Automic Workload Automation Reviews

One of the uses that we decided to use it for is site switching. We have two data centers, and we have critical applications in both data centers. We site switch them twice a year just to make sure the DR is in place. It takes just an hour to move one system from A to B. It is so fast, quick, and effective.

The two main things about it are its versatility and stability. For versatility, we bought it to do one job, and we now use it now for several jobs on all different types of applications. In regards to its stability, it is very reliable. We have never had any unplanned crashes. 

The new user interface AWI could improve. It is quite easy to use and work around, but it has lost some of the functionality that we used to have in our Vim client user interface.

I have been working on it for about 12 years now. We have had three unplanned outages throughout the whole time, and all three were man-made errors (someone pulling the plug out).

With some of the newer features, we have been able to do new things with them. We are always in demand in our company, someone asking us, "Can you do this or can you do that?"

The technical support is very good. It can sometimes take a little long to get an initial response, but it is very good. They will persevere, and get to the bottom of whatever the issue is.

We bought this back in 2004. We were upgrading all of our systems to SAP systems, and we wanted a scheduler. We did not want to use the SAP scheduler, so we were recommended UC4 (as it was at the time). That is why we brought it in. It was for our SAP system, but we use it on all applications now.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward. There is an awful lot of planning because it is such a critical application for us. We have to test everything before we go ahead. It could take us up to three months doing all of the testing, maybe putting the infrastructure in place for an upgrade. The actual day when we upgrade only takes about an hour or so. It is very fast, and we have never had an issues.

Because of its stability and versatility, I give it a nine out of 10. I never give tens.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Support is very important. Also, if we are looking for a solution, we might go to Automic, and say, "We want to do this. Can you help?" They are always very good. They will come over, sit down, and talk with us, helping us where they can.

We have many use cases for automating different systems. In most cases, we use it to automate database application servers. We have over 2000 servers, so we need to synchronize jobs on various platforms, which is our most common use case.

So far, the performance has been okay.

Our environment is more stable. We have less downtime and some of our operations are much faster than they were before. We have seen a positive impact on efficiency. Tasks that used to take people one or two hours are now done in minutes.

In terms of whether using Automic has enabled our company to grow, it is possible. However, I have not been made aware of any examples.

The most valuable feature is that I do not have to wait for one job to finish, then manually click on the next one to start. Automation is the best feature.

My biggest complaint is that there is no list price. We work with Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, etc., and all of them have list pricing. Automic, right up until today, has never had list pricing. This makes things difficult, because we need to plan budgets for the next year and can't. The lack of list pricing is my number one complaint because it is very difficult to plan anything.

We have some systems where, every time we lose the network connection, the software, after five or 10 minutes, is inoperable. With Automic, we monitor what is happening, and if network connectivity is down, Automic deletes all the logs that caused the system to crash. Before Automic, we needed to handle these situations manually. Now, every time that logs crowd the system, Automic deletes them and solves the problem.

That means we do not have this type of downtime anymore. It is system crucial for us.

Scalability is fine. We have a cluster and two active-active nodes, so it is very easy to scale.

We used technical support in the beginning. The experience was very good. They were easy to reach and know their business. They helped us a lot during that time.

This is our first job management solution. My managers made the decision to buy it.

The important criteria when selecting a vendor to work with are

• Good support
• A good product.

Good support is very important for us.

The initial setup was straightforward. The installation took two days. We did not have any difficulties. You just click, click, and click.

As an engineer, I do not have access to this information regarding ROI.

The cost of arrays is high. If you want to buy an array for an application, and see value from it, you need about half a million dollars. That is too expensive.

Read the documentation.

We have many clients in financial services. We install, implement, and configure this solution for them. They use this solution to automate financial processes.

We have roughly 100 users, using this solution. We expect to increase the number of users of this solution.

There are some monitoring features that could be added. For example, when we have some external dependencies from processes that were run the day before or one week before, these dependencies are always complicated to configure.

