ActiveBatch by Redwood Other Solutions Considered

PB
Senior System Analyst at a insurance company with 5,001-10,000 employees

ActiveBatch isn't the only scheduling tool that we have. There's also a product called Control-M, but control-M is a lot more expensive and mostly manages mainframe. ActiveBatch is at a very modest price for running a very complex process.

We can expand ActiveBatch more readily than Control-M because, with Control-M, you pay for X number of runs in a run book. If you want to extend that run book, they want half-a-million dollars, or more, for 500 jobs. We can expand ActiveBatch. We could go to 10,000 jobs and it wouldn't cost us any more. It's only if we were to add more agents to load balance that we would be charged any more, and it wouldn't be anywhere near what Control-M charges.

I've mainly been involved with ActiveBatch and it's hard to compare another vendor when there hasn't been a vendor to compare against. As far as performance is concerned, Control-M and ActiveBatch are on par, but they're not the same because Control-M is really just moving files and running programs on mainframes, whereas we're running against Windows and Linux environments.

The other one that's being utilized at the moment is Apache Airflow, but that's more for the developers because they like to be able to program the backend, rather than to use a frontend interface. We've been looking at how that works, but we haven't seen it to be very stable for a production environment. You can't compare Airflow with ActiveBatch, in effect.

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JB
Production Control Manager at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The decision for ActiveBatch was already in place when I joined the company, and there hasn't been any movement to go outside to some other solution.

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MaheshKumar6 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Analyst at Electronics For Imaging, Inc

I did also evaluate Jira.

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Buyer's Guide
ActiveBatch by Redwood
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about ActiveBatch by Redwood. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
SK
Senior Analyst at Capgemini

We mainly evaluated options based on the cost and flexibility of the software.

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RB
Systems Architect at a insurance company with 201-500 employees

It is the only automation tool that we're using. We are actually moving items from other automation tools that we have into this, so we have one central location where everything is automated. In the past, we have used some of our Microsoft Servers' scheduling tools and SQL Servers to automate the distribution of reports. Now, we are moving everything into one place so it's all controlled centrally. Then, you can look in one place to see where everything is. 

We have looked at a few different solutions in this past six months to see if they offer that same type of functionality and evaluated three other ones, which are very similar. I like ActiveBatch the best among the four solutions. The other tools seemed to not have the file manipulation tasks, and kept saying, "Well, you can do that in Doc." I thought, "That's okay. Welcome to the eighties." They basically said, "We don't have any filing manipulation tools built in because you can do that other ways." However, we're trying to put everything in one place. There is a lot of archiving of files that we do based on different criteria. For example, there was one job that we wrote which looks at the size of an Access database. When the size of the file gets too large, it notifies that team, saying, "You need to go delete data out of it." Those kinds of things were not available within other solutions.

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Preetham Gowda - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at Justwicks

We did some research on VMware and IBM Workload Automation.

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JF
Sr Technical Engineer at Compeer Financial

We had a consultant come in and try to share with us all the different tools. However, there isn't a lot of competition out there for automation capabilities.

A major component was that the vendor is thinking five years ahead, looking to future-proof our business. When we were making our decision, we were either ready to go with either upgrading SCORCH or a different path. We wanted to be in connection with an organization who had a long-term plan. We didn't want to revisit this in one to three years down the road.

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Aishwarya Shekar - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Technology Analyst at NTT DATA Services

We evaluated other software, however, ActiveBatch seemed to be a perfect fit for our requirements.

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Akshatha Ramesh - PeerSpot reviewer
Junior Business Analyst at EFI

I did not evaluate other options as Active Batch was the top choice and we opted for this without any second thoughts.

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SG
Senior Operations Administrator at Illinois Mutual Life Insurance Company

Maybe at a higher level in our company there was some research into other solutions and came to ActiveBatch as the best solution. As far as I know, it has always been ActiveBatch. I was hearing that name long before we had it in hand.

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Gowtham S - PeerSpot reviewer
Manufacturing Engineer at Asteria

I've also evaluated SAP HANA, ERP, and Oracle.

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TM
Software Engineer at Prodapt Solutions

I have used Selenium, and there were many drawbacks, so I switched to this application as it made my work easy and simple. 

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GJ
Operations Manager at Statkraft AS

I also have experience with CA Workload Automation. It has been some years since I worked with it but it's the same concept and the same features but doing things in slightly different ways. 

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Shreyas K S - PeerSpot reviewer
Sofware Engineer at Maveric Systems Limited

We did not evaluate other options.

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NP
DBA Individual Contributor at Aristeia Capital

We evaluated other solutions, but we went with ActiveBatch Workload Automation because it suits our environment.

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BC
Manager at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

I have evaluated other solutions, such as Control-M.

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YC
UI Developer at Gupshup

Since I have worked with ActiveBatch in my previous organization, it was my go-to option. I did not evaluate others. 

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NP
DBA Individual Contributor at Aristeia Capital

Before choosing ActiveBatch, we looked at a couple of products and run a pilot with Control-M. 

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BO
Supervisor IT Operations at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

We did evaluate other products before purchasing.

We asked for a proof of concept on this solution that ActiveBatch provided. We looked at the scalability, integration, ease of use, and constructing automated jobs. Those were the driving forces in the selection of these products. Their job libraries are so nice. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure some of this stuff out. 

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JM
Client Service Manager/Programmer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

One of our other technicians was the lead on finding a new automation tool. Along with ActiveBatch, he found three or four others that he thought might have good potential. I was on a few calls where they were demoing the software, and there wasn't really anything that fit for us as well as ActiveBatch did.

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Buyer's Guide
ActiveBatch by Redwood
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about ActiveBatch by Redwood. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.