Tidal by Redwood Reviews

The primary use case for Tidal Automation software will depend on the specific needs and goals of each organization. It includes tasks such as job scheduling, workload automation, and event-driven automation. It helps in batch processing, data transfers, and job scheduling. 

The software can also be used to integrate with a wide range of enterprise systems and applications, including ERP systems, databases, and messaging systems. Tidal Automation software improves the efficiency and accuracy of business processes, reduces errors and delays, and optimizes resource utilization.

It has improved our organization in the following ways:

1. We have intricate workflows and business processes using Tidal Automation software, which has increased output, accuracy, and efficiency.

2. Tidal automation software has greater visibility and control over its business processes.

3. Tidal Automation software provides real-time monitoring and alerts, allowing organizations to respond quickly to issues and ensure that workflows are running smoothly.

4. Tidal Automation software can help reduce errors and ensure that tasks are completed with a high degree of accuracy.

Tidal Automation software provides real-time monitoring and alerts, allowing users to track job progress and identify potential issues before they cause delays or errors.

Users can create customized workflows that integrate with multiple systems and applications, allowing for end-to-end automation of complex business processes.

Tidal Automation software is a valuable tool for organizations looking to improve efficiency, productivity, and accuracy.

Tidal Automation software includes workload management features, such as job prioritization and distribution across multiple servers or platforms.

 Areas where the product or service be improved are:

1. The software's performance and scalability could be improved, particularly when dealing with large-scale workloads or complex business processes.

2. Tidal Automation software could become even more valuable to organizations looking to automate and optimize their business processes.

These additional features should be included in the next release:

1. Adding machine learning capabilities to Tidal Automation software could help organizations to automate more complex workflows and processes, such as predictive maintenance and anomaly detection.

2. Adding more customization features or a more flexible API could help users tailor the software to their specific requirements.

3. Adding collaboration features such as shared workflows, team management tools, and commenting capabilities could help teams work more efficiently and effectively.

I've used the solution for one year.

The primary use case of Tidal Automation solutions is to automate and manage complex and time-consuming tasks associated with scheduling and reducing manual efforts.

Tidal Automation solutions can streamline these tasks by automating data collection and analysis, scheduling maintenance tasks, and monitoring the performance of environments and the associated system. By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, Tidal Automation has helped us save time and resources, reduce errors, and improve operational efficiency.

It was deployed on-premise as a SaaS application.

The solution has improved our organization with:

1. Increased productivity. By automating tasks, we were able to focus on more valuable work, leading to increased productivity and efficiency.
2. Improved accuracy. Automating tasks has reduced the risk of human error, leading to more accurate results.
3. Enhanced compliance. Tidal Automation has helped us maintain compliance with regulations and standards by automating tasks such as audit trails and security checks.
4. Greater visibility. Tidal Automation provided a central dashboard for monitoring and managing tasks, providing greater visibility into an organization's operations.
5. Scalability. As our organization started growing, Tidal Automation was scaled to meet the increased workload and complexity of tasks.

The most valuable aspects of the solution include:

1. Workflow automation. Tidal Automation allows organizations to automate complex workflows and processes, reducing the need for manual intervention and improving operational efficiency.
2. Job scheduling. Tidal Automation provides a centralized scheduling system for jobs and tasks, allowing organizations to manage their workload and resources more effectively.
3. Error handling. Tidal Automation includes features for error handling and recovery, reducing the risk of job failures and minimizing downtime.
4. Monitoring and reporting. Tidal Automation provides real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities, allowing organizations to track job progress and performance and identify potential issues.
5. Integration with other systems. Tidal Automation can integrate with other systems and applications, allowing organizations to automate workflows across multiple platforms and environments.

The solution need to improve its offering via:

1. Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to enable predictive analytics and proactive issue resolution.
2. More advanced reporting and data visualization capabilities to enable deeper analysis of job performance and trends.
3. Enhanced integration capabilities with other systems and applications to provide a more comprehensive automation solution.
4. Advanced job dependency management and scheduling capabilities to ensure that jobs are executed in the correct order and on time.
5. Integration with cloud platforms to enable greater scalability and flexibility.

I've been using the solution for 1.2 years.

Tidal Automation was widely used for alerts, notifications, and analysis. 

As we handle servers in which the application will be running, we used to get alerts of incidents if there was any problem or issue with an application running or if there was an OS issue. Everything was addressed and worked on in a timely manner with the help of Tidal. We also had to analyze the server performance over and over to improve the stability. For that, Tidal Automation was very useful and it reduced the manual intervention in big lengthy tasks.

