it do what you need it to do? Those are the most important things. The other stuff, while it's nice stuff, if you can't do what the product is required to do, then there's no value to the product.

For us, it gives us what we need so it's a good value. Forget about the price, because if the product doesn't do what you want, it doesn't matter what the price is.

I would rate the product a 10 out of 10. We use the product everyday and it works and, for the most part, every time we have a problem, it seems it's never my product's problem. It's: I have a problem because there's a problem on the system, so guess what? We're not going to be working. I need a stable system to run. 

Or if it is our problem, maybe we didn't do something we were supposed when we found out that we were supposed to do this, and we reconfigure something and then we move forward and we don't have that problem any more. Or we re-architect how we do stuff, because we've had to make tweaks of stuff as we've gone along. We would do stuff and it would work and then we would do something a little differently, and what we did, it didn't work and we'd have to figure out what the problem is and fix it.

Again, the flexibility of the product allows us to do things multiple ways. We might have started doing it one way and that worked for a while and then either something changed -whether we had more volume or we did something a little differently or we had different issues - and then we would address them with different tweaks, solutions.

We are an insurance company, so we are using Automic Workload Automation to control all of the night processes, the batch processes, and also the EDW. It is for controlling the other databases that we are using. We take all the data from the S400 and move it to other databases in order to do queries and gather other information. We also use it to control between a lot of other systems because we do a lot of workflow between other computers, so we can control the time and flow and other things.

The feature that I have found most valuable is that we can control between a lot of operating systems and other products because we have a lot of old and new products in our environment. It helps us to control all of them together.

In terms of what can be improved, we are in Israel, so we work in Hebrew. Now they are starting to move it also from English to Hebrew and to support the language, but for us it has been very difficult because the Hebrew looks like gibberish. So there are language issues.

The price could always be improved.

Now we are starting to check the AI, which is a new product there which can give us more information like Iosoft and other things. I hope it can help us because right now we cannot know when we can improve or not because we only see part of the data. I hope that if we can collect all the data we can improve and maybe use less CPUs in S400, but at least we can improve by knowing what happened in our batch processes. Meaning, how much time and how much CPU it takes not only for one month but to see all the information for one year. This can improve our flow.

I have been using Automic Workload Automation for more than 15 years. Now I'm using the latest version.

It is not stable all the time. Just now, we upgraded and we found out that it does not support the requirement that is an important computer in our environment, so the new version is not stable right now. I spoke with them and I hope they understand that they have to fix this.

Automic Workload Automation is scalable.

I not remember the number using it because we are always adding more and more. We add a lot of servers to this because we took the daytime process and brought it to our other system. In the Automic, I think we have about 50 users or something like that and a thousand processors.

We only have four people for maintenance of the solution here, and that's all. It is not complicated.

We are using this product extensively and I think we have plans to increase the usage.

We added the new features and we are looking to make our environment do things automatically, less manually.

Our license is for three years, or something like that.

My advice to anyone considering Automic is to know how they will use it, because they changed the license type. Previously, we used to pay for each computer. Now we pay for all the environment, no matter how much we use.

We change the license for the processors, but it depends on the environment that you want to automate, so I cannot give any advice. It depends on what you want. If you only have a few computers that you want to use, you can use it by computer, by your agents. If you have a lot of processors, don't pay for the processors. It depends on the type of environment you use it in. Sometimes you prefer to do it with the scheduling if you have a lot of workflows.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Automic Workload Automation an eight. This is because of the language and stability issues.