The Universal Agent is the most valuable feature. Being agent-based and being able to go across multiple technology stacks, which is what our workflows do, Stonebranch gives us the ability to bridge those disparate technologies. It enables us to remove the dependency-gap with the agent so we know the status of the workflow at each step.

Workflow development in Stonebranch is straightforward. There is something of a learning curve, but it's not very steep. Being able to develop workflows without having to train and develop some very specialized skillsets to use the tool is very useful.

Stonebranch absolutely helped enable digital transformation in our company and it still is. In our automation efforts, we're pushing everything to Informatica and, as we move those ETLs, we're automating the entire workflows. In phase-one and phase-two, there were 244 jobs migrated in from other ETL platforms to Informatica, and we've automated all of those. We have almost 200 jobs remaining. We're going to have something approaching 450 workflows in Stonebranch when we're done.

We like that it has GUI and is not just a command line.

The task monitor is quite useful in most cases. 

It's stable.

The solution can scale.

Technical support is helpful. 

The most valuable feature is the reliability of the agents, because we need them accessible and we need to run stuff. The agent technology and compatibility are top-notch. The agents are wonderful. I've spoken at several of their conferences and always give them high marks. I would put the agents' resiliency at number one in the industry.

We have used the Universal Task a little bit and it seems to be fully functional. It's good.

The Stonebranch Marketplace is decent as well.

It's very feature-rich, but our focus has been mostly around resolving the file transfer problem: We did not have a standard way of transferring files internally. That was a plus. I don't think anybody in the market does it like they do. When it came down to our standards and compliance and hardening down systems, it was the most secure solution.

We also lean a lot on the multi-tenancy that they offer within the product, the ability to get other people to self-manage their estate, versus having a central team do all the scheduling. That's what we lean on the most.

Regarding the Universal Controller, to give you a bit of history without getting into the details of it, we've tried multiple solutions across the years. The one thing that we wanted to get rid of was the lack of resiliency of all the solutions that we had. What I liked about the agent at the time, before we got into the scheduler, was how robust it was. It just does not go down easily. When we looked at the resiliency of the scheduler, it was on par. It wasn't something that was developed in a basement somewhere. It was top of the class. We throw a lot at it from a resiliency perspective. It stays up. That is a major focus for us. It has reduced the amount of time we have to throw into keeping it up and running, which is translating into a lot of dollars. We host it on-prem.

When it comes to agent technology and compatibility with other vendors, from a platform perspective it was the one vendor that fit all the platforms that we have, from your old platforms - mainframe, NSK, IBM i - to the new ones, going into cloud and containers, etc. It is able to work across the entire suite of technologies, and it works very well with our core, which is the Windows and Unix platforms. It fit what we needed it to do. Other, bigger companies tend to forget one or more of those platforms, because they're in competition with each other, so they do not support some platforms. Stonebranch is very platform-agnostic, so if a customer uses it, they will support it.

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.

Their agents are the simplest. They're easy to install, they're easy to get up and running. We do a particular kind of access on our servers for ubroker and then I have the directory created by my Unix admin. After that, I don't have to get them involved anymore. I can install, upgrade, I can name the aliases on the agent, so if we need a passive environment for an agent, that's one of the nice features. If our primary goes down, I can bring up the passive one and I don't have to change anything in the scheduling world. It will start running from that new server.

The agents have treated me very well. I have found the agents to be so much simpler, when compared to ESP. I haven't been exposed to the other tools, how they run their agents, but Stonebranch's agents are by far the simplest I've seen to download, install. I'm up and running within a half hour on it.

Task monitors work extremely well. We haven't had any issues with them: jobs monitoring another job to finish. We do have some that look into the future, but most of ours look backward. We have some that look back two days. The job running on a Friday looks for something that ran on that Wednesday and knows it ran successfully, and the schedule keeps right on going.

They brought in a web service task, which saves you running an agent on a server. I can send http commands directly to servers, which can start processes on that server itself, based on a file coming in. There is an agent cost, but there's a certificate that you have to put on. There's a little more background work for myself, because I have to keep the certificates up to date.

The features are upgraded, and every six months they're releasing patches. There are features like dependencies. Some jobs are one block, and some jobs are different blocks. That dependency can be set, and many jobs can be dependent or in one block. You can do many automations. 

The rerun portion is quite easy and very fast. If the database is good, then it is very nice.

