I would rate AutoSys Workload Automation eight out of ten.

From a maintenance perspective, large solutions like AutoSys Workload Automation, which are in constant use, accumulate obsolete and outdated elements. This necessitates a significant investment of manual effort from our team to remove them, as the product itself lacks automated cleanup functions that span all of its different constituent components. An automated solution for this task would be highly beneficial.

We have AutoSys Workload Automation hosted in the UK. But the workloads are scheduled across the UK and in different areas of the world as well. We have around 3,000 users.

I recommend doing a proof of concept to understand how AutoSys Workload Automation works compared to its competitors. While it operates slightly differently from most other tools in the market, a POC will help you get familiar with its functionality. Once you've completed the POC, you'll likely find that AutoSys is easy to set up and use.

I'm a solution architect, so I implement and support AutoSys Workload Automation.

I'm working with the latest version of AutoSys Workload Automation which is R12.

My team didn't have any problems maintaining AutoSys Workload Automation. There's no issue as long as the server and infrastructure are kept in place and as long as the latest version of the product is running.

Most of the customers who still use AutoSys Workload Automation have been using it for a very long time, for example, ten or twenty years. Newer customers probably go for cheaper solutions such as Tidal because it has more capabilities, aside from being more affordable, versus AutoSys Workload Automation.

My advice to anyone looking into implementing AutoSys Workload Automation is that the decision should be based on the use case, what you're looking for, and your skill set. You should have a resource who has good knowledge of AutoSys Workload Automation because learning the tool also takes a bit of time. It all depends on the use case. For example, for banking or for a customer who has more file transfer requirements, AutoSys Workload Automation would be the best solution.

I would rate AutoSys Workload Automation as seven out of ten because new products do much better in the automation niche compared to AutoSys Workload Automation.

We're partners.

My current role in the project is to manage the project, rather than the day-to-day operations. So, I manage the offshore team here, so I'm not 100% into the technical role.

I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We're using the solution at the request of a client. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

AutoSys is out of line with the latest trends of the IT industry, like the quick searching and things like that. It requires special skills which you have to develop in your team in order to manage it. That said, it's an excellent product and will give you the functionalities that you need. 

I would rate this solution a six out of 10. 

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

Based on my experience, make sure you ask a lot of questions and advocate for what your business needs are. When you get your solution, investigate it. Don't just say, like CA, like any other vendor says, "This product can do x, y and z." Don't take that at face value. Ask the right questions, because I find that in technology, especially what I experience, when people talk about what my needs are and what my product can do, sometimes they're using the same words with different meanings based on the perception of the user or the context of the conversation.

I'm thinking, be clear, especially if you're on the technical piece. If you're going to be supporting this, ask a lot of questions, because what I found is, after the implementation of this product, it's kind of hard to go back and re-architect it and things like that. Advocate for yourself, but it's a fine product. I advocate for it all the time to everybody, because it does what it needs to do.

I think that the product has so many moving parts and so many features that it's a plethora of great stuff, whether it gets implemented for a specific vendor really depends on the vendor’s needs. I think it's a fabulous product that you can really fine tune for what your specific business needs are. It's scalable, it can grow. You don't have to worry about re-buying a hundred different things.

To me, if you do it right, it's very easy to manage, which is great. My team that I work with, we've been working with this product for eight years now and we were talking about it and somebody says, "The great thing about this product is, when there's an issue, you don't have to worry about picking up all the pieces and figuring out what happened." The system kind of comes back online, makes the reports that you need.

Overall, I rate AutoSys Workload Automation ten out of ten.

For us, when considering vendors, a lot of it's going to depend on their 

• roadmap
• ability to service and respond to customers needs
• long term durability, are they going to be there a year from now, two years from now, 20 years from now? 

Vendors go out of business. You don't want to be in a situation where you're forced into doing a product migration to something else.

Make sure you know what the requirements of your business are, and whether it's going to meet the needs of those that are going to be using and depending on the product.

I recommend this solution to others.

I rate AutoSys Workload Automation an eight out of ten.

This product has been bought by Broadcom, and Broadcom does not have enough dedicated resources to further develop this product. I don't see any major features, versions, or functions being added to this product in the future. I don't think the vendors would be willing to spend resources on top of it.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. We really like the product and its functions. It works, and we like its stability, scalability, and robustness. It is a very reliable product, but it lacks future enhancements. We haven't heard of any cloud initiative for this product.

CA ESP is a solid product and very easy to use. It allows you to be very creative in what you do. It is well liked here and is very easy to learn. The customized views that each individual can create, and ones that can be made free-form, makes this very popular with the programmers.

One piece of advice I can give is training. You need to have some sort of a background in this in order to use this product effectively. If you're not trained up, you're not going to be successful with it.

