IBM Workload Automation Reviews

The solution comes with a scheduler. It contains a file for receiving things from external sources. We trigger the file, on which basis the subsequent business practices are kicked off, one after the next. This means that there is dependency on the file dependency. The subsequent steps in the business practices kick off, automatically, once the file is loaded. 

The performance of the previous versions could be better. We encountered certain issues with the lower version of it, the 9.2. Things have greatly stabilized since then. However, as with any IBM tool, things are a bit tricky. I would give a rating of four or five out of ten, as we encountered certain issues with the domain controller with the lower versions. 

It would be nice if we could get support for earlier versions. Generally speaking, IBM insists that we move on to their latest one. 

In respect of the dependency diagrams, the job dependencies across the business process should be improved. 

I have been using IBM Workload Automation for three or four years. 

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. 

We do not have plans to increase the number of users of the solution.

We regularly reach out to technical support when dealing with issues that are beyond our control. 

We did not use a different solution prior to IBM Workload Automation. 

While the installation is fine, it requires the involvement of an IBM engineer. The solution is easier to install for those who are well versed in the IBM world, but this is a bit difficult for someone who has a background in application development. The process is easier for someone who has experience working with IBM tools. 

One can handle the installation on his own. 

Including management, fewer than seven people are needed for the deployment and maintenance. This will always involve an administrator. There will also be a program manager involved, the rest of the team consisting of developers. 

The contract is with the customer with whom we are working, so IBM is not directly involved in this. 

There are approximately 50-plus users making use of the solution in our organization. 

My advice is that the implementation be handled by someone with the requisite knowledge. This will be difficult for someone who is not properly acquainted with IBM products. It should be done by someone who knows the IBM environment, who would find the process much easier to handle. 

I rate IBM Workload Automation as an eight out of ten. 

The whole product is valuable because it is a tool for batch automation.

There should be more custom documentation, specifically around Java APIs. There should also be more training.

In terms of features, we are currently using only 50% of its features. We don't use all features that are available, but there is always room for improvement in all of the tools. 

I have been using this solution for 15 years.

It is very stable.

It is extremely scalable. We run more than 80,000 jobs a day across multiple platforms.

Their technical support is fine. We have a contract with them to assist us.

It is simple to install.

It is about one-third of the cost of a controller.

I would rate IBM Workload Automation a seven out of ten.

The tool is managed from offshore by another company. The primary use for it in our company providing support to our main client who is a large beverage company that needs the product to manage operations. I just act as the support interface between the client and the offshore team starting at the time I took this position as a global manager for workload scaling. I found out about this product someplace and how we could put it to use. We have been running it ourselves and with our client for a long time. It is also a part of our company's application or solution set.  

The use cases for my workload purposes have to do with my applications. It works fine for scaling jobs and can interface with other systems. So it does what I need it to do.  

The interface for the applications team is really the most valuable part of the product in my opinion.  

The interface for the operator is not so good. I do not think it is as complete as something like Control-M by BMC Software (named for former Shell executives Scott Boulette, John J. Moores, and Dan Cloer). A few other things could be better like the scheduler and linking between jobs and dependencies.  

I have been working for the last five years between the client the provider and my company. 

This product is quite stable. There are no issues within the application or with the tool itself becoming unstable.  

The scalability is actually quite fine. I think that right now we have around 100 to 150 users that have jobs running on it.  

The offshore team is made up of about five guys that mainly take care of the maintenance tasks. At this moment, we do not actually have any plans to scale our usage. Maybe in the coming two years, we might have to. We are planning to upgrade or migrate to another tool depending on what is best for our situation at that time.  

I think the technical support is great. They have been helpful when we needed something resolved.  

Before working with IBM Tivoli Workload Automation I worked with Control-M from BMC. 

The main differences and advantages of Control-M are mostly to do with the operator interface. The console that the operator is using is quite a bit better in Control-M rather than Tivoli, and so is the way to schedule and make the relationships between jobs.  

I think the product is generally easy-to-use and that includes my experience with the setup.  

The advice I would give to others considering using Workload Automation depends on the necessity and the reality of their requirements. It depends on the complexity of the jobs. Depending on that it may be interesting to use Tivoli because it is a good tool. It is a good application to use to run workload tracking.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product between and eight and ten depending on who is using it and for what reason. I think it is quite good so I think it deserves a nine.  

Additional features I would like to see included in the next release to improve and make it a ten would just be the two things I mentioned that Control-M does somewhat better for now. The interface for the operator should be improved, and the way to create relationships and dependency between the jobs can be better.  

I  used IBM Workload Automation within the past 12 months

The support from Cisco is very good. I was with them as a company for 40 years.

The configuration of IBM Workload Automation has some challenges. We have a difficult time customizing it, but it is similar to other solutions. However, it is easy to set up.

I would advise others to push their marketing representatives to give a simplified licensing solution, or if you outsource, to an IT vendor, have them deal with the complexities of the process.

I rate IBM Workload Automation an eight out of ten.

We use it at the Bank for the portfolio management system. In 2001 and 2003 I created all these jobs for the portfolio management system for collecting data from the backend system.

From 2015 I use it as the tool that collects the resources within the IT system that reports the use of different resources, file system resources, storage resources, and so on.

The most important feature is the creation of folders. It's a really great feature because you can organize the process with naming conventions. 

Other solutions like Control-M are better than this solution. IBM should have better integration with the cloud. 