Tidal Automation actually helps a lot to improve overall SLA breaching (in percentage). We can easily maintain the incidents in SLA as it was triggering alerts. It allowed us to see the priorities so that the team could easily work on those alerts in a timely fashion. 

Also, server data visualization is much easier and helps to identify the capability and extended the resources to help scale up the project accordingly. This scaling was possible thanks to the Tidal Automation tool. 

It makes work easy and fast. There is no need to add more engineers to each shift. In the end, fewer resources could handle things with Tidal.

The data management on offer was valuable. It allowed for timely backups and storage. Tidal made the process of storing data on the servers simple. We could store it according to location and based on various client servers. Reverting back the data was also important when the server made a mistake or non-noticeable changes were made without information. When such an event took palace, we could easily revert the data back to as it was before.  

Setting up the initial product was a little hard. A small introduction or dialogue box could be very useful for handling a first-time setup. Also, the interface could be modified with more appealing and aesthetically pleasing layouts. 

Overall, Tidal Automation is good value for money. It could be better with a more interactive interface and some more cross-platform integration.

In my last project, we were using Tidal for six months. Later on, my project was changed.

The solution has good overall stability to sustain and process for the long run.

It has good scope for scalability. Scaling is possible with this Tidal tool.

There was a slight delay with customer support. Other than that, overall, we had a good experience.

Positive

I did not use a different solution previously. I was on this project for six months and later shifted to a different project.

The setup was slightly complex in the beginning. Later on, I got used to it.

It was implemented by the vendor. They were highly knowledgeable and helped us to get used to the solution. They even explained and guided us through each step of the process.

I was not involved in measuring the ROI.

As per my experience, Tidal Automation is worth the price.

I had some inights into different automation tools on the market. However, senior members of the company chose this solution over a previous solution, TestComplete. 

This is a great tool to use for big IT tasks. It makes the process fast and easy.

We use Tidal extensively to run our health and welfare claims processing throughout the day. That's the reason we got Tidal back in 2011. We receive 15,000 to 20,000 claims a day and we use Tidal to process the whole thing, all the way through to creating checks at the end of the day.

Since 2011, we've expanded it to other applications and other processes: mostly reports, and files that come in electronically from other companies that feed other applications. And in a roundabout way, what we use Tidal for is to execute the applications to load whatever needs to be done on those applications.

The transfer function we used to do with Tidal has been switched over to another software product called Cleo. And that is run by our network team. That way they can control all the information that comes in and out of our building. They can put secure FTP on it, encrypt and decrypt the information, and set password protections. Cleo has its own scheduler, like Tidal, but they don't use it. They let Tidal execute the Cleo commands to bring the data in and Tidal will execute any application programs after that.

Overall we run 1,100 to 1,200 steps every day, depending on day of the week. I call them "steps," but they're actually multiple steps. Before you get to the actual processing of a program there might be a move, a copy, or a delete when we're clearing out folders, using DOS commands. We then move data around to certain directories so that either the TriZetto software that we use can find that data or any internal programs that we use in VBS, .NET, Oracle, or MS SQL stored procedures can find that data.

We're also starting to use this new MDM application which captures addresses from various databases, verifies they are correct, and pulls them together into one database. After all of our nightly processing, we have Tidal kick off the main MDM master so that all those addresses are in sync.

Tidal sits on its own database and then it talks, through agents, to the other applications.

People who are on the Client Manager were complaining about response issues. It's never been proven that a batch job is causing the issue, but they do find that so many things are hitting the database at the same time that they shut down the batch job that's running at the time. We've now been able to move our schedules around so that it can just run at night when everybody's off the system.

Also, after a while using Tidal it started to reduce weekend hours by not have to watch it constantly on the weekend. The only time we're really busy on a weekend, now, is when there is a major upgrade going on, as we usually do it on a Saturday or Sunday. But other than that, it's very quiet on the weekend. It has reduced overtime by 80 to 90 percent.

As of right now, the only time we really have overtime is planned overtime. Once a month, our network team applies the Microsoft security patching, so we have to pick a day, once a month to hold everything in the schedule. They then apply their security patches to all the Windows Servers. They bring the applications back up and we have to do a quick, sample test to make sure Tidal is okay. We then run a few jobs to make sure other things are okay and the business users have to check their applications and their data. At that point we turn the schedule back on for the weekend. It sounds like a lot but it only takes about an hour. Where we used to have two or three hours of overtime a week, now it's down to one hour a month.

