We performed a comparison between AppWorx Workload Automation, Control-M, and Stonebranch based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC, Tidal Software by Redwood, Redwood Software and others in Workload Automation."Scheduling is a good feature."
"The solution is very user friendly so anyone can use it."
"We have a lot of nightly jobs that need to be run. Therefore, we perform a lot of calculations and processes during nighttime hours."
"It has improved my organization through automation of back office and infrastructure procedures, and by integrating and orchestrating key business applications spanning multiple technology stacks."
"It is an object-based approach to task and process design in conjunction with conditional logic and event-based scheduling actions, which enables a build once/use often design methodology to be employed."
"The automated solution is the most valuable piece. Otherwise, we would have to be doing everything manually on every server."
"The interface is good."
"The most valuable features of AppWorx Workload Automation are simplicity and reliability. Additionally, they recently transformed the UI which is better."
"It is very easy to use. The HA feature is also very good."
"It can do anything that I need. We do real-time jobs. We also do jobs that have to run at certain times. I have not been presented with a scheduling need that I was not able to do. It is very flexible and dynamic."
"My organization has been able to script scheduled jobs in Control-M to potentially replace legacy products that are at end of life or end of service. The previous backup applications that were being used for specific files, folders, or applications were no longer being supported, therefore being able to use Control-M to replace that has been very valuable."
"Self Service, BIM features are most valuable. As no need to login to EM client and check the job status."
"The reporting is top-notch. I haven't found any other applications on the market that can replicate what Control-M offers. The alerting is very good, and I think their service monitoring is the best in the industry."
"Automation of the batch jobs is the most valuable feature."
"The integration with ServiceNow is good. When a job ends and there are problems with it, we automatically open an incident in this platform, and the number of the incident is forwarded to Control-M. This means that we have a record of it with the log of the job."
"The ability to integrate file transfers has been instrumental in allowing us to accomplish the things we need with Control-M. In our industry, we take a lot of data and either push it down to the stores or retail grocery stores. We take files and push them down to the stores or pull files and information from the stores and bring it back to corporate. So, it's two-way communication with file transfers. One of the bigger things that we do with Control-M is scheduling data moves and moving data from one location to another."
"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 container"
"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."
"We 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."
"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."
"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."
"I love the Universal Controller. It's been great for us. We host it on-premise... It's High Availability, meaning there's failover from one server to the other if one goes down."
"I like the dashboard and the various workflows."
"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."
"As a general process automation and integration tool, it has been superseded by other offerings, notably the Workload Automation suite."
"It is difficult to integrate with the Active Directory (AD)."
"We are looking for additional features that would allow us to call APIs and integrate the product with other tools more effectively."
"It is not really scaling per say because they are not putting much into it. They are trying to push their new product."
"The compliance features are limited to the server and not the entire infrastructure."
"The internal security model can be complex when configuring multiple user groups."
"The scalability could improve."
"It has been a deprecated product, because it is so old. There has been a couple of new solutions that are a little more advanced."
"Their technicians should be more involved when we're applying new technology to Control-M, such as cloud. We're working with cloud right now, with AWS, and getting the attention of a technician, sometimes, can take some time. It would be nice if they had somebody assigned to it. Dedicated support."
"The infrastructure could be improved."
"The reporting tool still needs a lot of improvement. It was supposed to get better with the upgrade, and it really didn't get better. It needs help, because it's such a useful thing to have. It needs to be more powerful and easier to use."
"It has a slight issue with daylight savings time while advancing the clock in the Spring."
"Sometimes, with technical support, they will take feedback, but you don't know where that feedback goes or if it proceeds along in the thought process."
"I would like not to have to reach out to a third-party application company to do automated notifications. Right now, we still have people manually calling people and emailing people. There's a company called xMatters - and there are others - that has an API through Control-M that can automate any aspect of failure management. I'd like to see it build right into the product. I'd like to see a better notification product."
"I think it's slightly expensive but at the same time it's a good product."
"The reporting functionality needs a lot of work. We have faced problems with different versions where we run the right report, but it gives us blank entries. Then, when we run the same report again, it gives the correct data."
"It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability."
"Occasionally, we have an agent that doesn't come back up after patching. That doesn't happen very often... It's really just a restart of the agent and it comes back up. But that might be one thing that could be improved."
"One hiccup we've had is due to the fact that we have other internal scheduling tools. We're able to talk to them, but we have trouble with some of the networking between them, so we're still trying to work out the kinks there."
"There is room for improvement with its connectivity with the Microsoft SRS system. It is very weak. They keep telling us it works with it, and technically it does, but it does not provide a lot of visibility. We have lost a lot of visibility migrating to Stonebranch, compared with just running tasks on the SRS server. That's really about the only thing that is a sore point for us."
"Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics."
"I have a request regarding our agent on the mainframe. It may time out when communicating to the Universal Controller, when the mainframe is extremely busy. That can cause a task which is running at that time to not see the results of the job that ran on the mainframe. It happens sporadically during times of really busy CPU usage. We're expecting that enhancement from them in the fourth quarter."
"I would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex."
"The Universal Controller is decent for the money it costs... It needs some work to have full features, compared to other products that are out there, specifically IBM's Workload Scheduler."