Workload Automation should also have better RPA features, too. I think that would definitely improve this solution. Instead of having to have a separate solution for RPA, it would be nice if Workload Automation could handle it, too.

I have been using Automic Workload Automation for more than 10 years.

Both the stability and the scalability of Automic Workload Automation are great.

Usually, we only contact support when we have issues with bugs, etc. I think some users have support for installation and configuration.

I have used plenty of automation solutions. 

I made the move over to Automic Workload Automation as many other solutions weren't compatible with REST APIs. For me, it was a matter of evolution. The new solutions come with more features, more updated technologies that I can use. 

The initial setup, installation, and configuration are very straightforward.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight. If they added some additional features for monitoring, I would give it a higher rating.

If you're in need of RPA capabilities, this may not be the solution for you. RPA can be applied for some processes, but not for everything. 

We are currently doing a migration from Dollar U to ONE Automation for 815 applications for one of our clients.

We have used ONE Automation to make a platform for one of our clients using two clustered Oracle Databases and web services, with an Automation Engine. 

We made another platform for backup using Data Guard and two web services with two Automation Engines and one Oracle Database, so if there is a problem with the first platform, functionality can pass directly to the second platform.

I have found new methods for converting scripts from Dollar U to ONE Automation. For example, I take the dynamic library from Dollar U and put it in the dynamic binary library in ONE Automation. This enables us to use Dollar U scripts in ONE Automation.

It's easy for integration, not like BMC Control-M. It's clear when there are errors or bugs. We can just go to the logs and read the error code and find what needs to be done.

There were many bugs in the last version. For example, we could only use capital letters for searching for agent names. Also, we had a problem with ONE Automation where we couldn't use the PGA and SGA in Oracle Databases for resolving RAM because the last version didn't have this capability.

We can use ONE Automation with many other applications like ServiceNow and Jenkins. This is the scalability for me, that there are many possibilities with this tool. We can use it with many other technologies. It is really good.

The company where we are doing this work is looking at expanding into banking, and that would happen in many countries. Of course, this would give us more work with Automic Workload Automation. The objective is that all applications for this client are within ONE Automation.

I do not contact CA technical support but my colleague does for many bugs and other security and system requirements. We need to change many things in our platform for security needs. We open cases with ONE Automation to help us with the skills for integration, development, and administration. Tech support has been helpful.

I used Dollar U. There are really big differences. Dollar U has decentralized methods and tools. ONE Automation has centralized tools. It is really strong and really easy to use ONE Automation. For example, for organizing, for creating applications and clients, for manipulating the agents, for the servers, it's really easy. You just put the agent in the server application with the LI and it directly connects with the Automation Engine Server. It's amazing.

The initial setup required us to do an analysis of the Dollar U environment for conversion to ONE Automation. We have special tools for converting the session and the UPROCs from Dollar U to jobs and workflow in ONE Automation. We have developed macros with VBA to convert all the information in Dollar U to ONE Automation.

When we start an integration for the first time, we create the client and we attach the agent for the application, because every application is a "client" for us. We use Red Hat Servers for this. Of course, we use Windows servers, but 80 percent are Red Hat as well as iX and HPE servers.

Each application takes a different amount of time. For example, there are applications for factoring or financial applications. We need one year for their implementation. Smaller applications take a few months. We start with the small applications and then move to the more difficult applications. We have a team working on this and every person has ten or 15 applications to do.

You should know configuration and scripting in Shell because Automic only gives binary, which you can adapt for your environment. You can the Automic with PostgreSQL, but it's not good. I prefer to use it with Oracle Database and to use clusters to create a solid environment.

I have installed many packages, such as for WebSphere, for chat bots, for SSH, and for using programs like Excel, and Word. I'm trying to learn many things about development with ONE Automation.

It's a good tool, really strong. It needs some new features, it needs to evolve, but it's really good. I really like it. And now, with Broadcom in the picture, it's a strong company.