In addition, our number of jobs has been growing steadily. We do about 1,100 to 1,200 jobs a day. We could go further but we have never really tested how many jobs we could do.

One of the most useful features is being able to set up a schedule and create dependencies. The calendar can kick off processes at certain times, based on dependencies that you specify, like time, or whether another process has finished. Dependencies are the most useful thing.

You can also verify that a step is finished. And some of our departments are really interested when something has started. You can send out an email saying this step has launched or this step finished normally and, obviously, we always have it notifying us when something goes wrong.

It's also very useful to do repeating steps. If you need to do something multiple times throughout the day, it's very easy to just copy that group of steps or jobs and continually process the same thing each time. And you can always have one dependent on the other.

Tidal is also helpful because, once you set a schedule, you can keep an eye on it. You can kind of have "bookmarks" where it can tell you when this step is done and that step is finished, and you know that the schedule is moving forward and nothing has been stopped yet.

We've had some quirky stuff happen on an occasional basis where a job does not take off. For example, a job we expected to be finished by 3:00 a.m. is sitting there and not executing when we come in in the morning. We have to go all the way back to the dependencies and then we can see that one of the dependencies has become unscheduled, for some reason. No changes were made to the schedule but this prerequisite job has, all of a sudden, become unscheduled. I have brought this up with Tidal's support but they have never had an answer for it. It would be helpful to be notified ahead of time when something is going to stop the schedule, even if we don't necessarily know what's causing it.

But the main area for improvement is reporting. A lot of our managers would like to have metrics shown in graphs for the products they keep track of. The reporting part of Tidal isn't very useful. When you use the report function, you can't bring that data into an Excel spreadsheet. I understand in the new release they have something called Explorer which is a new reporting feature. I think they acquired a product to handle reporting functions, but we haven't gotten it yet.

We've been using Tidal since 2011.

Tidal has been pretty stable. We've had these little quirks, but they are mostly just minor bugs that crop up every once in a while. For instance, you might have to click on something twice or click off of something, like a tab, and then click back on it and it will bring up the screen. But other than that, it's been pretty stable.

The scalability is pretty good. We've used Tidal only for our main application which is our health and welfare system. We do a lot of reports and off of that, but we don't use it in any other areas. 

We've never scaled it extensively across too many different platforms. The only thing we have right now is a SQL Server platform and an Oracle Database that we go against. We're only in one location.

I don't see us expanding our use of it for now. We're pretty stable.

I haven't really dealt with Tidal support too much. The only time I really dealt with tech support is when we were doing an upgrade to a new release, to find out what release we need to have the agents in and was it compatible with other releases of SQL Server. The Tidal database, itself, is on a SQL Server release — I think it's at 2012 right now — and it can go up to 2016, but other applications are at different SQL Server levels. We had to check with them to see if it was all compatible.

They were very good in responding.

We had two mainframes running all of our applications. We were using CA products. Our health application was ClaimFacts, from TriZetto, but they were dropping support for the mainframe product and everybody had to switch to Facets. We were running both products at the same time while we were transitioning to Facets. We had to run ClaimFacts, the mainframe version, for about a year or so because, if somebody has a claim they have a year to report that claim and another six months to make adjustments on their claim. So our old mainframe product had to be kept until all that faded away. 

Then everything went into PC, server-oriented applications. We got Tidal because the company, TriZetto, used Tidal to run their stuff. So we brought it in and we started setting up our whole batch schedule.

I wasn't privy to the technical part of the initial setup, but I think it was pretty straightforward. We just needed to know where to place the agents so that they could connect, and we had to do a file share so that if you're doing a DOS command and a Tidal job, it will have shareability to whatever servers they're going to. Once those were all set up it was pretty stable.

Our deployment took about a month. But we were using the product for the first time. So we were setting up jobs for the first time. Some things were kept out of Tidal until they were ready to be moved in. They were run by developers or the application people, manually. It took about six to eight months to get everything on Tidal. There are so many icons and buttons and things that they had to press on to run something on a desktop and we had to convert that all into executable commands for Tidal in the schedule.

That approach was planned. The initial plan was to get the batch processing of claims in first. That was pretty smooth. There were hiccups every now and then but it was not that bad. While that was going on, all the in-house stuff was done in the periphery on a person's desktop. Those things were set up afterward.

