The most valuable aspects of AutoSys Workload Automation are its performance, scalability, and ease of getting started for new users.  AutoSys Workload Automation has improved their upgrade process. It is easier now than it used to be.

To me, what's most valuable in AutoSys Workload Automation is its robustness and quickness. The tool can trigger jobs within a few milliseconds, and it can handle large volumes of jobs.

The solution has been stable. 

There are no issues with scaling. 

The initial setup is easy.

It's a stable product.

The solution can scale. 

I think one of the valuable features of AutoSys is the easy configuration and integration of this tool with SAP. It's a critical part of managing the solution. In terms of the basic functionality, I found this to be a really excellent tool to work with. There are minimal issues and minimal maintenance.

It gives a real-time view of all the batch processing that we have. Monitoring-wise, it is really good. 

It also gives us the ability to connect different software processes.

Over time we have found that if there are any issues with communication between the various components [ scheduler (eventor) ,app server (as_server) , database (event server), the agents, etc ] that when connectivity is restored, jobs start executing as desired and anything that is stuck or is in an ‘strange state’ is easily found and rectified using the tools provided by autosys.

We have found that most of the time the WorkLoadAutomationAE software requires very little maintenance and has achieved an almost 100% uptime in all the instances we have running in our DEV/TEST/and PROD environments.

IOW – Although there are many components involved, once things are setup correctly, the application performs solidly, is extremely redundant (again, if setup correctly) and has very little maintenance overhead.

The most valuable feature of AutoSys Workload Automation is batch processing.

• Dependability
• Delivering on the execution of the jobs
• Zero downtime 

All the above are definitely important.

It is very valuable for us when we are trying to arrange or orchestrate jobs into a system. It is helpful for triggering jobs for a scheduled task.

Flexibility of scheduling jobs in PDS members, and not a database, gives you so many more options. ESP is a solid product and works extremely well, it's very reliable. Enhancements are always being added with new features.

You can add jobs/applications/agents in ESP very quickly; it just takes minutes to do.

It provides us with reliable scheduling of various business workloads. There are various service-level agreements, such as payroll, that need to be met at a certain period of time and if they're not met, there's going to be trouble. The reporting facility of the product helps me to identify problematic jobs in the environment.

The most valuable feature is the ease of coding up schedules to run jobs in both the mainframe and distributed environments.

Prior to installing ESP, we had to use two products: one for mainframe and one for distributed.

The most valuable features are helping to schedule jobs and helping to watch for data set triggers.

It works.

What we really like is that it's an enterprise solution and it really allows us to do the "normal work," the different operating systems and platforms, but it also allows us to manage and control our ERP systems, and things like Informatica and Hadoop, and all those good things that are coming down the line, in the way of big data and things like that.

The flexibility of being able to schedule the timing and frequency of different automation scripts makes it easier for us to meet our customers’ business requirements.

We use the WCC, which is an interface that sits on top of the application. That is pretty user friendly in terms of being able to see the status of job flows, job failures; and in the ability to manually intervene and fix issues. Essentially, the code you're running sends a return code, which you can configure to be read as a success or failure.

The web UI is beneficial and the granular security policies allow us to cover all of our audit requirements. 

Ease of use.

In our use, I really enjoy things being in one spot. It's extremely easy to use. It's easy to set up. It's easy to upgrade.

Most of the time, it's easy to teach people how to use it. My developers a lot of the times get in there really quickly and they're all able to make an impact quickly.

The valuable features are stability, ease of use, and the use of scheduling. Our company processes approximately 200,000 jobs a day through this product. The product is very stable and stays up.

The ease of using the scheduling feature of CA Workload Automation ESP Edition for Mainframe is valuable to us. Also, being able to configure dependencies and trigger file related processing is a big thing for us. We're starting to get into some of the DB2 plugins as well. We just keep adding functions and learning more.

• Reliability
• Stability
• Expandability: It scales well.

• Durability
• The secure database itself
• Usability of it

In a billion dollar company, you want a scheduling product that is very robust, which can handle the magnitude of schedules that we run through it.

• Flexibility
• Ease of use
• The capabilities of the product to schedule on multiple platforms, multiple operating systems.

Also, over time the CA workload agent has gotten much better. For our organization it's important for us to communicate in a secure fashion between the host and the other platforms, and we are able to do that with our CA product, with ESP.

Probably WCC. The aggregator reporting utility which tells us our throughput in lag and latency. 

