In terms of Stonebranch’s agent technology and compatibility with other vendors, it's been very good. We migrated off of the SAP platform or BOE; we had an old instance of Data Integrator. There were a lot of things that the other tools that we looked at when we did our PoC - tools such as Automic and Automate It - just simply wouldn't do. They had problems integrating with the old version of Data Integrator. We PoC'ed three platforms before we made the decision to go with Stonebranch. Automic was one, who was subsequently bought, about four months after we made our decision, by CA. 

We looked at a Windows-based solution called Automate which wasn't anywhere close, at the time, to Stonebranch as far as schedulers go. Automate had a lot more UI-manipulation capabilities, which Stonebranch and Automic didn't really have - you don't usually go in and automate processes with the latter two. They're more straightforward workflow tools, rather than automating UI processes.

From our experience in the PoC, Stonebranch's web-based platform wasn't converted from a client-server platform like some of the other platforms we looked at. And being agent-based, it was easy to use. It didn't require a steep learning curve.

And, again, that integration to some of the technologies that we were using was important. We're now about 75 percent of the way to migrating all the Data Integrator services and some of the SSIS ETL jobs we have running out there to Informatica. Stonebranch integrated to all three of those ETL platforms right out-of-the-box through the REST API. We really didn't have to struggle with those integrations, so that was great.

We did do POCs with various other products. 

We price-lined options including Computer Associates, BMC, IBM's product, etc.

We did evaluate many other options.

We evaluated BMC and we looked at CA's products - we already had CA in house. Tivoli was another we looked at. There were four or five on the list, and we dropped it down to three pretty quickly.

BMC would have been in the running, but they were... "arrogant" is the word I want to say. They just brushed us the wrong way. I think they have a great tool but the sales pitch that they sent to us did more chopping of other products instead of selling their own.

I was not part of the decision process of picking a solution.

We looked at a few automation schedulers. The long-term direction is that we're looking at a ten-to-15-year plan to migrate off the mainframe. It made sense to get an enterprise solution that was open-systems based. That's what Stonebranch brought to us.

control m

We evaluated seven products and brought in three for proof of concept.

I was not there at the time of the switch.

IBM zCentric

We did look at UC4 (Automic Software), but after evaluation, UAC had more to offer.

We are a SAP shop, we have evaluated Redwood, WorkFusion, and Stonebranch.

Yes, CA Unicenter was considered.

No.