The learning curve is at least one to two weeks, if you teach a person, full-time, how to run the schedule and how to set everything up. It depends on what knowledge they need to have to run a schedule. If it was just a matter of running jobs, it would take less than a week. But if they're constantly being asked questions on what this or that job does, it will take a person longer to get a feel for what all the applications do.

I came from a programming background when I started running these jobs and setting up the schedule, so I had a fairly extensive knowledge of what all the applications do. But you take a person who is just out of the computer room and all he knows is how to do a Computer Associates schedule, he knows the timelines and the flow of everything, but he doesn't know exactly what the applications do. They would need at least a few days to find out what are the major applications or major steps in a daily job schedule are. If some of those steps are very critical to run, they would need to be pointed out so they know which are critical and which ones can be held or bypassed. It takes time to get used to the processing.

We used a Cisco consultant for installation. There were four people involved in the installation. We had the consultant working with our network people, and we had a technical support person who made sure all the libraries were in place to set up for Tidal. And there was me and another person getting all the schedules together.

The only time we've used a third-party is when we were doing a major upgrade of Tidal from 3.1 to 5.2, back in 2015.

The third-party we used was Synertech. Our experience wasn't too good with the consultant they gave us. He was very gruff and it wasn't a pleasant experience. We didn't ask him to come back. But the actual conversion to the new release went well. We used the consultant to show us the technical part of upgrading to 5.2. We also wanted to use him to train one of our new people in Tidal functions, but it never got that far.

I'm not in the financial end, so I don't know what our licensing costs are.

I know that Tidal integrates with a product called JAWS Workload Analytics, which will analyze your schedule, give you graphics and reports, tell you where your logjams are, and analyze all the data going in and out. We asked what the price is on that and it was about $200,000.

There was one option back then, but by the time they wanted to come in for a demo, we had already decided to use Tidal.

The biggest advice I can give is to test Tidal first. Run the whole schedule, whatever you're putting in. Run everything you can and test Tidal before you bring it over to production.

The trickiest thing to do is to change a schedule during the day. Once you associate a job with the calendar, and then somebody comes by and says, "Hey, I want to put these six steps in, and we need to run that today," if you try to change that schedule during the day, you don't realize that, because you put it on the calendar, it's on a schedule. You could be making changes and kicking off things inadvertently. You can't change something during the day without like stopping the scheduler or putting it on pause. We might have done that once in all these years — pause the whole scheduler or pause job launching and then make a change and then turn it back on.

You may think that you can change something during the day and let it go, but then you realize, "Oh, this thing took off." And you realize that because you put that job on the schedule, it picked up the scheduling requirements it inherited from another group of jobs and it will take off on you. That's probably the trickiest part of the learning curve.

When we brought Tidal in there were six people who were taught how to use it but five of them have retired. I'm the last one. About three years ago I had to train another person who came from the mainframe computer room after he took the job as a Tidal scheduler. I got him up to speed. The two of us run the schedule during the day. There are no other users. There are a few application programmers or developers who just want to have Tidal available so they can see what's going on, and we give them inquiry access. But nobody else has any authority to change anything or to set up anything.

Overall, it does what it's supposed to do.

I always get into arguments with the management staff here. They always claim something happened in Tidal and I say that Tidal doesn't process anything. It's a scheduler and it just launches jobs on the servers. If there's a system hung up somewhere, it's not Tidal. Stop. It is the actual program. Whatever processing has been launched by Tidal is the issue, not Tidal itself. I finally convinced them of that. Just because Tidal launched something doesn't mean it has touched anything or changed any data. It just goes to a server and launches a process. A person with the right authority can do the same thing from their desktop.

Our use of Tidal is mostly file-event driven. We use it to manage our ingestion, processing, and loading of data. Tidal has a hook and it runs ETL for us. It runs jobs and SQL and some of our database appliances like IIAS, the new version of Netezza Teradata.

We have a file gateway that receives a file and drops it in a location. That file event picks it up and drops it over to the ETL tool. The ETL tool will run and aggregate a number of source files and turn it into a properly formatted input file. That file then goes through data hygiene and data analysis. Then it goes through a matching process. It is then put back out and runs an ETL process to stick it into a SQL database. And then there are a number of jobs that are run in the SQL database to manipulate that file.

We don't have a lot of calendared events or scheduled windows.