The ability to

• monitor your critical work 
• track the service levels 
• recover the work and predict the work, if it's late or not.

Some of the features I like are:

• Ability to monitor a complex workload
• Easily see our batch flow status
• Deal with problems before they become bigger issues

As an example, we had a stuck file watcher we weren't aware of. Due to the alerts, we were able to reach out and get the file in time to still make our batch commitments. This happened instead of missing an SLA.

Most of all it automates the processes we need to get done at night. We've grown into it. We have several thousand jobs in our production environment right now, about 40,000 altogether, and that number's going to be growing because with the success that we're seeing with certain applications that have submitted jobs to the workload automation, other groups in our company are saying "Hey, we want to get onboard too and automated our processes, too."

The most valuable features of AutoSys Workload Automation are the file transfer protocol and file watcher. The solution has a user-friendly user interface. It is very simple to use. You have a scope of all your jobs, jobs are what you call tasks that you will automate in the solution. It lets you monitor everything in these jobs.

• Easy to use.
• Supports job scheduling on mainframe and distributed systems.

The actual scheduling of our jobs has helped us tremendously. Before it was all done manually, and we've totally automated the whole functionality, so there's no longer a case where somebody didn't run something. It's 100 percent reliable.

For workload automation, I think the most valuable feature is the robustness, being able to support high availability for as many batch jobs that we process on a daily basis.

CA Workload Automation automates across multiple platforms. We're actually getting rid of our mainframe; so it's allowed us to use a distributive scheduling package. Getting rid of our mainframe is a big deal to my company.

It enables you to tie into audit systems, gives you a lot of visibility as far as workload goes, and allows you to automate it as well.

CA7 is very robust and one of CA's legacy products. The batch platform varies depending on who installed it. The iDash feature sits on the top of it, but we're not using that. 

CA7 also extracts and externalizes data without having to be reengineered, which keeps the mainframe people happy.

• The automation of it
• The triggering
• The scheduling of the jobs
• The processes

We recently got iDash. So, we are starting to review iDash with CA-7 now, and we are using it.  

The integration that it provides and the auditing features are the most valuable to us. It also gives us an end-to-end solution that we can give our clients.

You see a lot of automation tools right now in the market. Whenever we try to look at the products that clients are trying to use, we try to see which one is better matched for their requirements. Most of the times, we try to gauge their level of understanding of the products as well. Workload Automation gives a lot of insight for the client, to better understand how they can actually automate the process of scheduling the jobs within their environment. Workload Automation really plays a good role. If you see every product come with its own workload or its own scheduling product so if you talk about SAP, SAP rebuilt its own scheduling product. You talk about Hulu which comes with Uzi which is its own scheduling product. Having a different scheduling product scattered around in the environment, it is really a tough for the management to have a better in-scope of seeing what actually is happening in the scheduling area.

• Ease of use 
• Scripting capabilities

We're able to monitor a complex workload, easily see where we're at in our batch flows, and take care of problems before they become bigger issues.

We had a stuck file-watcher we weren't aware of, and then because of alerting, instead of missing an SLA, we were able to reach out and get the file in time to still make our batch commitments.

We find scheduling to be the most valuable feature because we can do so on multiple platforms and we can define them once then re-use them.

It's a pretty solid product. The stability of it is probably its best feature. Also, the newer versions are going to have extended job numbers.

I think the speed of it, the consistency of it and that it stays up all the time. We've not had any problems with it in the last year. We upgraded to the last version and I'm here taking a look at the newest version that they've released, 1136. We're on 35. It's promised to be a better product, it's much faster and just as reliable. They also have a great web interface that we haven't deployed yet.

The most valuable feature for us is security. We now have extra job types, so instead of three, we have 55. We use the database plugin and, instead of running a job through OCO, we can run it through WCC. The SQL is right there on the spot.

We're able to find jobs and seeing how everything looks. We just upgraded from 4.5 to 11.3. It is a lot more powerful and a lot more secure. The security features are top notch. Anyone within the company could get in and do whatever they wanted if they had access to 4.5, but with 11.3 we can put them in an AD group and then assign security based on the AD group, so it's great.

The valuable feature is that it is mainframe.

What I like about it is that we use it as our enterprise-level scheduling systems. We used to have scattered jobs scheduled. They all had problems every day. The troubleshooting made a huge mess for the whole company. After we started using CA Workload Automation, everything became one integrated system. It makes the troubleshooting and monitoring much easier.