Take the time to learn how to use the GUI and learn how to code the schedules. There are a lot of different ways to code schedules.

My advice to others depends on what they're looking for, too, in a tool. If they need something like we did to go across multiple platforms, I think it's great, but I have nothing to compare it to except TWS. But I think this is a great tool, and I think it solves the problem for us anyway. It's a great tool.

It's a great tool. I really like working with it. Now that we've got it and had it, it's very easy to use. I think it's easy for other people to use, too, because we had to work a lot of kinks out at first. A lot of our stuff came straight from TWS over to CA, and we just did a transition of straight over. We didn't rework the whole schedule, so we did have to work out some problems with it just to begin with. Now that we've got things smoothed out, it's great.

It has been my go-to tool for 28 something years, and it has not failed me yet. There are all kinds of schools of thought as to what is the best scheduler to choose. I am an AutoSys proponent. I prefer AutoSys over the other ones out there for ease of use, ease of understanding, and getting people to understand how the tool works. Other schedulers do things differently than AutoSys. So, it really depends on what it is you need your scheduler to do in order for you to be able to choose which one to use.

Look really hard at what your requirements are today. Know that you're going to have a solution that you're going to be able to stick with for as long as you care to stick with it; also, something that can address audit requirements, address things like scalability, and usability. If you have to become an expert on how to make the product work and use it, then it's probably not as usable as you need it to be. Look for something that you can talk to, like you were talking to your little brother, and move forward from there.

The reasons for my rating are usability, reliability, and scalability of the solution.

Do your homework, and be ready for a challenge. Anytime you switch tools, it's going to be a challenge.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are a good reputation and good technical support.

I would suggest researching CA. It's good.

Do your homework. Talk to other workload automation people. Get their feel for it and find out what has worked for them and hasn't worked for them.

I had to learn things the hard way. I now have this amazing network of workload automation people. They're engaged and they want to help you. Talk to them and make everything a little bit easier on yourself.

We have a saying at work, "If there is an issue, CA 7 is the victim, not the cause." This tool is a pretty stable product.

When choosing a vendor, I look for customer service. I want them to be there when I need them. I'm not going to say that they have to have a big name, but I guess cost is a factor as well. Cost is always important. I think cost and customer service are the best things. Those are the most important factors. I need someone to be there when I have an issue, and I need personal assistance to stay up and running.

Give it a try and call me if you need. I'm open to questions and helping. It's been a great workload automation tool for us.

Use this product. I have used the competitors' products. I have used AutoSys. If there is a comparison, I will give them my views as to what I think of all the products. My view right now, use AutoSys.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Service
• Reliability
• Support
• If we are able to actually contact our sales reps and get solutions and answers from them. 
• If we are able to open tickets and get answers to some of the easier questions.
• Are they willing to come in and sit with us, and make sure we are getting things done correctly the first time.

They do a really good job for us with their improvements and new releases, especially the agents.

When you are looking for at this product, you are not looking just for at the product itself, you are looking at the total package: The support for the product, the durability of the product, and the scalability of the product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: support. By far, CA has the best support.

I believe CA had been actively developing it, enhancing it, and attempting to make it easier to use. I think it's been a good product for us, and I think others would find that to be true as well.

It is stable, it works, and it does what it is supposed to. I would recommend this solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: support. Providing knowledge and giving us the ability to address any issues or problems of the software.

I would say the most important criteria to us when selecting a vendor are

• usability
• operational friendliness
• cost, obviously
• and scalability, because we have a global footprint around the world in different datacenters. 

And it needs to be something that's maintainable or the maintenance is robust. That's something with which we've had good luck, and a good experience, with CA.

I would just say, based on your use case, to see what flavor of ESP you wanted, whether it's the mainframe, or distributed systems, and then understand what kind of functionality you want to achieve from it. Get users' suggestions, if they already have it set up, so you can get past some of those stumbling blocks at the beginning.

When looking for a vendor, I suggest looking for long-term relationships, a partnership. You want a vendor who is willing to grow, willing to listen to feedback, offers support, and help us do our job. Make sure you partner with them. Get buy-in from your business units before implementing. I think that's one of the biggest things to success, is let CA get the buy-in for you if you don't feel comfortable doing it yourself. Let CA explain their own product. Get the buy-in first, then move forward so you don't have the resentment of the business units thinking you forced the solution upon them.

Rating: at least 9.5, 9.6/10 for sure. I probably shouldn't say 10 because I want to give CA something to work at and work towards, so 9.9.

I heartily recommended them, even if they had software such as the Terma Labs JAWS or something else, to really very seriously consider looking at iDash for the lot of features, it's so easy to use, I said "CA will be very glad to a proof of concept test trial install for you, and then you can do a comparison." I didn't try to push people, say "Oh, iDash is a lot better." I said "I think they should decide for themselves." But I think it'll be evident once they get it in, look at it, and do a comparison. There's a good guarantee they'll go in that direction, I would think, based upon my own experiences.