It should support other schedulers that aren't IBM products. 

We have been using IBM Workload Automation since 2015. 

It's very, very stable. The support is quite good. I was totally astonished about the life cycle of this IBM product because a lot of colleagues told me that Control-M is the best scheduler but I have found that it's not true. IBM does a really good job with its product.

It's better than the solution that Control-M offers. Within Deutsche bank they are using Control-M for the investment banking and they are using different timezones, for every console you need a separate installation with Control-M. With IBM, it's not necessary. 

IBM uses also has different plan options, from monthly plans to weekly plans. This is a problem with Control-M. It makes maintenance very, very costly because you have to configure different environments for different timezones.

The scheduler is a little bit complex. They have different concepts, they use event mechanisms for their workforce. 

With Control-M you have a lot of server components. In the meantime, you can install them with Kubernetes as well which is a big improvement.

I would definitely recommend this product. It's an interesting option in terms of schedulers. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

The most valuable feature is the job scheduler.

I would like to be able to access the return value or result from one job, in the following job. This is a feature that other solutions have and is very helpful. I had to create my own workaround for it because the capability is important for me.

It would be helpful to have a mobile app that could be used to follow the job schedule. Most IT applications now have mobile app support.

I worked on IBM Workload Automation for close to 10 years, although I have recently changed companies and no longer use it.

The stability is good. 

We did not need to scale this solution. We had close to ten people who used it.

Technical support from IBM is very good. I have worked with different vendors and I know that it is sometimes difficult to get a good level of support, but there were people supporting this solution who were very good and always helped.

The implementation was done by external consultants.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Product administration with minimal scheduling usage these days. Installing, configuring, and administering distributed agents and integration with multiple services and applications.

Provides a robust, full spectrum enterprise-wide WLA platform. I have practical experience with all of the major "Enterprise" WLA products (Control-M, CA-7, and Zeke). None of them have the functionality and ease of use of TWS.

The DWC, when configured correctly, is a great GUI tool to provide Self-Service Scheduling capabilities to the user community. The variety of agents available allows for an extremely flexible Enterprise WLA solution. The WAPL (formerly SOE) functionality is one of the major things that sets IWA apart from the other platforms. With its use, you can automate tasks that other platforms can only dream about.

This may not be the norm, but slow down on the releases a bit. I fully understand that IWA functionality is increasing at an amazing rate, but trying to keep up with the upgrades is rough. Figure out a way to speed up the DWC response a little.

None! It's indestructible, and if configured correctly, and easily recovered in a disaster scenario.

None! I have supported this product in literally 100s of different environments and its unmatched in its ability to scale to any size.

Let us be honest: It is IBM. They may not have invented arrogant, but they perfected it. 

If you make it clear that you know what you are doing and you get support involved, it is as good as it gets. I have been given direct cell phone contacts to Product Development in Rome (when it was still there). They cared enough to help at that level.

I am currently supporting both IWA and CA-7 while my company decides on which direction to go forward.

With any experience whatsoever, IWA is as simple to install and configure. You basically fill in some blanks and run the setup jobs. They create all of the STC, panels and skeletons that you require.

In-house.

If you are running an IBM Mainframe, why would you want any other product as your z/OS based WLA "hub" ? 

To my knowledge, IWA is the only WLA product that will provide "parallel tracking" capability to assist in upgrading from one platform to IWA.

Not applicable. I have used IWA, CA-7, Control-M, and Zeke in the past.

Having used all of the major WLA platforms, I believe:

1. IWA is the most user-friendly and feature-packed product on the market today. 
2. Control-M is a close second (even though there are rumors that BMC is shopping it around). 
3. As for CA, at this point it's hard to tell what CA's Strategic Vision is going forward. They have ESP, Dseries, and now Automic, yet they are keeping the old dinosaur CA-7 alive because they can't figure out how to get all of the old legacy clients off it without major heartburn.

The event notification feature is beneficial since it allows for prompt and immediate notification in relation to any errors occurring in the system.

The IBM scheduler allows for easy and seamless execution of the automated tasks in order to ensure data processing.

The integration and monitoring within the extended agents such as SAP, PeopleSoft mainframe etc needs to be improved.

Extended agents such as SAP, PeopleSoft, CA-7, etc do not have the ability to trace child jobs or dependencies within the extended tools. The ability to do so would be a great added-feature in the next iteration of the application.

I have used this solution for five years.

8.5.1 is not stable, we've since moved to 8.6 but the front-end GUI was very slow. We've since migrated to a 8.6 back-end with a 9.1 front-end.

The system is remarkably stable on Unix/Linux/extended agents. There were some connection/configuration issues on the Windows machines.

IBM TDWC makes scalability and functionality easy and fast.

One drawback would be the mail server IDs are maxed out at 6-7 servers per ID (IDs are classified as per the alpha-numeric characters A-Z and 0-9).

IBM customer service is great. Dedicated account managers make support and technical assistance very easy.

The PRBs with IBM make support and troubleshooting easy and efficient.

We have not used any other solution. Although, we've upgraded 3 times.

The application comes packaged from IBM. Once your Oracle db (or DB2 db) and network connections are configured, you are essentially set and running.

Research your needs versus the cost and scalability of the product.

We looked at other solutions namely Skybot by HelpSystems, Tidal by Cisco, CA-7 from Computer Associates and Control-M by BMC.

Research your needs versus the cost and scalability of the product