We started with Workload Automation 10 years ago. Before we started, we had about three hundred scheduler jobs distributed in different Unix systems, Window systems, AIX systems. Everyday you need to fix some problem. Once we built the Workload Automation, everything was in one centralized place.

As a management firm, every morning we have to be ready to trade, as soon as the stock market opens. To be able to trade, the nightly cycle jobs are very critical. If any one of them isn’t ready, you cannot trade at 9:30. It's always a struggle for us. For a while, we had about five people just for overnight support. After we integrated Workload Automation into our system, we are down to two people.

The most valuable feature of AutoSys Workload Automation is user-friendliness. If someone has some knowledge of the tool they can use it.

The ability to create calendars, calendaring for batch jobs to run on a scheduled frequency.

Inherit Dependencies. Reduces scheduling errors for holiday processing.

Ease of use.

CA Workload Automation AutoSys Edition is one of the most powerful schedulers that you have on the open systems, or going between Window servers; to be able to schedule and take advantage of the different powers that the automation has with it.

I've taken advantage of not only the normal command jobs and stuff like that, but I've turned them into using the proper plugins, the job types. One of the things that I have found out is that I'm the one that's using most of the job types, because I've taken away the need for writing or scripting processes. When somebody knows the database and knows how to write SQL code, or they know how to write a stored procedure, they don't need to know how to write scripting in order to run their scripts.

It's a little bit of a cost savings thing by using a plugin and using the different job types that AutoSys has. It goes the same thing when you're running a web service and you want to update stuff.

Taking care of the customers is the number one thing for any client; the client that I'm with, it's the same thing. They want to make sure that the customers are happy.

• Top-notch scheduling features and functionality
• Reliability, performance and stability
• Advanced GUI to manage the batch, flexibility to schedule jobs on various business needs

Its scheduling and its notification to us. We need to know when things are taking too long and when it fails, but we really need to schedule jobs to run. We need to have things run in a very sequential order, so it is very useful that we can schedule the work flows.

It has allowed us to automate many of the functions of our operations staff. 

For instance, we had production control staff spending two hours a day entering date parms into our daily business processes. And now, CA Workload Automation does it for us.

Scheduling in general. Running anything in crontab, you need to put a lot of logic into it to make it work. With this product, you don't have to worry about it. You have the schedule object where you put all the dates or holidays in it, and it does it for you. 

Its stability and reliability, that it's been there for 20 years and 30 years, and it's always been the number one scheduler.

• Enterprise cross-platform scheduling
• MVS scheduling

We have couple of hundred thousand jobs scheduled monthly via ESP so it is critical.

• Flexible agent configurations
• Integration with multiple services and applications across the enterprise.

We often have to implement complicated processes. Automic Automation Engine provides us the ability to map logic using a scripting language. We have an advantage where practically all automation problems can easily be implemented within the Automation Engine.

Our challenge is having a centralized schedule on a single pain with 180,000 jobs each day. We are looking to move to iDASH with predictive analytics. We don’t have many SLA’s. We're looking to do better with predictive analytics and we want to further integrate.

Administering with the command line: The feature creates similar jobs in bulk using the command line.                                                                                                                                                               

The scheduling feature allows us to know when jobs are going to run and makes sure they run in the order needed.

The most valuable feature is probably just the robustness of the platform itself, where you can go in and put any code inside of it and, as long as the server that you have it running on has the legs to be able to execute all that, it's good to go.

Granular Security enables self-service role-based access. JIL language is always a big accelerator for creating/editing job flows efficiently.

Great at handling timezones and daylight savings adjustments.

Virtual machine usage: It helped us to schedule the job to run on multiple servers based on the workload. It is automatically taking care of workload balance based on configuration settings.

Calendar usage is also very useful. It allows us to use our own calendar.

Mostly its stability.

The flexibility and the scalability that it can be used from the back-end. It is very user friendly.

• Automation of patch process
• SQL integration
• Reporting

The features that I have found most valuable with AutoSys are that it is scalable, easy to use, fast, and always available. That's very important because if it's not steady then it's a real problem. So, at this point, we are satisfied with it.

In our current environment, we have a large community of users. So Workload Automation helps us with our complex job scheduling with automating placements.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the functions are easy to use.

I find that it provides better agility in regards to job execution features.

I find the UI to be a really nice feature. It's great and pretty user friendly. Also, there are many agent integrations available that support various platforms.