The primary use case is automation of our business processes within the bank along with several areas of process automation. We have been using the product for 10 years now and have built it up from scratch. We do a lot of stuff with it, of which, we are mostly satisfied, though there will always be problems with it.

It enables us to build automation which is flexible in a controlled environment. We have a lot of governance and compliance requirements as a bank that we can fulfill with this product. We can fulfill them because we have an environment where everything is monitored where you have an audit trail of the product and for the executions of the development. 

We can perform across platform automation with a product, and we are not bound to one architecture or system. We can bind together a lot of systems and ways of integrating systems. That is the most positive effect on our end. It is very flexible to program around your automation.

The stability needs improvement.

The stability is not as good as it was in former years. Stability has gone down from version to version, but it is probably due to the product's complexity and transitions in the company. Stability could be better, as it was better in the past.

The scalability is okay, as we are not scaling so much. 

Technical support is good. They are doing the best that they can, but it is a complex product with difficult requirements from a stability point of view.

The initial setup was 10 years ago, so it was easy at the time. With each upgrade, it will probably have more complexity, but it has been a little hidden because it is a step-by-step process. Though, the complexity is okay with the setup.

It is not so easy to give numbers. There are just a lot of things that you cannot do without this product.

We evaluated some competitors a decade ago, and Automic (UC4) was the best choice. We look at the product and features. We did tests and an installation of the product, then we decided on Automic.

The other competitors, 10 years ago, were CA and IBM.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Product features (i.e., flexibility).
• It must fit the requirements.
• A partner that you can rely on.

The abstraction - I call it the "who, what, and where" of pieces of work that need to be done in the IT world. The who: the log-in, the credentials, all those things. The where: as far as the agents and those things. Then the what: the actual worker objects themselves. Having those abstracted and separated allows us to move things from one environment to the next, and it allows consistency and testing. We can abstract those three different layers. To me, that's one of the biggest advantages of the tool.

How technology agnostic it is. It works with all the different legacy solutions we have and it allows us to look at things in one location, as opposed to going to a lot of different places.

• More Hadoop native support for things such as Oozie jobs, Spark jobs.
• Native support for messaging architecture like with your RabbitMQ, your Kafkas. 

More native support for - we talk about the software factory with services and that new architecture - more native support for interacting with those things.

Very stable. The tool we had before this tool, we were nervous around patching cycles, and we were nervous for datacenter downtime because we didn't how that tool was going to react. But this tool, far better than the tool we had before and we probably don't even really have to think about the stability. It's sort of like a good piece of software is like a good referee. If it's doing good, you don't notice it. That's the good thing about Automic. We don't even notice that it's there a lot of the time. It's a very, very stable product.

Very scalable. I know they just talked about adding support for hundreds of thousands of agents, and I know it goes up to like a thousand clients per engine, so you can do a lot with that. It's a very scalable solution. We have a lot more capacity probably than we have use cases for it right now.

Technical support has been good. With any type of support structure, you're going to have challenges with geographies and things getting passed off, but generally Automic has been very supportive. Their Professional Services department: excellent, A1. And they really give you that "partner" feel, as opposed to the customer-vendor. We still have that relationship, but when there are actual issues, it feels more like a partner situation as opposed to a "You're the vendor, I'm the customer."

I give it an eight out of 10. The functionality is great, the scripting language is very powerful. They can adapt to most use cases. Very good community of different companies and a user base so when we have problems we can go to other people.

Why it didn't get a 10, there are too many windows. If you're getting deep into some of these workflows, you may have 20 different windows open and, if you didn't already have that deep understanding of how enterprise orchestration works, it would be very overwhelming to get up to speed on something like that. 

It needs some type of way - and I don't even know what that looks like, but I know when it doesn't feel good - to minimize the amount of windows and get it to where you could have all the information you need available on the screen; or more dynamic so you don't have this clutter on your screen.

Monitoring Oracle jobs.

Performance is great.

