We performed a comparison between OpCon and Redwood Software - Workload Automation Edition based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: OpCon is known for its flexibility, integration capabilities, self-service options, and automation of manual tasks. It also provides a user-friendly graphical interface, database functionality, and a testing environment for deployment concepts. OpCon allows for on-demand access, includes a file watcher, and offers the MAS feature for reliability. Redwood Software excels in powerful job definition and job building capabilities. It allows for job importation and user authority restrictions and provides monitoring alerts, dashboards, and error-handling capabilities. and load balancing. Additionally, it ensures efficient memory management and provides mobile notifications.
OpCon has room for improvement in its web-based interface, compatibility with agents and connectors, accessibility through a mobile app, and integration with mainframe systems. Redwood Software could enhance its reporting features, minor issues, reporting and analytics capabilities, user interface, cloud-native features, documentation, customer support, security standards, application integration, data accessibility, and compatibility with other platforms.
Service and Support: OpCon's customer service is highly praised for their prompt and efficient assistance, while Redwood Software's customer service is considered helpful, however, could use some enhancements.
Ease of Deployment: OpCon's initial setup can be challenging, however, SMA consultants help streamline the process. Redwood Software's setup is time-consuming, but it ultimately minimizes space requirements and simplifies future upgrades.
Pricing: OpCon has a tiered pricing model, while Redwood Software has a unique pricing model based on job executions. OpCon is considered expensive and complex, however, it is seen as providing value for money. Redwood Software is praised for its low-cost compared to competitors.
ROI: OpCon has proven to be highly effective in terms of return on investment, resulting in significant time savings and decreased reliance on operators. Evaluating the ROI of Redwood Software is challenging; however, users have reported favorable outcomes.
Comparison Results: OpCon is the preferred option when comparing it to Redwood Software - Workload Automation Edition. OpCon is highly praised for its flexibility, integration capabilities, self-service feature, automation capabilities, and reliability. Users particularly appreciate OpCon's graphical user interface and database functionality.
"Manual processing has been automated 99 percent by OpCon. With new processes, we give it at least two weeks manual so we can write down the details of how to do the steps, then we automate it. Within a month, it has been automated, then it's no longer a manual process."
"We recently did a branch acquisition of another bank, though not a full bank. With that, we had to convert all of their ACH transactions. It was a very complicated product that we received from our core provider, Fiserv, for some translation programs. It was very cumbersome to run through the process, convert it out, get output files, etc. Without anyone touching it, I was able to automate the full process from pulling in the files from this other bank, converting everything needed, and posting it to our customer's account 24-hours throughout the day."
"It's very scalable. Right now we're barely scratching the surface of what it can do. I've looked at Symitar's instance of OpCon and they're running something like 13,000 jobs a day with all the clients that they have. So it can go from small use cases like ours to enterprise-level."
"It has streamlined operations, specifically with the timing of our processes. We don't have to worry about if things are going to run at a certain time. The automation allows us to say, "Okay, we want this to run at this time, and this to not run until that is done." So, it has really streamlined the accuracy and timeline of when jobs run throughout the day."
"I find OpCon's ability to monitor files and folders, and its integration with other software to be the most valuable."
"It allows us to have more information and more control than we previously had over the processes that are running in host systems."
"When a lot of jobs are scheduled on different platforms, without any interaction possible between them, it's very difficult to manage things. With OpCon we avoid this difficulty. It's very visual."
"We have found it scales very well. We run thousands of thousands of jobs every day, and sometimes thousands of jobs in a few hours."
"We can achieve anything that anything that we would like to do. In SAP, it's not generally possible with just with SAP. So we have solution manager as an option, but run by job."
"It is very easy and easy to use, and minimal supervision is required to run it."
"It conjures simplicity from the depths of complexity, effortlessly shouldering burdensome workloads."
"There are various ways in which you can construct jobs depending on your business needs and requirements."
"Redwood is of value to our organization due to of its ease of use and the ability to automate and orchestrate any platform that we utilize today."
"Error handling and the recovery feature ensure that my job processes are not stopped if any error occurs."
"Redwood is more flexible and we can schedule the tasks based on different time zones."
"Redwood manages all complex job workflow processes."
"I would like to see them improve the Solution Manager for the web application. It's the future for us. Our customers need a lot of functionality, but there isn't that functionality within Solution Manager. So they have to develop and improve it."
"There are some limitations in the actual jobs that are created and how you're able to rename files. Suppose you're bringing in, say, 10, 15, or 20 reports from a core system, and you're using an "asterisk character" to identify files. For example, if you're grabbing files that start with this, end with this, but the characters in between could be different, it has to retain that same name in the destination. It won't allow you to rename them with a date stamp or the like."
"The FICS integration is a little bit clunky. We've had some tickets with their support team, and sometimes they couldn't figure it out, but that probably has more to do with FICS than with OpCon."
"I might like to see a little bit more of a seamless user interface. That would be good. They're moving towards a browser-type interface, rather than the Java application that we currently use. Also, a little bit more built-in self-service would be good, rather than a standalone product."
"I would like more web-based training from SMA. That would be nice. Our primary OpCon representative is phenomenal, but we would like some training opportunities for learning on our own. When I started utilizing OpCon, the sheer breadth of it made for a very daunting task. I was almost fearful to start, not to mention fearful to go change things and possibly hinder a job."
"Some additional logging-information reporting would also help. They have all the information there but you still have to search around and look back. It's not right there for you, where you click and can get the reporting. You have to know the system and do some additional searches. So reporting is another area that they can build on by simplifying it."
"I would like to have an interface with PowerShell. PowerShell has a lot of functionality. We use it a lot because we're a Windows shop. Having a built-in tool or interface with PowerShell would go a long way."
"I believe there's room for improvement, and while I think it's something they are considering, I would welcome seeing OpCon integrate with a broader range of systems and third-party products."
"We'd like to see an integration with ServiceNow to raise the tickets/incidents in ServiceNow."
"The documentation for this product is limited, which can be improved in the future."
"Customer support should be enhanced so that we can automatically raise tickets and incidents in customer service."
"The user interface of Redwood can be improved a bit to make it more user-friendly and interesting."
"The dashboard provided can be made more visually appealing and could include more critical data that would help associates in one glance get the required information."
"The reports are downloaded in .CAR file format, which makes it difficult to convert to an Excel file."
"The only issue at first was that we had to manually delete or raise the event in order to run some of the events and wait for jobs, even if the file was kept at the correct AL11 position."
"The price wise, it is not affordable. When we compare with other industry leading softwares and even the same scale, there are certain softwares that can compete with Redwood, but Redwood is very highly paced.So it is more SAP friendly, I would say, at this point. Since it was owned by SAP for very long time, they have made it SAP friendly. But if you look at the tool as a enterprise tool. Like, in general, it is not really that great as a tool. So you can you have better options when you couple it with SAP. But if you would like to control your enterprise level applications, anything after that, like, Azure AWS and things like that Oracle."
OpCon is ranked 9th in Workload Automation with 56 reviews while Redwood RunMyJobs is ranked 3rd in Workload Automation with 30 reviews. OpCon is rated 9.2, while Redwood RunMyJobs is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of OpCon writes "Gives us the ability to schedule dependent jobs across different mainframes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Redwood RunMyJobs writes "Simple to use, increases CPU speed, and reduces the cost of machine time". OpCon is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, IBM Workload Automation, Automic Workload Automation and UiPath, whereas Redwood RunMyJobs is most compared with Control-M, Stonebranch, Tidal by Redwood, AutoSys Workload Automation and Automic Automation Intelligence. See our OpCon vs. Redwood RunMyJobs report.
See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.
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