We have a central location for Tidal in our data center, and then we have client-hosted solutions where we run smaller instances of Tidal, and those are in the cloud. We use AWS, Azure, and GCP.

It reduces our administrative costs. As much as people are in a DevOps model, we can create dashboards for tier-one people to monitor multiple jobs and then alert or call when things fail. It helps us with reliability and managing SLAs.

It has also helped to reduce weekend and overtime hours due to the fact that you can have a single person manage multiple jobs. If we didn't have the single pane of glass and that visibility, people would have to manually look at logs to determine the progress of a job. So it reduces headcount. But when you run 24 by seven and 365 you still have people working weekends.

We run 70,000 Tidal jobs a day. it would take a mountain of people months to run that many jobs manually.

What we find most useful from the operations side is that it provides a single pane of glass for managing that workstream. It also alerts us on failed jobs, so it's our monitoring and management tool for those workstreams. 

Tidal helps administrators and users to see the information that is relevant to them in that single pane of glass. They can see jobs running, they can see job history, and they can see job progression. If you look at alternatives like Airflow and clouds, you'd have to design your own UI to monitor the progress of the different jobs that you've created in Airflow. So Tidal is huge for us.

Most of our stuff is private clouds. We haven't had an issue with its support for private cloud or its migration to the cloud. In our scenarios, we run the masters here and we reach out to agents that are running in the cloud. We also use it to kick off command-line utilities for loading data into BLOB storage and S3 buckets. We use the SFTP utility to move files around.

One area for improvement is the command-line interface and the API to bulk-load jobs. It's a little bit kludgy, but we still manage without it. They're working on it and it's getting better all the time. In addition, the documentation for their API for creating jobs needs to be updated. It has a bit of a learning curve.

We also wish there was a search functionality for assigning actions to events, and users to workgroups. 

Finally, the S3 data mover jobs are still a little buggy.

I've been using Tidal Workload Automation for about 14 to 15 years.

After the 6.2 release, the stability became awesome. With 6.6.1 it was a little bit difficult, but everything after that has been solid.

Scaling is easy. You could run these in VMS. We happen to have physical boxes. 

We haven't scaled it out, such as creating a remote master. In instances where we thought we may have to kick off jobs from our Maryland data center or jobs in our Denver data center, over MPLS, we thought we would have issues but we didn't have any issues. We were fine. We've been able to run things centrally.

The databases scale the way SQL scales, either by giving it more memory or more CPU.

As we have brought on clients we've grown over the years. We have a tendency to overbuy for the Client Managers. Our Client Managers are coming up on four years now. In 2021 we'll likely do a tech refresh. We'll stand it up with another version of Tidal and we'll do the migration onto the new platform. At that time we'll look at scaling up the boxes a little bit. You can put a lot more workload, a lot more Tidal jobs, on these without having to increase CPU or memory.

Their tech support is awesome. We've had Tidal for a long time. We had Tidal when it was Tidal, and then when it was purchased by Cisco. During the time that it was purchased by Cisco, support was lacking. But now that it's part of the STA, it's back to being awesome.

We were using a home-grown solution. It was a cron job manager. It didn't do file events very well; it had monitor CIS logs. It was tough to schedule tasks. It was purpose-built so it didn't have a SQL adapter. It didn't have the ability to run on Netezza and things like that.

We switched because to programmatically create the enhancements for the things that came out-of-the-box with Tidal was just too costly. It would have taken too much time.

We've retooled our environment three times since we first installed it. Our last one was easy, a piece of cake. The ones prior to that were not so good. 

When Tidal sold it to Cisco, and they had introduced the concept of a Client Manager, a type of web interface, there was a time when going from one version to another version was not good. Now that Tidal is back to the STA Group, our upgrades are much easier.

With our last upgrade, we stood up a whole other set of servers — our servers were old — as well as a database. From the time we got the servers installed, loaded Tidal, and did our initial database export, so we could do testing, it took two to three weeks. It was a piece of cake. And then we did extensive testing.

In terms of the solution's learning curve, from an operations standpoint, teaching people how to search and manage jobs, and start and stop them, put jobs on hold and kill them, we can get someone up to speed in less than a week. For developers, it's a little bit more lengthy. There have been several instances where we have a Tidal developer, a subject matter expert — we've only had one or two of them — who has been able to train multiple people and make them serviceable. We've been doing it for 14 years, so we don't use Tidal training. We've created our own training documentation to get them up to speed for how we use Tidal. We can get them up to speed very quickly. I know people who have joined the company and who are writing and creating Tidal jobs two weeks or three weeks later.

