Automic Workload Automation Reviews

It's very hard to transfer the feeling when you have a platform that came to handle infrastructure issues, but at the end of the day, they are making real changes and impacting our business level, which is amazing, because it's very uncommon. That's it, basically.

We started this engagement with Automic working on basic scheduling. If you can just imagine an organization, which has around 10,000 written processes in Visual Basic or old code, and now we need to maintain these processes. They are very core processes because they are handling interactions between our customers to us; they are transferring data from our customers into our system. It's several thousands of PDFs, invoices and shipping notices, etc.

Up to the phase where we met with Automic, we just used manual stuff that we wrote to handle it. While using Automic, we created one mechanism of transferring data, and that's it. We need to just replicate it to other customers, and then you have thousands of Automic processes that are working by using only a single design for the rest of the customers, so we don't need to write code anymore.

By the way, another impact that we had using this process by transferring these invoices from one FTP site to another FTP site is the generation of invoices. In order to generate invoices to thousands of customers, we did some old code style process. We designed the process in the Automic, which basically does it faster.

Invoices: It's important they're faster, because at the end of the day when the driver needs to leave for the customer, I need to make sure that he will leave the logistics site as fast as he can. If I'm printing, 1,000 invoices in four hours, or if I'm printing 1,000 invoices in two hours, it makes a difference in my business process.

This is the must have in these processes for the customer, because if you are using Automic at the infrastructure level, then you have a problem because you are missing a whole step. Why? Because at the end of the day, the biggest impact that we have had when we started using Automic was when we embedded our digital processes with the tool. Today, Automic is the tool that helps us to manage all our digital strategy.

When you are going to some kind of a digital journey, you must have some kind of a tool or robotic platform that will enable you to manage the full cycle flow of the customer experience to a level of the data in the operational system process. When you are talking about putting the customer at the front of your business, if you don't have some kind of automation tool that enables you to integrate between the system, monitoring, enterprise data, analyses, trigger and action, and then to the multi challenge platforms, you don't have a digital strategy, and you need some kind of an orchestration behind it. This is what Automic is doing for us.

Today, this is the impact. In our business, we have a lot of operational costs. Let's say, we have 255 call center representatives and they are doing thousands of service transactions while speaking to our customers. By using Automic as an engine to our digital contact center, I'm doing almost 45,000 transactions per month, but it's on technology. It's our digital platform, which is orchestrated by Automic and some other tools, and few technologies behind the process.

So, if you're looking for the real impact, you must look at the integration of the Automic into your business application, in your customer journey, and into the digital process. This is what most organization are experiencing today.

We are in interruptive era at the moment, and everybody is looking how to reach customers, and how to manage a low cost operation and their digital strategy, because you need to invest a lot of resources. Instead of doing it in coding stuff and managing stuff behind the scenes, you need some kind of automation.

By the way, if you are the customer receiving an instant message from me, so an SMS, you have to understand that behind the scenes, there is a business process that somebody needs to manage, control, and make sure you are receiving this SMS. We, at O.P.S.I., are using Automic to do it because it is closing the full cycle.

We are always talking about leveraging the power of big data by automation, and we have a gap, but we didn't really implement it yet (the automation), which they have a great solution for, so the business continues in the cloud. We are not there, but we need to be there, and I think it's a little bit hard in our area.

Our area with the CA solution for DR is not really concerning directly to Automic, but to all of the DevOps, a word which is something that everybody is trying to touch on today in their daily business. There is also some gap that's a little bit hard to understand or to implement because not all the organizations are the same. When you are adopting DevOps, you may need to be more flexible in your processes.

But once again, we are not really using that because it is a little bit hard for us. We have rapid changes now in our digital strategy, because, at the end of the day, my business is to do service, and we are trying to improve in the service area and to be very near to our customer business needs. We didn't really make it to cope with the Automic road map, because we have a road map.

Around two to three years.

Yes. If Automic will be your automation platform or the orchestration platform, then you must build it in a high availability mode, which is what we did together with the guys from Automic. Now, this system is basically available 24/7. If one connector is failing, we have an HA connector that will replace it, so you must design the platform to be stable. The platform itself, it's stable. But once again, if you need to work 24/7, there is no way. I am working with the Custom Authority, and the Custom Authority in Israel is a very challenging organization. There is no way that we wouldn't be able to transfer data to customs, because if you don't transfer data, then we wouldn't be able to deliver to our customers abroad, so we need to be working 24/7 because a lot of stuff is being done automatically behind the scenes.

No, after we implemented, we didn't have any issues with the system. It's the core system today. It's one of the most important systems in our operation today, and once ensured that we had a high availability solution from them, then we started working 24/7 with no issues.

At the end of the day, I think there is an integration between good product, stable product, and a good delivery team. This symmetry, it makes stuff work well. When you're testing platforms, you know your enterprise, you have data functionality, and you have the delivery concept. At the end of the day, when you do the statistics of what you've tested, you need to decide. What helped us to decide, except from the function, the way the system works, was the approach of the guys from Automic, how they approach our business, how they help us do the analyses. They care. They just care.

