We used Dollar Universe.

Previously, we relied on native Windows job scheduling tools, but they pale in comparison to OpCon.

OpCon was our first workload automation tool.

We previously had a solution just for moving files, but OpCon can do a wider range of things.  Both have their place. Our other solution was easier to use, but the capabilities were limited. 

We were using ASG-Zeke, which is now Rocket Software. We got away from them because we did not care for their support and they were, frankly, expensive.

Our system analysts requested it, so it was easy for us. They are happy now to have it available and to use it on a daily basis.

We conducted a review for purchase several years ago, initially opting for MOVEit as it aligned better with our older core system, which was more tech-focused rather than GUI-based. However, we soon identified a significant limitation with MOVEit—it lacked a dependency component. After six months of in-house use, we recognized the weakness and transitioned to OpCon. Since changing vendors in 2005, we have exclusively used MOVEit and transitioned to OpCon.

We utilized a significant amount of Azure's native functionality. Azure offers a wide range of services, with some having multiple designations. Primarily the Azure automation.

OpCon is far more functional for us because not all of our applications are hosted on Azure. Therefore, OpCon's cross-platform compatibility allows it to connect to our legacy system, while Azure automation is limited to the Azure environment.

We also looked at DMC. OpCon has a relationship with Symitar. That was a selling point for us because they have a close relationship and they already have several Symitar clients using OpCon and they came with great reviews. DMC had several other core systems that they were automating but Symitar wasn't the main system. So we just felt more comfortable going with SMA.

We switched from a different vendor's scheduling system. We implemented a project that encompassed a requirements definition, a vendor questionnaire, demos, and finally a selection of a product.

We switched from our old scheduler for multiple reasons. First, the vendor was asking far too much money for an upgrade. Also, we found this vendor's support weak at best. Finally, we wanted something that presented a modern user interface, which the old system tried to implement but it was a poor attempt.

On a scale of one to 10, where 10 is simple, super easy, and effective, that's what I would give it. At my prior work, we had another scheduler, and it was okay. It did its thing, but OpCon is, by far, super awesome.

The solution I used previously was called ISE, and it was related to another core provider and the solution that they provided. This was probably at least 10 years ago. I switched because I came to this institution who was using SMA before I got here. So, I adopted it simply because it was the resource that we had. I don't regret it one bit.

I'm kind of jaded now because I've been using this solution for so long. My previous solution was obviously an older version, so I'm comparing against something from way back when it was more convoluted. It was harder to get the results that I wanted from the interactions with different jobs. Having used OpCon for the last eight years, I'm familiar with how all the different pieces of how I set something up. It's super easy to set things up. At this time, I don't know that I have a good comparison against another software.

We did not have a previous automation tool. The reason we went with OpCon is that it has an integration with our core system.

I think our previous solution was called AutoMate. It wasn't nearly as robust as this, and it relied on on-screen scrapes, etc. It was pretty dissimilar to this, and we retired it as soon as we had this in place. 

We didn't have a previous solution. We were doing things manually.

We were using an SMA product, Scheduler, but they stopped supporting that product and then we migrated to their updated product which was OpCon.

We did not look at anything else of this caliber. We made heavy use of Windows Task Scheduler and the IBM Job Scheduler. The process worked, but everything was scattered and we really needed a centralized point of contact for all our automation.

We find it very simple and easy to use. We had a previous product that was a scheduler which was overly complex and extremely difficult to use. We're very pleased with this one.

When we changed our core systems, the new core system supported OpCon. It didn't support our older product. As part of our conversion, we changed over to the OpCon product. This was one of the better things that we did.

One of the things which has really helped us is the time it takes us to build jobs and automate things. For example, if we decide we are going to go out and do a new process tomorrow, our previous system would take a week to 10 days, then require assistance from a third-party support company to get it to work. With this solution, we can do it in a matter of minutes without additional support.

I am coming off of a system that was so cumbersome to use that we couldn't even get it to do basic things without having to involve support all the time. Whereas, we've had to involve support very little with OpCon.

OpCon overcomes limitations of our previous automation tool. Our previous tool didn't work well with anything other than the particular core system that we have. For example, it didn't work well with Microsoft Servers, moving files around, and doing things like file transfers. Whereas, this system does that very well.

Autobatch was one of the solutions I used previously. It was a free product that we downloaded, and then someone wrote some scripts. We didn't get to the point of purchasing it. OpCon is more of a high-end product. You get what you pay for. I don't know how we would continue to grow our operation without the help of OpCon.