I rate AutoSys Workload Automation an eight out of ten.

This product has allowed us to provide more business value to our company by automating more processes.

When we are selecting a vendor, what's important to us are

• support, that's number one
• price
• maintenance

which all seem to be reasonably well in hand right now.

I gave it an eight out of 10 because of the support and the product; it is very easy to learn. It's pretty straightforward.

We actually were just advising colleagues who asked us about this product. We said it is very easy to use, it's multi-platform based; those were the main reasons, I would think. They actually ended up buying the product as well, with our recommendation.

Definitely look at this product. There are a lot of key features in there that will definitely help organizations out.

It really supports, and CA's been great in showing the robustness of the tool and addressing any issues with anything that you come across with it.

I think there're still some more improvements in there, some things that we're finding out as we're using it, the tool. It's definitely on the higher end.

It just depends on what they're coming from. If they're coming from the mainframe flavor, just know that they are similar, but there are still some very glaring differences that you have to accommodate to.

It performs really well.

You should look at some of the use cases because there are so many people that have so many different setups, with so many different ways to do it. We have found the most efficient way and that is why everyone comes to us and uses our agents.

In my opinion, the most important criteria whilst selecting a vendor is reliability.

Rating: I would say 9/10 because I believe always there is a scope of implement for every product. There is nothing like everything is really best in product so yeah there is still scope of improvement with workload automation tool.

So far what we are doing, we are really happy with this product. When they talk about the workload automation solutions, we definitely try to explain how better it can be having worked with the CA producs compared to others. It's pretty easy because most of the corportation do understand the requirement and what best that solves. The best part of the CA is it is open to integrate with multiple products. It is not that we cannot integrate or we do not have anything like that. The support has more scope where they can also work with us in order to do a third party integration as required as well. I mean it's pretty easy for us.

Our most important criterion when selecting a vendor is the partnership.

I give the solution an eight because it has a few quirks, but it's a pretty reliable system. They could do better supporting it. They have too many of the same type of products, so sometimes it doesn't get as much attention as it should.

I would advise a colleague who is looking at similar solutions to stay informed with the technology, and engage with the CA reps. 

I would recommend it whole-heartedly.

When choosing to work with a vendor, the most important criteria I look for are

• a long-term relationship
• a partnership
• willing to grow
• willing to listen to feedback
• support
• that they'll help us do our job.

I've worked with CA Workload Automation so I'm happy. I would say they're a nine out of 10 because I don't know anyone else. It's all relative. They could be a 10. I'm happy with them. I don't have any complaints. They're responsive.

Make sure you partner with them. Get buy-in from your business units before implementing. I think that's one of the biggest keys to success. If you don't feel comfortable let them explain their product. Get the buy-in first, then move forward so you don't have the resentment of, "Hey, you're forcing this product on us."

It's been great.

We still use the green screen on the mainframe terminal screen instead of having a Windows-based view – though it's our decision. Overall, it's a good tool for an entire mainframe environment.

I would suggest implementing CA Workload Automation AE.

I would give AutoSys a 10/10. Best practices are to plan your workflow. Try to plan where you have as less intervention as you can possibly use. Use the product and the triggers, the timing base events, use the calendars and try to make it flow as smooth as possible. Don't put something that's troublesome into your production environment. Work it out in tests and UAT or development. Even try it in your sandbox if necessary but don't bring it to production.

When it comes to production, if it doesn't work, send it back. You don't want these problems in production. At the shop I work with, we have a 99.91% success rate. When we don't have that, we go through and examine the jobs that fail. If they failed then we have a problem, we examine and get them fixed.

Important buying criteria: reputation, longevity, how is their product and other people's opinions of the product as well. After we've test driven a product, we usually bring something in-house, drive it and see how we like it. If we have use for it, we have enough people that would take a buy in on it, find it's useful, we find it's dependable then we probably want to set something like that in as a candidate. We need to have something that's proven.

Although there were some doubts during our upgrade, I think this turned out to be the best product, as long as you're prepared and have your servers ready to go.

I would recommend this product to others.

We had so many NT schedulers, like cron jobs for Unix. We know this is not right. At that time, we luckily had a new CEO. When he came on board, he said the first thing we need to do is to have some enterprise scheduling. I was actually the one who was in charge of finding the right solution.

We went to IBM Tivoli, BMC Control-M; and then we also came to CA. What CA did is: instead of just selling some products to us, they actually sat down with us to understand our environment first. Then they come back to us, and say "Okay, I don't think you guys want to have AutoSys. "At that time, AutoSys was famous. Our environment is not big enough. So they said, "We think the Workload Automation dSeries is actually much better for you." I was very touched by a vendor who came to us and gave us the right solution, instead of just selling us something more expensive. That's the whole reason we chose the dSeries.