I like that the users can kick off the tasks that the administrators have allowed them to kick off so that they are more in control of the data that they need. They don't have to contact IT or other people to get the data they need. It makes the users very self-sufficient and they like it too. They don't have to wait on people. When they know they need it, they can just go start the job and whenever it's done they get the data.

We're using the Universal Controller and, while it took a little while to get everything we needed into it, once it was there it became a really nice tool. We can delegate tasks through it or we can delegate all tasks for certain machines through it. It's a really nice, central point to let us know which tasks have failed. I come from a programming background and, as a programmer, I would output a log file from our jobs. After a while, people forget to check log files. With Stonebranch, as long as the error code is there, it displays on the dashboard right away, so you don't have to remember to go check the log file. It gives us a lot better visibility, and a lot more quickly. The Universal Controller, and everything we do with Stonebranch, is on-premise.

The tasks are incredibly capable, and as long as you name them with a nice, uniform naming convention, they are very useful. You can create some interesting workflows through various machines, or you can just have it kick off single tasks. All in all, I really like the Universal Task. You can do some mutually exclusive stuff, such as an "A not B" kind of thing. It has a lot of capabilities behind the scenes. We don't use it to its full capabilities, but it is very strong and a very capable interface.

I really like the agents. We've had no trouble with them interfering with any of our other systems or vendors — and some of the machines they're running on are very flaky. But I've never been able to trace any problems back to Stonebranch. The problems we had after Stonebranch were the same problems we had before we put the Stonebranch agents on those machines. The interoperability is really nice. It has a minimal footprint, it doesn't consume much RAM, and there is very little network overhead unless the machine is actually doing something and sending data back. It's really nice to fire-and-forget. The syscontroller tells the task to start on the remote machine. The remote machine executes it and when it's done it sends back the package of data that the control holds and consumes. It's really a very well thought-out system.

Workflow editor and the ability to visually see how a particular job or set or jobs will run together, when and under what conditions. 

I like the dashboard and the various workflows. 

The ability to monitor tasks that are on the open-system side as well as our mainframe side gives us a one-window view of all our processes.

I love the Universal Controller. It's been great for us. We host it on-premise. It resides here on their own servers within our network, within the company. It's High Availability, meaning there's failover from one server to the other if one goes down.

The Stonebranch Universal Task is very flexible. There are many different tasks that are available for use.

It is very user-friendly, and it is quite easy to use. Moreover, you can integrate a lot of applications by using this simple tool, and it holds all the details in a very simplified manner.

Triggers separate from tasks contrary to the competitors.  

The bundling promotion feature will greatly save time and improve implementation by reducing the manual intervention required to move workflows from our test/staging environment.

Workflows in general. It's great to automate across multiple servers through multiple applications. It is also useful to be able to use the universal templates to create our own automation types. We have found this useful for several different applications, as well as our own internal FTP task type.

Agent overview with clustering, monitoring and filtering the different operating systems and/or software versions.

• The possibility to connect multiple tasks in a workflow across domains and operating systems.
• Also the UDM file transfers and the possibilities which can be achieved with UDM scripting.
• The GUI is also easy to operate and does not need installation since it is web-based.

From a Product Owner perspective, I can say that for me, the most valuable features are: web interface, business services allowing to segregate users, reporting capabilities. 

Most valuable option is creating tasks and triggering them on scheduled time. It is so helpful that tasks can be added to Workflows and many dependencies can be created between those tasks. 

• Ready-to-use standard API or interfaces available, and flexible scheduling. 
• The beautiful part of scheduling is you can do weekdays or business days or custom business days. 
• The template format is very helpful when you have 100s of jobs to be scheduled every day.
• Email feature can be customized based on the variables and parameters.

• Runs without problems 
• The joblog (STDERR, STDOUT) is spooled online to z/OS, so it is easy for the z/OS user to manage a distributed job.

• The layout of the UI is solid.  
• It has really helped scale automation efforts.
• I also like the existing templates.
  

• Universal Agent runs very stable and just needs very less maintenance. 
• The easy-to-use interface gives access to the shell environment of the target system.

Create Java between tasks and show this in a graphical overview. Integrate easily different application with UNIX tasks.

The installation of the product is very straightforward.

The interface is very user-friendly and easy to navigate.

The solution is very stable.

The product can scale easily.

We've found the pricing to be reasonable.