The limitations in Autobatch which OpCon overcame are due to OpCon's ease-of-use and the configuration. I wouldn't have been able to train my team to start building jobs on the other solution if they didn't have a good technical background. With OpCon, it's much simpler.

Before, we did use file transfer stuff, which was a bunch of "if" and "then" statements. We were executing with that. But, that was very limited to what the application could do. Whereas, OpCon is a whole different game changer of what you can do from an enterprise level.

As a bank, there used to be a lot of full-time employees who would just run checklists all day doing manual steps. Whereas, with this product, we can automate the full day to a certain extent. There is still some intervention or items that are more user driven. Instead of our operators running the day-to-day, they just initiate certain phases of it. Then, we rely heavily on the Self Service portal and building out that stuff for our operators to use. They very much enjoy that.

Prior to OpCon, the organization used a lot of scripting in its own server. A big selling point for OpCon was its automation on an enterprise level. Converting everything to OpCon moved everything to one place. 

The nice thing at Frandsen is management sees the need and results of all the automation. They took an investment with my predecessor buying the product and we continue to see great results.

It was proprietary scheduler for our operating system. We had another job scheduler that couldn't quite handle the flexibility we needed. It wasn't as sophisticated as what we needed it to do. The frequencies and dependencies were lacking. The jobs that you could set up had to be Windows jobs, so there were a lot of things that we couldn't do. It required a lot of manual tasks. There were interruptions and interventions, so we couldn't get anything done. We didn't stay with it long, as it didn't take us that long to figure out we could not be successful without OpCon. 

The previous solution was cumbersome to work with. OpCon took us about two weeks to install and deploy.

We didn't have a previous automation tool at an enterprise level.

It was used to replace chrome.tabs or Windows Task Scheduler.

I was at a Unite Conference and SMA was there. I went over to their booth and started talking to them and learned that it was cross-platform, which I really liked. We gave it a trial for free for three months. They came out, they installed it, and they trained us. And we found that, wow, this is really great.

I report to the VP of finance. I don't even remember what the cost was back then, but I had to sell him on it. I was going to have to sell him on anything that was going to cost over $10,000. I told him about it and I told him what we were going to be doing with it and he said, "Yeah, let's do it. Let's see what it's like." After the initial three months I said to him, "We have to have this product because of all of the benefits that it has." I shared all of the benefits with him and that's when we purchased it. We were then able to move forward with automating all of our jobs on a daily and monthly schedule, or whatever schedule was needed.

When I came to the company, they were already using OpCon. I had used this solution in a previous job, so I was thrilled to see it being used. In my opinion, there's nothing better. 

We used to use Robot, but that was strictly AS/400. It had a lot of limitations. OpCon is way easier to use than Robot was, and OpCon goes across multiple platforms, which makes it an even better solution.

I did use another automation tool before OpCon, but there is almost no comparison. It is certainly not apples to apples. I have used Windows Scheduler to do very simple things, but again, there is no comparison to what OpCon can do.

OpCon was implemented at my former company while I was there, and when I came to work for my current company, the solution was already in place.

This is my first job scheduler/job automation application.

We were on a Unisys machine and used their workflow language to write automated jobs. But, it's sort of apples and oranges comparing the solutions, as they are pretty different.

We had a process in place before we switched to the IBM and were on Unisys, when we used to be on a different tool. It wasn't as consistent and would get things out of order, not running properly. Switching to OpCon, employees have found other things to fix their time on.

It is a lot easier to schedule things with OpCon than with our previous solution. We have jobs which run every 15 or 30 minutes, and it's easy to schedule those. You can use it to check and make sure other things are not running at the same time. 

We had a different product, and it was limited. OpCon was less expensive and did more.

We had MOVEit before. The time to implement that solution, versus OpCon, was about equal. But OpCon can do much more than the other one could. In terms of automating processes, they are similar. MOVEit did not depend so much on command lines, so it was a little more straightforward when we wanted to work with dates or file names. But it didn't integrate with Symitar. For us, that was the huge part.

OpCon's TCO is a lot more but we didn't have support with the other solution.

We did utilize another job scheduler prior to OpCon called JFS, which was not robust enough to do everything that we needed done. That's why we opted to look at the OpCon solution as a replacement. JFS was more tedious in terms of implementation. It was not robust enough to do individual calendar scheduling, nor did it have the ability to do a lot of these single transfers or to initiate any scripting for SQL or AIX. It was very limited.