I don't want to say just care. When you care about something, then you feel the difference. Then you are coming with all these big solutions and big company solutions which have tremendous platforms, but once again, they are too big, too robotic, and forgot the customer at the end of the day. It's one of the things that makes their stuff different for us.

Basically, here in Israel, we have very good support. The guys from Automic are assisting us, there is the world wide web, and we have a project manager that we work with. From the global perspective of how they help us, I think that we are pretty covered, and they are always trying to push new stuff, but once again, if we are thinking about improvement, it's a very big platform. We don't cover it all at the moment, and we are doing it step-by-step.

We had a few solutions. Most of them were code reading oriented, but it wasn't the platform. We didn't have any other platforms. We had tested another platform in that time, a very big one, which is not really relevant to this discussion, because I don't have anything bad to say about them, only from the point that they were too robotic for us. I think that Automic came with a very good approach in the delivery level. It's important, because when you're working at the delivery level, you can see the ROI that you will receive from the implementation.

It's a very good product and has a very good delivery level. Especially the guys that designed the solution over here are focused on the issues in the top 10 painful issues that we had, while resolving them during a very fast implementation. It gave us the boost to go with the digital area, the application area, and the business strategy area.

When I'm saying they care and were very focused on the issues, in three months, the implementation of the system was running right. Instead of going through all the processes and trying to upgrade all of them, or change the way we work in a rapid movement of things during the implementation, once the system and the change model was up and running, we did two things:

• Good mapping process of the pain points
• Good mapping process on new projects.

Then we stared to just transfer new projects to this platform. Then, in parallel, we took all staff for the scheduling, which is the simplest way, and in two to three months, we upgraded most of the scheduling items that we needed to handle. Then, the organization saw that we rapidly changed the way we were experiencing a problem, integration, etc.

From the implementation point of view, it was straightforward, very simple, and not complicated. Of course, you always have issues with creating various servers and SQL licenses. You must handle the server optimization because you have a lot of traffic, so you need to do an optimization of the right resources. We have a private cloud on our site, so it's easier for us to do the optimization of resources in the process, which is great. Then, you eliminate more issues when you're implementing a new platform. It's tricky and complicated, but we are an organization that works with a lot of legacy systems, which has very big systems, which usually has a lot of troubles and issues in transforming between platforms, between different applications with a legacy code. So, when you have the opportunity to work on a shelf platform, on an advanced platform, then it's very easy.

It's very important to see who does the delivery for you, and what's their approach. If the approach is simple and easy, not too rushed, then you can manage the process to receive the best results. It's important because this is what made the implementation very easy at the end of the day for us.

Once again, from a technical point of view, there were no issues.

Control-M from BMC was one of the applications which we looked at or tested. IBM also has some solutions in this area, and HP in the DevOps orchestration. They have very good platforms, very good approach, very scalable, very stable, and from my personal experience and perspective, it just helped my business grow and cope with all our digital challenges.

We started the concept of working with Automic when we looked for a tool that would help us to automate our business. It started in the infrastructure level, because everybody wanted to automate their infrastructure stuff to do basic scheduling and standard things that you are doing in an organization, especially in the IT department.

Basically, we are divided between infrastructure and business applications, so in my IT department where the infrastructure recedes, we have thousands of processors that were created there manually by coding with all kind of windows applications or something like that. In Israel, we are the biggest company who is doing deliveries and managing a global supply chain operation, so we have a lot of legacy systems. It's a 25 year-old company, and we have a lot of legacy systems and a lot of old code from the past years that we need to manage or handle.

We started off looking for an automation tool that would help us to just upgrade old processes to some kind of a new system, and that is how we found Automic.

I work at O.P.S.I., which is an authorized service contractor for UPS in Israel. Basically, the first challenge is that we are not really UPS, we are just an ASC, an authorized service contractor, so we are totally independent and are working like a standalone company, but we have a lot of integration with the global UPS. We have UPS system and applications that we must use because it's part of the agreement.

Here in Israel, we are identified totally brown with the logo and everything. Just one issue, this is why I mention it, because when somebody is talking about us worldwide and in Israel, we mention our name as O.P.S.I., an authorized service contractor for UPS. People need to know that we are a subcontractor for them and not really a brown branch here in Israel. Basically, just to let you know, we have 155 authorized service contractors like us worldwide.

As for additional advice, just pick stuff where you can and go for the quick win. The first phases of this project must be dedicated to understanding the mechanism and the platform, because when you're going with the simple stuff, you have the chance or the opportunity to test the system. We had thousands of processors with thousands of challenges, but once again, we started with the infrastructure. We succeeded over there, then we went to the application.

We started at the lowest level of the implementation. After we learned the system, we learned how it behaved. We learned the ability of the system, then we went to the application. I think what has amazed me the whole time is that I have fully automated business processes in this difficult area, so it's an excitement because you started in transferring files from one server to another, then you are managing your digital business strategy with this platform (my CEO knows this platform).