If you are considering this product, I would say just go for it. The planning is like I said: the systems stuff itself is easy, but the migration is not. You need to understand what you have now before you move on to different one.

I recommend this solution to others. 

I rate AutoSys Workload Automation an eight out of ten. 

Evaluate whether it performs all the functions you need for batch processing.

I recommend using the conversion services provided by CA.

As far as I know, the product is just doing its job for us at this point.

If researching this solution and on an existing scheduler, just make sure you can convert over to this particular solution without risk. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: How we work together. I have to trust them. Also, their overall support. 

I think it's one of the most powerful workload automation processes that are out there. It is able to reach across platforms. It's able to reach across appliances. It's able to update.

It's a matter of your return on investment. It goes right back to that. How much do you want to spend, but how much are you going to save?

Look for industry trends, overall deployment, scale and scope, features and functionality and vendor support structure/relationship.

I'm sure 90% of the world uses CA 7, so it's a known product.

I would recommend it. Actually I do not even know another automation product. I would not know what else to recommend.

I appreciate training and support from a vendor. They should come in, train us on the product, and be around for a while, or at least available, to help us with anything we should have learned or did not. Or, things we discover we need. Training and early on support are really important and we really would like to see, like the same person providing it. 

I would like to be able to contact him and say, "Hey, how do I do such and such? How do I attach this report to this thing? How do I filter this?" And he would reply with, "Here are some codes you might find useful." I know these would be available out in the community, but I should not have to look it up because I am still in training. That is just one thing I would like.

When selecting a vendor it really centers around the product reliability for us, and we saw that in this product.

I actually sat by several people today, here at the CA World conference, that were saying they were here just to evaluate this product. I mostly told them some of my personal success stories and shared with them, that it has been a wonderful tool for automating our business needs, and that they should really consider this product.

We've been using the product for 12, 13 years, so it's been a while.

My most important criterion when selecting a vendor is stability. in general. We want to make sure our customers who use the system never have any downtime.

Give it a try. Test it out. Set up a system, play around with it. It's very easy to work with. The learning curve is not that steep.

When we are researching different products or vendors we do a pretty thorough evaluation of all the products. They have to meet our objectives of reducing the risk and cost. Those are the two most important: risk, cost.

I would recommend CA 7.

Great tool, excellent technical support, stable product.

Consult onsite support for the first implementation. Errors made at the beginning can only be corrected with great effort afterwards.

Understand your needs, don’t complicate it, and understand what you are looking for. You don’t want to create an automated mess.

Get on the community. Ask questions.

When choosing a vendor, since we're a university, what is important is the cost, and then who does it benefit. Is it going to benefit the student body? If it does, perfect. It does benefit the employees, perfect. Other than that, are there any other people, any other companies that offer something similar, and what do they do. Outside of that, how hard is it going to be for us to bring them on and what does a company do with the data that we give them. That is a very important piece. If we have to give student data to that system, does that student data go anywhere? If it does, that violates federal laws, things like that.

As far as advice, make sure that you document everything. As you're setting it up, work closely with other universities, figure out what best cases are going to be, best practices. Really just have a deep understanding of what you are wanting to do with it, what jobs that you want it to do, what processes are you wanting to map out.

Get some specialist help if you don't have internal knowledge.

This product is now legacy.

The one that we actually support is the CA-7 Edition for the scheduling package. It's very, very stable, always has been. And we rarely have any problems with it, so that's great.

The important criteria when selecting a vendor include

• that it works with other products
• stability, definitely
• and that it works great in DR.

If I were to advise someone who is looking at this kind of solution, I would say always look at multiple products, and decide from there. I would tell themabout the staple we've had with the CA-7 here, some people may say it's old, pre-historic, but it works great for us.

I would recommend this solution.

I recommend that they evaluate a high availability infrastructure.

On a scale of one to ten, for the part that we are currently using, I can give AutoSys Workload Automation an eight.

I would recommend this product for other users who want to start using it depending on their needs. I'm still investigating what the new version provides in the future, based on technology, so it is difficult to answer that question.

At this moment, we've been pretty long-term customer with CA. I don't think there's any product out there that we're going to be willing to switch out at the moment, given what their customer base is, what the capabilities of the product and how it fits into our model.

My advice would be to negotiate thoroughly on the price.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

I would not say this is for a large shop, but for a small shop it is overpriced. 

I evaluate AutoSys Workload Automation an eight out of ten.

I would recommend to make use of outsourced software solutions such as Atgen for ensuring a stable setup process.

I would recommend the product, but you have to have a good team to work with it. The solution is good, but you need a prepared team.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.