What we really like is that it's an enterprise solution and it really allows us to do the "normal work," the different operating systems and platforms, but it also allows us to manage and control our ERP systems, and things like Informatica and Hadoop, and all those good things that are coming down the line, in the way of big data and things like that.
The really nice thing is that, as the business grows, we're not seeing the infrastructure grow. Regardless of how much new business we keep on, the team is pretty stable. We have a dedicated team of eight people. We maintain today nine instances of DE: three production and six pre-production. We're probably going to add a couple more in 2017, but we don't anticipate having to grow the infrastructure. We'll be able to keep serving the customers the same way we have historically and we'll be able to do that into the future, without seeing any degradation in service.
We would like to see good improvement on the historical reporting capabilities. It's always been, I think, a bit of a weak point. Currently, if you know a SQL programmer, he should become your best friend, but I'd like to see it get to the point where somebody with really basic skills – where they understand the information they want – can easily extract it. That's really the big area with room for improvement.
The development team has been really good about keeping up with not only our requests but the user community as a whole. We're pretty happy about it, but that's the one exception.
It's extremely stable. We put in the Canadian systems about three years ago, and we have not had an incident in the three years that has kept us down for more than a couple of hours.
Support has been really good. If we need to call somebody, generally they're on the line in a few minutes, and we get right into the diagnostics and we're set to go again. Extremely stable; the agents are perfect. They never give us a problem at all. The servers are getting awfully close.
It's our impression that we're probably one of the larger installations in the world. We have two instances controlling our Canada operation; it’s really Canada and the rest of the world. It was suggested that we spin up the second instance, but we really haven't seen a good reason for doing that, other than we keep some of the competing lines of business separated. Other than that, it seems to scale really well and we can keep going with it.
Tech support, as I’ve mentioned, has been great. I know that CA has kept some people in support for a very long time, so they're very comfortable with the product. They know how the thing works. They know if it ever makes a particular hiccup, what's exactly causing that. We actually are on the Platinum support program, so we have a dedicated support resource. Historically, that person has been outstanding. He's always just a phone call away. He's knowledgeable not only about the product but our environment. Based on that, he can do a really, really good job for us.
Before I came to my current job, I was actually an independent consultant. The last job I worked before I came to work here was converting all the material into the system. I've been there since day one. Initial setup has always been really, really straightforward. Architecturally, the solution make sense. There's a very good separation of functions and features. The security is outstanding and because the solution is English language-based, we don't really need to go out and put in a lot of infrastructure support to do the normal stuff. Basically, if you want a job to run on Tuesday, you simply tell it, run on Tuesday, and it miraculously works.
We were in a situation where we had one of everything and we really went out to do a consolidation in the solutions that we were using. We really saw the CA solution as something that would give us the reliability and the scalability to move us forward in the future. We really didn't see that from a lot of the other solutions in the industry, so we chose them.
When we are selecting a vendor, the support is really the first and foremost criteria, and then I guess support going forward, so, the development organization: How are they addressing changes in the industry, changes in the solution? That sort of thing.
Look really hard at what your requirements are today. Know that you're going to have a solution that you're going to be able to stick with for as long as you care to stick with it; also, something that can address audit requirements, address things like scalability, and usability. If you have to become an expert on how to make the product work and use it, then it's probably not as usable as you need it to be. Look for something that you can talk to, like you were talking to your little brother, and move forward from there.
The reasons for my rating are usability, reliability, and scalability of the solution.