It's huge because I was a user in a subdivision that got bought or came into the single instance of Emerson. We brought, at the time, UC4 with us. We saw it was a value even for Emerson as a whole to have it.

Being able to script, create something I want the software to do for a specific job. This allows me to do that. Very powerful.

It's a scheduling tool on steroids. We can have a job run at certain times. If it fails, reset it a number of times and then send an e-mail. Send e-mails on any type of event. Calendar creation, schedule things on certain days, year-end stuff, period end. It's endless, really.

I don't know if they have it now, but a mobile version would be good so instead of logging in on my laptop to see something, I could just go in through an app and see if a certain job is running or not. That would be pretty slick.

Stability is good. We just upgraded, so there are a few things we're working on, but otherwise it's pretty stable.

The scalability is good. We've got more than Oracle jobs, we've got Windows and SQL Servers so we can do quite a bit.

They're responsive, because we've had the tech people on the phone during upgrades. They've also been teaching us, because we're learning the new version, so I guess I could say I've worked with them. They are very knowledgeable.

The older version wasn't performing as well because we pretty much maxed out what it could handle with our thousands of jobs we run a day. So, the Automation solution was brought to us and we said, "Well, this thing could supposedly handle it," so we've gone to it, and so far so good.

I'd say complex from the side that I don't know, where they have to set up, from our operations group, the servers and all that. That's beyond me.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor, I would say, are

• tech support
• the knowledgability
• their track record with other users 
• the size of the users too, to see where we compare with them.

Go for it. I love it because I can move around in it and I'm very comfortable with the software. So I'm not scared of it, you could say.

It's very hard to transfer the feeling when you have a platform that came to handle infrastructure issues, but at the end of the day, they are making real changes and impacting our business level, which is amazing, because it's very uncommon. That's it, basically.

We started this engagement with Automic working on basic scheduling. If you can just imagine an organization, which has around 10,000 written processes in Visual Basic or old code, and now we need to maintain these processes. They are very core processes because they are handling interactions between our customers to us; they are transferring data from our customers into our system. It's several thousands of PDFs, invoices and shipping notices, etc.

Up to the phase where we met with Automic, we just used manual stuff that we wrote to handle it. While using Automic, we created one mechanism of transferring data, and that's it. We need to just replicate it to other customers, and then you have thousands of Automic processes that are working by using only a single design for the rest of the customers, so we don't need to write code anymore.

By the way, another impact that we had using this process by transferring these invoices from one FTP site to another FTP site is the generation of invoices. In order to generate invoices to thousands of customers, we did some old code style process. We designed the process in the Automic, which basically does it faster.

Invoices: It's important they're faster, because at the end of the day when the driver needs to leave for the customer, I need to make sure that he will leave the logistics site as fast as he can. If I'm printing, 1,000 invoices in four hours, or if I'm printing 1,000 invoices in two hours, it makes a difference in my business process.

This is the must have in these processes for the customer, because if you are using Automic at the infrastructure level, then you have a problem because you are missing a whole step. Why? Because at the end of the day, the biggest impact that we have had when we started using Automic was when we embedded our digital processes with the tool. Today, Automic is the tool that helps us to manage all our digital strategy.

When you are going to some kind of a digital journey, you must have some kind of a tool or robotic platform that will enable you to manage the full cycle flow of the customer experience to a level of the data in the operational system process. When you are talking about putting the customer at the front of your business, if you don't have some kind of automation tool that enables you to integrate between the system, monitoring, enterprise data, analyses, trigger and action, and then to the multi challenge platforms, you don't have a digital strategy, and you need some kind of an orchestration behind it. This is what Automic is doing for us.

Today, this is the impact. In our business, we have a lot of operational costs. Let's say, we have 255 call center representatives and they are doing thousands of service transactions while speaking to our customers. By using Automic as an engine to our digital contact center, I'm doing almost 45,000 transactions per month, but it's on technology. It's our digital platform, which is orchestrated by Automic and some other tools, and few technologies behind the process.

