I would give it a nine out of 10. Just because, you never get a perfect 10. There is always room for improvement. There are minor things here and there, but I would say it is a solid product. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Reputation, definitely. 
• Support is really important to us being on the mainframe side. The support has to be really responsive when we need it: 24 hours a day, seven days a week, holidays, weekends, whenever. That is a really big deal. 
• Stability is very important, obviously. 

It has been a solid product. We are very happy with it.

When our company is looking into a vendor, what's important to us are three main points:

• that their product works well
• efficient
• cost.

I rate in a nine out of 10 because I think it's a wonderful product but I always think everything can keep getting better. I see that it keeps going in that direction.

I would tell a colleague it's very easy to use. It does its job very well. It's very efficient.

Right now, we're pretty well locked in with this product. I know we are looking at a migration, which would potentially be off of the mainframe platform. Right now we're just using what we have, and whether anything will happen with that massive project or not, we have no idea, but it is being investigated. There's certainly no software or changes that will be going on for quite a while anyway.

Follow the instructions as given and you won't have any problems. If you have any questions, tech support is there, they're good. As I said, I've gotten to know a couple of those individuals just by going back and forth on different issues, and they are extremely easy to work with. 

There's a blog-type posting out there on their site, in what they call CA Community, where a lot of other long term users answer questions, have all kinds of suggestions, for anybody new getting in, which would be huge. You get tech support from other users, in effect.

DATACOM is a great database package, and the add-on features such as VSAM-Transparency and DL/1-Transparency, which I had at my former employer, really ease any transition.

I would say to use it because of the stability. From what I've seen - because I've worked around other technicians that actually support the other products, the way that I support this - most of the time when we go to outage calls, because we review any outages that happen, most of the outages that happen are with the other products and not mine.

I gave it a nine out of 10 because I really believe in it. Again, it's back to the stability and the support that we receive from the vendor on it, and the fact that we don't have too many issues with it at all. It's very stable.

I’d highly recommend working with CA. Some products need to be developed, some have a limited number of users, but they are very good.