We performed a comparison between Fortra's JAMS and OpCon based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Fortra's JAMS is highly regarded for its effective job dependency tracking, visual representation of dependencies, warning and notification system, management of intricate scheduling needs, and comprehensive logging functionality. OpCon is praised for its adaptability, integration capabilities, self-service functionality, and automation capabilities.
Fortra's JAMS client interface lacks intuitiveness and options retrieval, while OpCon's web-based interface, Solution Manager, lacks functionality. Fortra's JAMS would benefit from a comprehensive training resource, whereas OpCon needs better documentation for upgrading.
Service and Support: Fortra's JAMS customer service receives high praise for being responsive, knowledgeable, and helpful. Customers appreciate the promptness of their responses and the availability of documentation and training resources. OpCon's customer service is also well-regarded, with customers praising the technical support team's ability to provide timely solutions and prevent disruptions. However, there have been occasional delays in issue resolution.
Ease of Deployment: Users find the initial setup for Fortra's JAMS to be simple and clear. The setup process for OpCon can be intricate and necessitates close collaboration with SMA consultants to achieve success.
Pricing: The cost of setting up Fortra's JAMS product is not specified, while OpCon is recognized as a pricey and intricate solution that demands a learning curve.
ROI: Fortra's JAMS saves time, boosts productivity, and is cost-effective. OpCon also delivers a high ROI by automating tasks, reducing the need for additional staff, and saving man-hours. OpCon also delivers a high ROI by automating tasks, reducing the need for additional staff, and saving man-hours.
Comparison Results: Fortra's JAMS receives positive user feedback compared to OpCon. Users appreciate JAMS for its simple setup, ability to handle job dependencies, automation capabilities, support and interactive agents, code-driven automation, flexible scheduling, and detailed logging for troubleshooting. JAMS is also seen as a valuable investment with a good return and earns high ratings for its responsive and knowledgeable customer service.
"JAMS has improved my organization by taking a myriad of manual processes and allowing us to automate them. It enables our folks to focus more on tasks that require their human intelligence and their creativity and less on just mundane tasks. It increases efficiency, accuracy, and consistency."
"We also use the solution’s Interactive Agents. If we need to push something to our dealer portal, we can just drop a file in a folder and it goes. Running interactive tasks helps me users focus on business processes since I don’t have to take care of running the jobs manually."
"The interface is good, and it's very easy to define and create jobs. If a job is not running or there is an error, the solution will send an email. That's all very good and very useful."
"The most valuable feature for us is that it's DR-ready. With respect to disaster recovery, it has the built-in capability for failover to our DR site. If all of the required ports are open, it can be done seamlessly."
"While I appreciate the other features, the agent stands out for its ease of installation and configuration for JAMS monitoring."
"The code-driven automation for more complex scheduling requirements frees up time because it's really easy to use... It's almost like a stand-alone software that we can't live without."
"The alerting in it is really targeted... you can set specific alerting so that if jobs in a given folder fail, certain people are alerted. You can also set security at the folder level, so that only people in those areas can go set them. That means that the alerting and security can be set at a very granular level."
"I find the historical tracking feature of JAMS invaluable for reviewing past events."
"We haven't freed up a full person's job using it, but there are a good handful of people for whom it has freed up about half of their time. And those employees love it. A lot of tasks are based on certain times, and they're no longer stuck doing those things at those times. We don't have to have anybody coming in early anymore. They can focus on the processing part of their jobs instead of the file moving and downloading."
"We particularly like the fact that it's graphical because it is Windows-based. Before, we were text-based on the mainframe. You can also produce flow charts. Because it's point-and-click, its ease of use is very nice."
"Often times there are criteria that cannot be determined by the system, which allows a human to make the determination and use the Self-Service Solution Manager to trigger a job."
"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 stability of this solution is awesome. It's the only product I've ever seen that you can actually build to fix itself if it has a problem. You'll build something and, if you find an issue, you can say, 'Hey, if this happens again, do this to correct it.'"
"Since we got it configured, it has just done the job day in, day out. Being able to rely on it and know that it's going to happen, whether there's a person over it or not, is really good."
"It can run scripted tasks automatically over and over without intervention. That is what it does and the part that I really like because repetitive tasks need to be done over and over, day after day, no matter what day of the week it is. It is difficult to have staff do these manually and consistently, especially over weekends or through the night. Instead, you can have OpCon do them."
"There are three features which are valuable: the automated calendar functions; the notification process for failed jobs or unscheduled events occurring, via email and text messaging; and the ability for the scheduling package to communicate across multiple platforms."
"It does validations when you try to delete an object and if there are any dependencies in place, the deletion process will not proceed... there is no information provided as to what it was that caused the validation to fail... it's quite a tedious process to find which object is getting in the way."
"The UI could be better. There were some things that were not quite intuitive, such as the search tool. When we tried to search for jobs, we had to clear the entire search and then go in and enter the new search query. That's something that wasn't intuitive for a new user."
"JAMS handles exceptions fairly well but there are some areas where it might improve a little bit. It has to do with being able to automatically handle exceptions, out-of-the-box, rather than having to code them."
"JAMS lacks source control features. Our previous solution had job control language, but JAMS doesn't. When migrating between versions, JAMS doesn't migrate all the data, like job change history, etc. Also, the scheduler doesn't have a way to make jobs invisible, so you can temporarily turn a job off if you decide not to run it today."
"I'm not sure if they have fixed it in a newer version, but there is no global search in the version I have. If I have multiple sub-folders that are named for business units, like HR or IT, and I have to search for a job, I cannot search from the top. I have to go to the HR folder to search for a particular job, or to the IT folder."
"The documentation is not super... It's not as quick and slick as I'd like it to be."
"I would like a simple web interface that I could give to my team to go in and kill jobs or see why jobs died so that we don't have to drill down deeper into the application and know everything about it. It would be good to have a really clean web engine that would say here are the jobs running. We can then click to see the time running and whether any of them fails and other similar things. I know they have one, but it's not very simplistic."
"The product does not allow the users to cut and paste the job names from the screen."
"I think that they're working on this, but I wish that there was a more centralized area to be able to see what other people are doing... They have a community platform for OpCon users, but I want to see more of where somebody is doing this process in that way. They have a great community platform right now, but I feel that it could be developed."
"There is room for improvement needed around setting up the calendars and frequencies. I would like more flexibility in what jobs run. Sometimes, with frequencies, I can't find what I want to without putting a little more labor into it."
"The UI refresh rate is really bad and needs improvement."
"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."
"I would like to see them improve the Solution Manager for the web application. It's the future for us. Our customers need a lot of functionality, but there isn't that functionality within Solution Manager. So they have to develop and improve it."
"What can get complicated is if you're doing anything more than just the built-in jobs. If you're using the more advanced features, troubleshooting becomes extremely complicated."
"Usage is a little complex. It's not like you can bring somebody in and they can just use it. They have to be trained... As far as complexity goes, it's right up there."
"We are still in the early stages of our implementation, so at this point, I cannot see any needed improvements or features."
Fortra's JAMS is ranked 5th in Workload Automation with 27 reviews while OpCon is ranked 9th in Workload Automation with 56 reviews. Fortra's JAMS is rated 9.0, while OpCon is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of Fortra's JAMS writes "We can scale up our organization's scheduling and automation without having to add staff to the department". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OpCon writes "Gives us the ability to schedule dependent jobs across different mainframes". Fortra's JAMS is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Redwood RunMyJobs, Tidal by Redwood and VisualCron, whereas OpCon is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Automic Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation and UiPath. See our Fortra's JAMS vs. OpCon report.
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