So, if you're looking for the real impact, you must look at the integration of the Automic into your business application, in your customer journey, and into the digital process. This is what most organization are experiencing today.

We are in interruptive era at the moment, and everybody is looking how to reach customers, and how to manage a low cost operation and their digital strategy, because you need to invest a lot of resources. Instead of doing it in coding stuff and managing stuff behind the scenes, you need some kind of automation.

By the way, if you are the customer receiving an instant message from me, so an SMS, you have to understand that behind the scenes, there is a business process that somebody needs to manage, control, and make sure you are receiving this SMS. We, at O.P.S.I., are using Automic to do it because it is closing the full cycle.

We are always talking about leveraging the power of big data by automation, and we have a gap, but we didn't really implement it yet (the automation), which they have a great solution for, so the business continues in the cloud. We are not there, but we need to be there, and I think it's a little bit hard in our area.

Our area with the CA solution for DR is not really concerning directly to Automic, but to all of the DevOps, a word which is something that everybody is trying to touch on today in their daily business. There is also some gap that's a little bit hard to understand or to implement because not all the organizations are the same. When you are adopting DevOps, you may need to be more flexible in your processes.

But once again, we are not really using that because it is a little bit hard for us. We have rapid changes now in our digital strategy, because, at the end of the day, my business is to do service, and we are trying to improve in the service area and to be very near to our customer business needs. We didn't really make it to cope with the Automic road map, because we have a road map.

Around two to three years.

Yes. If Automic will be your automation platform or the orchestration platform, then you must build it in a high availability mode, which is what we did together with the guys from Automic. Now, this system is basically available 24/7. If one connector is failing, we have an HA connector that will replace it, so you must design the platform to be stable. The platform itself, it's stable. But once again, if you need to work 24/7, there is no way. I am working with the Custom Authority, and the Custom Authority in Israel is a very challenging organization. There is no way that we wouldn't be able to transfer data to customs, because if you don't transfer data, then we wouldn't be able to deliver to our customers abroad, so we need to be working 24/7 because a lot of stuff is being done automatically behind the scenes.

No, after we implemented, we didn't have any issues with the system. It's the core system today. It's one of the most important systems in our operation today, and once ensured that we had a high availability solution from them, then we started working 24/7 with no issues.

At the end of the day, I think there is an integration between good product, stable product, and a good delivery team. This symmetry, it makes stuff work well. When you're testing platforms, you know your enterprise, you have data functionality, and you have the delivery concept. At the end of the day, when you do the statistics of what you've tested, you need to decide. What helped us to decide, except from the function, the way the system works, was the approach of the guys from Automic, how they approach our business, how they help us do the analyses. They care. They just care.

I don't want to say just care. When you care about something, then you feel the difference. Then you are coming with all these big solutions and big company solutions which have tremendous platforms, but once again, they are too big, too robotic, and forgot the customer at the end of the day. It's one of the things that makes their stuff different for us.

Basically, here in Israel, we have very good support. The guys from Automic are assisting us, there is the world wide web, and we have a project manager that we work with. From the global perspective of how they help us, I think that we are pretty covered, and they are always trying to push new stuff, but once again, if we are thinking about improvement, it's a very big platform. We don't cover it all at the moment, and we are doing it step-by-step.

We had a few solutions. Most of them were code reading oriented, but it wasn't the platform. We didn't have any other platforms. We had tested another platform in that time, a very big one, which is not really relevant to this discussion, because I don't have anything bad to say about them, only from the point that they were too robotic for us. I think that Automic came with a very good approach in the delivery level. It's important, because when you're working at the delivery level, you can see the ROI that you will receive from the implementation.

It's a very good product and has a very good delivery level. Especially the guys that designed the solution over here are focused on the issues in the top 10 painful issues that we had, while resolving them during a very fast implementation. It gave us the boost to go with the digital area, the application area, and the business strategy area.