It's not like you are installing some kind of a monitoring tool. When you are starting small, infrastructure and then application, then turning this application into a core system, it is something else. So my humble advice from my experience is to start small and start with the pain points. Learn the system, learn the capabilities, then slide to the business level.

The primary use case for using Workload Automation is the automation of applications in different cases for business or data warehouses, controlling programs, and ERP systems (like SAP). We have also began to use it for data center automation for provisioning of virtual infrastructure.

One of the benefits is we have one view of our automated things. We do not have different automated silos. We have one view for our operators, which are doing things 24/7, and need just one interface, not multiple ones.

The main features are the enormous, stripped function, which the software provides. Also, its many different agents which are supported in different platforms. 

After the merger, it is getting more American. Now, they do not have support in French and have limited German documentation. This is a critical problem for companies who have older generations who did not have English in school.

The big pain points are the AWI and the web interface. There needs to be a change with these features.

I am a long-time customer of the solution. The older versions were very stable. Then, there was a switch to versions eight and version nine. This was a few years ago. 

I am happy that Automic understands the needs of their customers and changed their development process, because now, the application is very stable.

It is very scalable. We have in one environment one and a half to two million executions a day. We are one of their bigger customers.

There used to be custom support from Germany, which was one of the biggest features. There was a change. It was German speaking support. That was one of the things, which I am sorry to say is getting worse. They have different support centers now, and the support is worse, not better.

I understand why there was a change. There were different mergers with other companies. There were more products, like the release automation or service orchestration. There are many platforms which are supported. It is very hard for the support to support the whole thing.

When we build a new environment, I am involved. Workload Automation environment setup is smooth, but it could be smoother.

One thing which is not so smooth is CA Release Automation. When doing a PoC of CA Release Automation, and it is not so smooth to install because of the different communications between these components.

Every time there is a task which must be repeated, the solution can reduce costs. When you do it one time manually, or when you do it perhaps two times manually, it is okay. If you have to do it more than this, because of the automation, you can reduce costs.

Possibly IBM, because we are a big IBM customer.

You should have a look at Automic, but also at their competition. There are a few things which they need to change. I would not have said this a few years ago, but now they need to improve.

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. 

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.

I mainly use this solution for batch job processing.

The most valuable features are the predefined templates for application-specific jobs and the access for different users.

The interface could be made more user-friendly in terms of job creation and scheduling, especially when doing bulk job creation and modification. Drag and Drop to create conditions dependency between jobs

I've been using this solution for three years.

This solution is stable.

This solution is scalable.

It can be very difficult to reach the support team, and they don't have support available in all locations, so you sometimes have to wait to hear back.

Positive

The initial setup was very straightforward and quick.

The implementation was done in-house using cloud automation, which provides the functionality to upgrade or install the agent and clients.

This solution is pretty well-priced. I would rate its pricing as four out of five.

Automic Workload Automation is a good, clear automation tool that's reasonably priced. I would rate it seven out of ten.

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.

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.

We use it for the following:

• Automation
• Server positioning
• File transfer solutions
• Daily business processes
• Different processes.
  

• All the possibilities, like scripting different objects. 
• All the components that can be used to design workflows; process automation. 

There are some problems when using the new interface, which is normal, as it is a new technology. In the future, it will be much better. Hopefully, Automic is working hard on the issue.

We would like to see critical path analyzers. I am not sure if it is coming. If it does, out-of-the-box would be nice. We would also like improved SLR monitoring. There are SLR objects, but I can't define an SLR object plus one, or end days. I can only do it for one day. As we are time shifting to another day, it is not possible. This should be improved.

The performance is nice. The stability is very good. We do not have any problems concerning the stability. We have never had any major problems. We have had minor problems, but it has not crashed hard. It runs our business safely.

We have one server, and it has enough hardware with no problems at all. 

In the last two years, the reaction times were not so good. However, in the last four to six months, my experience has with them has been a lot faster. People are called back five minutes after I establish a ticket or incident. They are often doing WebEx and web sessions to get to the point, not making us write 50 pages, then not providing a solution.

It was 13 years ago, we previously used Control-M and switched to UC4. This was a management decision.

I did it 13 years ago at different companies. In the past, we did not use the wizard. We set up the components standalone, then combined them in configuration. It was easy and well documented. 

Presently, there is a problem with the translation. It is some type of hybrid. We have some parts in German and some in English. It should be completely in German and completely in English. It should be better in the future.

We receive time efficiency from this product. For example, some users use to manually transfer many files from A to B, and we have automated this task. We used to have complex solutions just to gain information from files, read files, put in a customer filter, or share something. In the past, many people had to look into the files manually. 

No competitor has this mass possibilities to design processors for automation solutions.

Test it for a long time. You have to look if it fits into the mindset of your company.

Main criteria when selecting a vendor: 

We look to other companies about the following:

• What do they use? 
• How is their experience? 
• Does the support work? 
• How quick is the support? 
• How good is the documentation? 
• How good is the vendor concerning new technologies and time to market new solutions in the software?