For ROI we'd have to figure out how many man-hours am we're saving with Tidal versus not having it or having one of the other automation tools. We've grown up with it. I can't imagine being without it. Back in 2016, when we looked at possibly switching over to another solution, it wasn't a clear path to migrate to any of the other tools. We literally run our whole enterprise on this, so if Tidal goes down, the world stops.

We feel we're getting a pretty good deal with Tidal. It's supporting $600 to $700 million in revenue.

The licensing model's flexibility is awesome. The way it's licensed for us is per master and then per agent. We have an enterprise agreement, so we have unlimited agents, and we have it on 500 devices.

I don't know how it could be easier to budget for Tidal, given that there are no costs for upgrades and other enhancements. There are increases over time, but unless you add functionality, such as buying other adapters, it's very easy to manage costs for maintenance and the like.

In terms of the hardware that we purchased — VMs and storage and networking, and the VMs' SQL licensing — it was a little bit below $200,000. That doesn't include licensing.

The hardware list is includes

• a SQL cluster
• a utility server that we use to migrate jobs from dev to prod
• two masters in dev
• a fault manager in both dev and prod
• three Client Managers in dev and two Client Managers in prod
• for each of those Client Managers we have a database
• 11 VMs
• 12 physical boxes.

So we've got a pretty big environment.

There have been a couple of times that we have looked at competitors, especially when we saw that Cisco wasn't really investing time or money into it. It wasn't clear to us if Cisco was going to continue to invest in Tidal. So we went out and looked at the market and did evaluations. 

We looked at Automic or UC4. We looked at BMC Control-M. Stonebranch was actually interesting, back in 2016.

What it came down to was that Automic was tough because it was changing hands on a regular basis. Stonebranch was more in our price range, but Tidal's price for the way that we use it was cheaper. When we started looking at what it would take to migrate from one to the other, there was no ROI.

The way we evaluated things was we looked at our use cases and ranked them from one to ten, and then costs. All of Automic, Stonebranch, and BMC would do what we wanted them to do. I'm sure, if we had dug a little dig deeper, we'd have found the little idiosyncrasies between them. But the cost for those and the cost of migration was just too much.

We started seeing how Cisco was propping it up a little bit more, right before they sold it to STA. And when STA bought it, they assured us that they would start making improvements. We stopped our analysis of other solutions there.

Tidal's drill-down functionality is one of those things where you get out of it what you put into it. If you program it to fire-and-forget then it doesn't have a lot of drill-down mode to it. If you put in result codes and things like that, instead of using the agent to kick off the SSRS package in SQL, or if you use the adapter, then you can drill down.

We have about 100 users using Tidal in our organization. They are anywhere from developers to operations people to administrators. There are only a couple of administrators. There's a bunch of operators because we use this to run 24/7, 365 for 20 or 30 customers. For each of them there may be a couple of operations people and a couple of developers. As for maintenance, we patch our boxes, our masters, our Client Managers, and our databases every month, and it takes one person.

The solution is used to automate and manage intricate and crucial business workflows across numerous systems and applications is the main use case for the Tidal workload automation software solution.

The workload automation software from Tidal is especially helpful for sectors like banking, production, transportation, and healthcare that have high volumes of time-sensitive processes. Any delay or mistake in finishing tasks can have serious repercussions and affect the bottom line in these sectors.

The software solution from tidal can assist organizations in achieving regulatory compliance and supports compliance requirements.

Tidal Automation offers extensive monitoring and reporting features that let users keep track of the status of their workflows and quickly spot any problems. 

The tool's high degree of adaptability also enables users to design processes that are tailored to their particular company requirements.

The Tidal software utility offers a wide variety of automation features, including exception handling, sophisticated dependency management, and event-based scheduling. Helped our organization to meet SLAs.

Tidal Automation can assist businesses in automating their processes, lowering the need for manual involvement, and boosting productivity.

It offers cost savings, quicker working periods, and greater accuracy may come from this.

Users of Tidal Automation frequently laud its simplicity, adaptability, and dependability

The product offers a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for users to generate and plan tasks.

Tidal Automation is a flexible option that can be tailored to meet various company requirements because it supports a large number of platforms and apps

Tidal's adaptability and user-friendliness could be increased by integrating it with additional programmes and platforms.