When I'm saying they care and were very focused on the issues, in three months, the implementation of the system was running right. Instead of going through all the processes and trying to upgrade all of them, or change the way we work in a rapid movement of things during the implementation, once the system and the change model was up and running, we did two things:

• Good mapping process of the pain points
• Good mapping process on new projects.

Then we stared to just transfer new projects to this platform. Then, in parallel, we took all staff for the scheduling, which is the simplest way, and in two to three months, we upgraded most of the scheduling items that we needed to handle. Then, the organization saw that we rapidly changed the way we were experiencing a problem, integration, etc.

From the implementation point of view, it was straightforward, very simple, and not complicated. Of course, you always have issues with creating various servers and SQL licenses. You must handle the server optimization because you have a lot of traffic, so you need to do an optimization of the right resources. We have a private cloud on our site, so it's easier for us to do the optimization of resources in the process, which is great. Then, you eliminate more issues when you're implementing a new platform. It's tricky and complicated, but we are an organization that works with a lot of legacy systems, which has very big systems, which usually has a lot of troubles and issues in transforming between platforms, between different applications with a legacy code. So, when you have the opportunity to work on a shelf platform, on an advanced platform, then it's very easy.

It's very important to see who does the delivery for you, and what's their approach. If the approach is simple and easy, not too rushed, then you can manage the process to receive the best results. It's important because this is what made the implementation very easy at the end of the day for us.

Once again, from a technical point of view, there were no issues.

Control-M from BMC was one of the applications which we looked at or tested. IBM also has some solutions in this area, and HP in the DevOps orchestration. They have very good platforms, very good approach, very scalable, very stable, and from my personal experience and perspective, it just helped my business grow and cope with all our digital challenges.

We started the concept of working with Automic when we looked for a tool that would help us to automate our business. It started in the infrastructure level, because everybody wanted to automate their infrastructure stuff to do basic scheduling and standard things that you are doing in an organization, especially in the IT department.

Basically, we are divided between infrastructure and business applications, so in my IT department where the infrastructure recedes, we have thousands of processors that were created there manually by coding with all kind of windows applications or something like that. In Israel, we are the biggest company who is doing deliveries and managing a global supply chain operation, so we have a lot of legacy systems. It's a 25 year-old company, and we have a lot of legacy systems and a lot of old code from the past years that we need to manage or handle.

We started off looking for an automation tool that would help us to just upgrade old processes to some kind of a new system, and that is how we found Automic.

I work at O.P.S.I., which is an authorized service contractor for UPS in Israel. Basically, the first challenge is that we are not really UPS, we are just an ASC, an authorized service contractor, so we are totally independent and are working like a standalone company, but we have a lot of integration with the global UPS. We have UPS system and applications that we must use because it's part of the agreement.

Here in Israel, we are identified totally brown with the logo and everything. Just one issue, this is why I mention it, because when somebody is talking about us worldwide and in Israel, we mention our name as O.P.S.I., an authorized service contractor for UPS. People need to know that we are a subcontractor for them and not really a brown branch here in Israel. Basically, just to let you know, we have 155 authorized service contractors like us worldwide.

As for additional advice, just pick stuff where you can and go for the quick win. The first phases of this project must be dedicated to understanding the mechanism and the platform, because when you're going with the simple stuff, you have the chance or the opportunity to test the system. We had thousands of processors with thousands of challenges, but once again, we started with the infrastructure. We succeeded over there, then we went to the application.

We started at the lowest level of the implementation. After we learned the system, we learned how it behaved. We learned the ability of the system, then we went to the application. I think what has amazed me the whole time is that I have fully automated business processes in this difficult area, so it's an excitement because you started in transferring files from one server to another, then you are managing your digital business strategy with this platform (my CEO knows this platform).

It's not like you are installing some kind of a monitoring tool. When you are starting small, infrastructure and then application, then turning this application into a core system, it is something else. So my humble advice from my experience is to start small and start with the pain points. Learn the system, learn the capabilities, then slide to the business level.