We performed a comparison between IBM Workload Automation and OpCon based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: IBM Workload Automation and OpCon are both highly regarded for their unique strengths. IBM Workload Automation stands out for its impressive capability to initiate tasks across multiple nodes and pre-plan them. OpCon is recognized for its adaptability, seamless integration capabilities, self-service functionality, and ability to automate manual tasks.
IBM Workload Automation could benefit from enhancements in performance, navigation, job dependencies, daily schedule refreshes, stability, reporting visibility, and integration with new technologies. OpCon could be improved in terms of its web-based interface, upgrading process, logs, programming and configuration, accessibility through a mobile app, self-service functionality, failover, licensing, support, and UI features.
Service and Support: IBM Workload Automation's customer service is praised for its lab advocacy program, which provides thorough code support. However, customers may face difficulties in pinpointing the root cause of certain problems. OpCon's customer service and support have garnered positive feedback. Customers describe their technical support team as exceptional and commend their prompt responses and efficient solutions.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for IBM Workload Automation can be difficult for those who are not familiar with IBM tools or application development. OpCon's setup can be complicated. Close collaboration with SMA and receiving training is necessary, however, once acquainted with the system, it becomes more manageable.
Pricing: IBM Workload Automation's setup cost is dependent on the customer's contract and the number of agents installed. OpCon offers a tiered pricing model that includes previously purchased add-ons. Although OpCon is recognized as an expensive and intricate solution, it offers good value for the price.
ROI: IBM Workload Automation focuses on optimizing workload scheduling processes. Users have found it beneficial for automating and streamlining tasks, resulting in time savings and improved efficiency. OpCon has also demonstrated significant advantages in terms of ROI. It excels in automating tasks, which saves time and also contributes to increased productivity.
Comparison Results: OpCon emerges as the preferred choice when compared to IBM Workload Automation. OpCon stands out for its adaptability, ability to integrate with other systems and self-service functionalities. Users appreciate the ability to automate tasks according to their own requirements, leading to a decrease in complexity and an increase in productivity.
"I have supported this product in literally 100s of different environments and its unmatched in its ability to scale to any size."
"Technical support from IBM is very good."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The project we worked on involved the running of nearly 24,000 job instances in a single day, so I would say that the solution is stable."
"Jobs can be triggered in multiple nodes."
"The DWC, when configured correctly, is a great GUI tool to provide Self-Service Scheduling capabilities to the user community."
"Jobs can be triggered in multiple nodes."
"The whole product is valuable because it is a tool for batch automation."
"Reliability is always important, and the reliability of the system is outstanding."
"It seems like it would scale well."
"Among the numerous valuable features, one standout capability is the implementation of self-service buttons."
"With a simple click of a button in self-service, the department or the user can complete his/her job."
"I have been pleased with the support that we can get from the European partners. I think they are very good. All the time, when we have a question, they have an answer. It is very reassuring to have that support every day. Then, you can concentrate on your job and OpCon is just there to work. For us, it's perfect."
"MAS is by far the best feature, although not a feature of the software specifically. MAS has more knowledge than our employees, so we have been able to develop schedules that are far beyond our own skillset."
"Last year, we added a second environment and the OpCon Deploy product. This has allowed us to build a testing environment. This has been a great addition for us as we can work through our workflows without disrupting our production environment."
"The stability of this solution is awesome. It's the only product I've ever seen that you can actually build to fix itself if it has a problem. You'll build something and, if you find an issue, you can say, 'Hey, if this happens again, do this to correct it.'"
"The schedule refreshes daily and that's a challenge for us."
"It is missing some features and can improve in areas where the competition is somewhat better like linking job dependencies."
"Scalability-wise, it can be a little bit challenging."
"The configuration of IBM Workload Automation has some challenges. We have a difficult time customizing it, but it is similar to other solutions."
"This solution does have bugs and could be improved in this regard. However, these bugs are resolved relatively quickly."
"The performance of the previous versions could be better."
"It would be helpful to have a mobile app that could be used to follow the job schedule."
"It should support other schedulers that aren't IBM products."
"I would like OpCon to implement a reporting feature on the dashboard that displays historical data for specific jobs. Ideally, this feature would allow us to view the past seven days or the next seven days, but with a specific focus on highlighting instances where a particular job has historically failed, particularly on Saturdays over the past year."
"It is a complex product to use. Programming the schedules is complex. It does require training from OpCon... I would like to see some online training, some videos. When I bring in a new employee... it would be nice if there was some basic information for her to look at to understand this program. Even for my systems administrator, it would be helpful if there were tips and tricks available."
"I would like to see them improve the Solution Manager for the web application. It's the future for us. Our customers need a lot of functionality, but there isn't that functionality within Solution Manager. So they have to develop and improve it."
"Stability is an area for improvement. There are FTP agents that run on the MCP and they are there so that we can transfer a file from the MCP to the Windows environment or vice versa. Sometimes, and nobody has been able to figure out why, it just goes down, and all of my jobs that need it are hanging or failing... It would be very helpful if they could figure out what in the world is happening with that FTP client that's on the MCP."
"It would be nice to go to a fully thin client."
"We would like a display of the created date, created by, and last modified date, as well as modified by."
"Of course they have a RESTful API within OpCon, but they have that new web services agent that we installed because we have some SOAP APIs and we had to interact with SMA to get things running. Our developers did do some tweaks, but we have now been able to get some test jobs running, and understand how the workflow goes back and forth."
"Upgrading to newer versions remains complex."
IBM Workload Automation is ranked 13th in Workload Automation with 28 reviews while OpCon is ranked 9th in Workload Automation with 56 reviews. IBM Workload Automation is rated 8.2, while OpCon is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of IBM Workload Automation writes "With an easy setup phase in place, agent-based installation can be done in minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OpCon writes "Gives us the ability to schedule dependent jobs across different mainframes". IBM Workload Automation is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, HCL Workload Automation, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Rocket Zena, whereas OpCon is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Automic Workload Automation, UiPath and Tidal by Redwood. See our IBM Workload Automation vs. OpCon report.
See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.
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