By enhancing its analytics and reporting tools, Tidal could make it simpler for users to monitor and evaluate their tasks.

Added security elements may raise the product's general security posture.

Also, Tidal's adaptability could be increased by integrating with cloud platforms, which would also make managing tasks in these settings simpler.

Users may be more likely to adopt and use Tidal if the setup and configuration process is made simpler.

Tidal Automation uses advanced algorithms and machine learning techniques to analyze real-time data from tidal turbines and adjust their settings to maximize energy output while minimizing maintenance requirements. This can help increase the efficiency and reliability of tidal energy systems, leading to cost savings and improved environmental sustainability.

Overall, the primary use case for Tidal Automation is to help manage and optimize tidal energy production in a variety of settings, ultimately contributing to the growth and success of the renewable energy industry.

One of the main benefits of Tidal Automation is increased efficiency and productivity in tidal energy production. By automating the process of turbine management and optimization, Tidal Automation can help reduce downtime, improve turbine performance, and ultimately increase energy output. This can lead to cost savings and improved profitability for organizations in the tidal energy industry.

Tidal Automation can help improve the reliability and safety of tidal energy systems. By analyzing real-time data and making adjustments to turbine settings, Tidal Automation can identify potential issues and prevent equipment failures before they occur. This can help minimize the risk of accidents or other safety incidents.

One of the key features of Tidal Automation is its ability to collect and analyze real-time data from tidal turbines. This includes data on turbine performance, energy output, and environmental conditions. By leveraging machine learning algorithms, Tidal Automation can use this data to optimize turbine settings and improve overall efficiency and performance.

Another valuable feature of Tidal Automation is its ability to automate turbine control and monitoring. This can help reduce the need for manual intervention and monitoring, which can save time and reduce the risk of errors or accidents. By automating tasks such as turbine startup and shutdown, Tidal Automation can also help reduce wear and tear on equipment, which can prolong its lifespan

The solution could be improved via:

1. Integration with other systems. Tidal Automation could be further integrated with other systems used in the operation of tidal energy systems, such as weather forecasting tools, energy management systems, or asset management software.
2. Customization. The ability to customize Tidal Automation's algorithms and settings to better fit the needs of individual installations could be added in the next release. This would allow for greater flexibility and adaptability to different environments and operational requirements.

It's a company-wide batch scheduler.

It runs tons for us. It runs Windows, Unix/Linux. We connect with a lot of databases: Oracle, SQL, Sybase. We have BusinessObjects BI adapters, we scan emails, and we incorporate it with TriZetto Facets healthcare solutions. There's so much. It's our core enterprise scheduler.

It helps because we have brought in a lot of other applications and systems where we're able to use an enterprise-level scheduler that is consistently monitored and backed up and has a ton of redundancy so that we don't have any downtime. We're pretty close to 99 percent uptime on our scheduler.

It has reduced some of our weekend and overtime hours. For us, it's all based on the programming around the scheduler. For some teams, it has greatly reduced weekend and night hours, but for some people it hasn't because they babysit the process.

Tidal has also helped us increase capacity in terms of the number of jobs. Over the last three years we've added between 10,000 and 15,000 jobs.

It's very

• user-friendly
• intuitive
• robust.

Most people, once you give them a quick tutorial on it, can figure out how to use Tidal. For the basic user and developer, it's very intuitive. I don't think it's very hard. I teach users how to use this in a quick, 30-minute conference call, and people are usually very quick to learn it. For a basic user, 30 minutes should be fine.

We use the solution for cross-platform and cross-application workloads. That's one of the core reasons we chose it. It's one of a few things in the industry that can be used for cross-platform integration. It has the schedules to monitor the workflow. We have a 24/7, 365 department that monitors the batch schedule. It's fairly easy and intuitive and we could easily set up the alerting systems around it.

Admins can do more because they have more access but you can set that up the way you would like it. That's all configurable, at least in the GUI. In the back-end, obviously, it's only the admins who have access. But both admins and users can see the schedules.

The drill-down feature makes the GUI interface and the scheduling interface load faster because you don't have as much to load into the screen. I personally use it more, but I do know a lot of users don't. It's all dependent on user experience and how much they choose to use it.

Before STA bought this product, Cisco owned it and, unfortunately, they did not update things as well as they should have. We're just now seeing improvements to the product and bug fixes.

