OpCon pros and cons

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.

The whole product is valuable to us because of the integrations that it has with the MCP and the Windows environments. You have to have the agent on each one of them that you want to monitor. The integrations that we have created are along the lines of extracting files and sending them through SFTP to another vendor. Those are the things that were taking a lot of time away from my staff.

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.

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.

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 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.

Thus far we have only had a few minor problems, all of which the vendor addressed quickly. We have not encountered any major problems. The product is very stable and reliable.

The most valuable feature is the automation in general.

For us, the most valuable feature of the solution is the file transfer piece and being able to automate the moving of files around between our various vendors. It reduces the time involved versus somebody having to individually move the files around.

It would be great if you could create physically separate "clients," as I call them. I wish I could have a production client and a testing client and that they would be separate.

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.

The initial setup is very complex, but that's not necessarily something that needs to be improved. I'm told that in the next version they're improving the upgrade process. So that's in the works already.

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.

Enterprise Manager is a little clunky which I know they're addressing in the solution's manager.

Upgrading to newer versions remains complex.

More functionality within self-service would be greatly appreciated.

We are still in the early stages of our implementation, so at this point, I cannot see any needed improvements or features.

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.

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.