With JFS it did not take long to implement automations; a couple of hours to automate a process and to be able to add jobs to it. It's just that it was very tedious and we had to consistently manipulate the schedules to fit our needs because it did not have a calendar system like OpCon does to be able to manipulate jobs and do schedules by date.

Overall, JFS was not scalable. It didn't meet our needs. It required a lot of manual intervention. We had outgrown that product very quickly. We had been on that product less than four years before we decided that it just was not good enough to sustain our environment. Currently, our environment has over 240 servers and there was no way we could have managed that with the old schedule.

I wanted to see if Automic was going to work with KeyStone, our core system that we were converting to. Automic pledged to help us support that and come up with a connector for it. But in doing my due diligence, I read over what OpCon provided for KeyStone and, just by reading the documentation, I realized that we probably should go with OpCon, even though it wasn't something that I knew and it wasn't a bench strength for our organization. I realized that we weren't going to find a better partner, with robust features for KeyStone, and that we should switch.

Before we got OpCon we did have another automated system, AutoMate. We switched due to OpCon's capabilities of communicating with the host system. And OpCon runs faster than the last one. There are some scenarios where it has been more capable and some where it has not been.

In terms of the time to implement OpCon versus our old solution, they're very different. The last system was geared closer to, and was more in tune with, developers than OpCon. It was very capable, as long as you had the skillset. Whereas OpCon is very simple and the GUI is very click-and-point. OpCon is faster at delivering some of the smaller things. But when it comes to more complex things, the last system was better because it was more prepared to handle those systems.

We did not use a different solution. We were doing all of this manually. 

I've used many automation tools in my career and the time to implement OpCon, compared to some of those other tools, is about the same. This is a specialized job-automation tool, instead of a generic automation tool. The way it works is a little bit more job-like than some of the other automation tools. That's really the difference between OpCon and a full-blown orchestrator-type of tool, like Automation Anywhere. It's important to keep those separate and use OpCon for what it's good for and other tools when you need things to be a little bit more diverse.

Other job-automation tools are not specific to credit unions and financials. There are some hooks that OpCon has that other tools don't, which is why credit unions go to them.

Tidal Workload Automation sits in between OpCon and full orchestrator tools. It's not as fully functional as some of those big automation toolsets, but it does some things very well.

The total cost of ownership of OpCon is quite comparable to other automation tools I've used. For a financial institution, in particular, OpCon makes a lot of sense. We're replacing another tool, Automic, that would have been comparable. There are certain things you can't do in Automic, or it's costly to do.

I am unaware of the previous system used for our other core. It was prior to my tenure here.

I'm not sure if anything was used before.

I brought OpCon into the company. Prior to that everything was done manually by people.

We did not have a previous solution. One of my requirements, when we decided to go with our new core banking system, was that I did not want to spend my time doing these routine jobs and tasks every day. So I went out to my colleagues at other credit unions and asked them how they were managing these things. Everyone said, "You must have OpCon." I researched a little on OpCon. Our core banking platform, Corelation Keystone, put me in touch with the OpCon salesperson. They did a demo for me and I was immediately sold.

I have never used an automation system other than Windows Scheduler, which is probably the best way. You go into Windows, restart your computer every day or run updates at this time. Whereas, OpCon gives us more prompts and things to do where you can set up different PCs or servers to do certain things.

We did not have a previous solution. Our company went with OpCon because it has a very tight integration to our core system.

We did not previously use an automation solution. We had done things like using PowerShell and doing scripting on the servers, but we had not used those things exclusively as an automation platform.

We used Windows Scheduler before to automate some general file movements and stuff, but we couldn't do anything within our core system with it.

We switched our core system. Originally, we were using a system provided by Pfizer. We switched to a system provided by Jack Henry & Associates, and they were not compatible with Windows Scheduler. So, we were doing everything manually for a while, until we adopted OpCon. This solution overcomes limitations from our previous automation tool.

We did use another solution prior to this one, but we switched to OpCon because it's more user-friendly.

We had a tool before OpCon, but it's been so many years that I can't remember the name of it. It was not nearly as robust as OpCon is. Implementing things is a lot easier with OpCon. Most things don't generally take that long to implement. The way you can calculate different dates, and all the different types of contingencies make OpCon a lot more flexible.

Also, OpCon was the preferred partner of Jack Henry, which we were converting to. That was our primary reason.

Another reason was that OpCon enables us to do all these other external processes, outside of the core, with other vendors, like downloading bond files. We did not have any of that before.

We switched to a different core and Opcon was definitely a better replacement for the solution that we were using.