The biggest improvement they need to work on is doing better QA checks before they release new patches and service packs. We do find that you can't trust getting the new product right away, as they have to get some bug fixes out. They do tend to have some bugs in the first iteration.

In addition, something that they already know about is that speed can be a little bit of an issue in the environments and the viewers.

And while everything is nice in the GUI interface — they recently upgraded it — they could take it a step further. I would like it to have more flexibility and the overall look of the product could be better. Before this recent patch that we're doing to 6.53, in the 6.5 series it still looked like a product from the 1990s. They recently did a mini-refresh on graphic user interface, but it still looks a little bit clunky. It doesn't look as smooth as I would expect from a 21st-century product, but it's getting there. But this a secondary item, versus the speed and working on bug fixes.

I, myself, have been using Tidal for six or seven years. Our company pretty much runs all of our core processing through scheduling. Tidal is the default and has been the default for many years. So it's hard for us to come up with numbers for how it's improved our operations because we're not a company that just brought Tidal in, brand-new, and it suddenly revamped our company. We've been using it for close to 20 years and I enjoy the product very much.

Tidal is pretty stable. We haven't had any major issues, at least in the last three years that I've been working here, and especially since we upgraded. We haven't had many major issues, and we do have redundancy, which is great. We have redundancy for the primary master backup master, and fault tolerance. That that helps with keeping things stable. As of mid-year 2020, I am decreasing the product stability from 8 to 6 stars due to the amount of bugs we are constantly facing.

It's very scalable. As the company grows you increase the resources. I've worked at a small company that has Tidal and I'm now working at a pretty big company that uses Tidal and it all works pretty seamlessly.

It's pretty extensively used in our company. We have 25,000 jobs in production, and we keep growing. We keep adding jobs.

We have about eight engineers who create jobs and we have about 10 people who are operators who monitor the production schedule. And we have 200 to 300 other users who are developers. They create code that integrates with Tidal and they work with the engineers to create the jobs in Tidal. They access Tidal to view and check their jobs.

We have an architect and two admins to keep the environments up and running. We have the eight engineers who create, monitor, and edit the jobs and the general environment. They are on-call as well. That's the core team for Tidal. And the NOC manages alerts if something happens, to reach out to the on-call people

Technical support is great. They're fantastic. They're very responsive and detailed when we ask them questions. A big thing that I like since STA bought it is that their support has been very responsive and very quick.

Each upgrade has gotten a little bit better. I remember back in the day, when I first started working Tidal, upgrades were a pain, but they're slowly making improvements on the upgrades. One thing I would like to see them improve a little bit on is the documentation, because some parts of the upgrade are not exactly clear and I've had to go through support to help me on what to fill out in certain parts. But their support is actually fairly quick and they have been able to help me with it.

We've done major upgrades, and that's always a multi-month process because you have to do the change-process testing. That depends on the corporation. But the recent upgrade that we're doing from 6.35 to 6.53 has been going really well and has been pretty fast in terms of the actual setup and installation. Other than a little snag that I had to work through with support, it has gone very well. To upgrade each environment has taken an average of an hour-and-a-half to two hours.

There is some very complex strategy for updates. The main thing is to start with the lower environments and back up everything, the database and the servers, and go through each environment in a slow and steady process. We come up with a testing plan before moving on to the next environment. We have to make sure we test each environment thoroughly, over time, before moving to production.

When we did a major upgrade about two years ago, we used BLUEHOUSE to help us, when we went from 5.31 to 6.3 That was a major change. But ever since then, we have been handling each integration or upgrade in-house.

We purchase a seven-year contract. Once that's up, we'll look at renewals and costs and compare them again.

The main thing is to look at whether you really need an enterprise scheduler in general. After that, implementation is very important. Setting up standards from the beginning for the scheduling and the jobs is very key. My biggest advice is to analyze all these processes and come up with a good plan for how to incorporate everything into your scheduling. That would be one of the most important things for Tidal or for any scheduler in general. From the admin side, for the technology itself and the technical stuff, work with and trust Tidal support at the beginning to get to a certain level of how to scope everything out, and then go from there.

I'd rate it an eight out of 10. The main thing is whether or not they come out with a better rollout of their upgrades and patches so that they are less buggy. Unfortunately, they still do come out with a consistent number of bugs. They also need better documentation at the admin level. Those are the two core areas that they're truly lacking in, and a little bit on speed. However, the newer version that we're still testing is supposed to take care of that. We'll have to see when that comes into play.