CA 7 Edition supplies our mainframe scheduling workflow. Automation.
It's performed well over the years. Obviously we've had CA 7 Edition for decades. It just performs its job day in, day out. Very little of having to remediate any issues with 7. Obviously there are issues with jobs eventually, but those are always developer issues, with how they've coded their JCL. But, otherwise it performs well and executes as scheduled.
All the above are definitely important.
Day to day it actually allows the developers to execute their critical processes for the business, running the business. I can see that expanding in the future.
It's hard to tell what needs to be improved. That's kind of why I'm here at the CA World conference, to see what options are out there that may help our developers fulfill their needs in the future. I'm trying to get a feel for what other tool sets may be available to help them do their jobs better.
I can see the analysis piece and the web client being critical parts, going into the future. Especially with the aging population, the baby boomers going out. We're very top heavy at this point within the company. As those people age out and retire, they're taking a lot of business knowledge with them.
Stability is very good. Like I said before, very little remediation needed, close to zero. We probably have two or three tickets with CA in a year.
Obviously, scalability is dependent on the mainframe MIPS. If you need more to run the jobs, once it's running jobs, it's out of CA 7's control. We haven't any performance issues, any time recently, of it not being able to get jobs into the cues.
Customer service with CA 7 has been very good. They've helped us through several upgrades, with tickets around those. Whenever we've had issues, they've been able to point out where to look to see what potentially is affecting 7 itself.
For us, when considering vendors, a lot of it's going to depend on their
Vendors go out of business. You don't want to be in a situation where you're forced into doing a product migration to something else.
Make sure you know what the requirements of your business are, and whether it's going to meet the needs of those that are going to be using and depending on the product.
A somewhat surprising review...
CA WAAE will easily scale up to 50,000 jobs a day per single instance and more if the jobs starts are relatively evenly distributed in time. The vendor claim and a quarter of a million with the recent service pack3 improvements (not verified) which introduce new threads for handling agent communications.
The UI (WCC) is relatively poor but will scale up to tens of concurrent users and hundreds of defined views (we have over 300 defined users and over 100 jobflow views per instance). A lot of development effort has been spent by the vendor to improve the UI and this is still on-going. The UI is 24/7, the issues are elsewhere.
Bear in mind that the strength of of CA WAAE (Autosys) is its relative simplicity, which enables both administrators and end users to get up to speed with it quickly and start getting value from it in a matter of days. Therefore it is logical the that UI is always going to be somewhat less rich than some more complex and feature rich products.
As far as stability, yes there are some issues: not so with the UI though but with the application server. Also the security module (EEM) cluster failover seems somewhat unreliable and prone to corruption (for instance if you run out of disk space the settings will get corrupt as some xml settings file get clobbered).
The built-in application cluster is old fashion and a bit slow to fail over. More modern technologies should be considered for resilience.
Re. SLA and deadline monitoring, the base product does lack functionality although the reviewer suggests otherwise. Some useful improvements are in the road map but more importantly this aspect if very well covered by complementary products such as iDash or JAWS.
Lastly on the licencing aspect, this is obviously a matter between the vendor and one's organisation but be informed that there is nothing in the product that will block or preempt any functionality based on licence (expiration or limit etc.), except for some of the advanced agents plugins which do not come out of the box and need to be purchased separately.
I hope this helps