"There are a lot of valuable features. The version that we're currently casting, Self Service, is going to be the most valuable to us. It is going to allow us to open up the doors, broaden our automation capability and help other business units to be able to automate a lot of the little things that they do from day to day. I'm really looking forward to being able to help other areas with their automation needs. Self Service is really key."
"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."
"The biggest example in which OpCon has improved my organization is that we have to download and process files from the federal reserve several times a day. If we don't do it in a certain timeframe, we can be penalized. It's the fact that we can download these files, process them, get our accounting teams the information they need to work the exceptions that is one of the most important roles."
"We're also starting to use its Self Service and Solution Manager. My team in the data center and some of the development team use the Self Service. Developers are using the Self Service for upon-request jobs for their testing. They used to have to go through us to schedule testing and now they can just go on and kick it off all they want. They have also really appreciated that they have access to view and/or submit jobs."
"The end code response allows us to evaluate how a process finished, set the termination/end code appropriately, and then trigger further processing based on how it ended."
"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."
"There's also a self-service solution manager... that allows us to enable staff to run complex automation tasks by clicking a button and entering some information. They don't have to have access to the OpCon environment to kick off those kinds of events."
"With a simple click of a button in self-service, the department or the user can complete his/her job."
"Stonebranch performs well, and the graphical representation is excellent. Overall, it requires more technical effort from our teams, but the solution is intuitive, so anybody can use it."
"The interface is very user-friendly and easy to navigate."
"I like the dashboard and the various workflows."
"The features are upgraded, and every six months they're releasing patches."
"The solution also enables admins and users to see the information relevant to them. They're able to actually run jobs that they weren't necessarily able to run before. They can see the output and they can be notified when there are issues and resolve those issues before they cause more issues."
"We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. That's the biggest use for us and that's the biggest advantage."
"The Graphical Views feature is also very good for helping us to understand a job stream. It's great for providing a visual overview of the status of a workflow, especially the Critical Path view. That is one of our favorites."
"I like the fact that I have control, and I am able to monitor. If there is an issue, I would be able to respond to any jobs that may fail. With any other scheduler that I know of, a lot of times, when I have a very complex script, if there is an issue in the middle of it, I have to let the whole process fail and then figure out a way to recover from it, whereas Tidal will stop the process, and I can resolve that issue. Once I resolve the issue, I can continue the process. This is very important for invoicing, accounts payable, accounts receivable, or any kind of financial reporting. It allows you to recover from an issue much more effectively than anything else that I have seen."
"The most valuable feature is the job scheduler, where you can schedule thousands of jobs to execute at specific times."
"There are some limitations in the actual jobs that are created and how you're able to rename files. Suppose you're bringing in, say, 10, 15, or 20 reports from a core system, and you're using an "asterisk character" to identify files. For example, if you're grabbing files that start with this, end with this, but the characters in between could be different, it has to retain that same name in the destination. It won't allow you to rename them with a date stamp or the like."
"Upgrading to newer versions remains complex."
"We would like a display of the created date, created by, and last modified date, as well as modified by."
"The FICS integration is a little bit clunky. We've had some tickets with their support team, and sometimes they couldn't figure it out, but that probably has more to do with FICS than with OpCon."
"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."
"Licensing would be the first part I would overhaul. Each time a new licensing paradigm comes out, more features are removed and costs are added. They "add" features that are rarely used and increase charges for the number of jobs run. I'm sure someone in finance got a raise for their brilliance but the end-users won't thank them one bit. Expect price hikes and threats when you hold them to account at every opportunity."
"We are still in the early stages of our implementation, so at this point, I cannot see any needed improvements or features."
"The logs are a little daunting to look at the first few times, however, as you begin to understand what you're looking at, it becomes easier."
"It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability."
"It can't handle negative written codes."
"I would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex."
"It would be ideal if they had the exact same features as the CA Workload Automation DE series. It would be helpful to have calendaring options."
"One thing I would like to see is better training on both how to set up and support the product as well as on how to make use of the product, especially regarding the scripting that is available."
"When we patch to the next version, there is often a little thing that breaks. It has rarely been a big deal, but I always seem to have to follow up on one tiny issue. It would help if they had some better QA testing of their patches."
"The GUI, the graphical user interface, gets a little bit busy."
"There are several improvement points that our team has provided to the vendor."
"My complaint about their pricing model is that every year or every time technology changes or somebody has a new requirement, it usually means that I can schedule that with Tidal, but I would need another adapter. So, every time there is a change, I need a different adapter that I don't have. That's why it is harder to plan for Tidal growth because you have to buy a new adapter every time."
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Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is ranked 11th in Workload Automation with 4 reviews while Tidal Automation is ranked 7th in Workload Automation with 5 reviews. Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is rated 8.0, while Tidal Automation is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Stonebranch Universal Automation Center writes "Allows you to schedule jobs on applications like Informatica and SAP". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tidal Automation writes "Allows us to use one scheduler for multiple instances, helps us to recover from an issue much more effectively, and is extremely flexible". Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is most compared with Control-M, IBM Workload Automation, CA Workload Automation ESP, AutoSys Workload Automation and AppWorx Workload Automation, whereas Tidal Automation is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, ActiveBatch Workload Automation and AppWorx Workload Automation. See our Stonebranch Universal Automation Center vs. Tidal Automation report.
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