We had Cisco Tidal going before Stonebranch. It was an older product which was being retired. Cisco's core competency is not automation, it's networking. The product was somewhat clunky and difficult to work with. Stonebranch is a lot easier to work with. We made the decision to do a PoC and find a different scheduler and selected Stonebranch.

I was one of the key parts of the implementation process of this solution, and we migrated from AutoSys. Therefore, before this product, we were using CA AutoSys.

We are still also using the IBM scheduler. But we completely switched off of the IBM agents to Stonebranch agents. So Stonebranch replaced the existing legacy system as far as the agents go. That went great. It was a very affordable solution, works like a champ, so it's good.

We're still using the mainframe scheduler, but we're looking at phasing that out over this next year.

We have many other solutions. I don't think I can mention those solutions as we do have NDAs with all our vendors on that side of the house.

The Universal Controller is what I'm running. I like it for web interface. There were four or five products we were reviewing. We came from an ESP shop but we didn't like their web interface. We were leaning toward a web interface and this was the only tool that had it. I believe a couple of them are close, but we didn't like their features. We liked this one better. We have the Controller on our own server, inside the company. I have read some of the cloud stuff and we have other products going in that direction, but I haven't been asked to go that way.

We had an elective in 2013 to get off the mainframe, so we jumped to get going with a different scheduling tool but, guess what, we're still on the mainframe.

I have also used Control-M. Compared to Control-M, Stonebranch is also cheap. If Control-M is down, it will be up within five seconds and will be working fine. Control-M is very stable, and many companies are using it. Stonebranch is new and has been in the market for 5 to 10 years.

Their structure is very nice, and it's better than Stonebranch. Control-M is more complex, but the security and stability are better than Stonebranch.

We used cron and Task Scheduler from Microsoft and a gut-feel on how long systems should take to process something.

No.

We used a product from ASG. It was their Beta 42 solution. It's something that they purchased and it was pretty old. It ran on the mainframe. It just didn't give us the flexibility we needed to do enterprise-wide and to be able to integrate server tasks or open-systems tasks with the mainframe.

Stonebranch replaced our old, mainframe scheduler, and we got much more flexibility in the new product, compared to the old product. Our file transfer processes are much more resilient. And one of the biggest benefits is that when a job fails it sends an email to us and alerts us about the failure. In addition, it sends it to our ticketing system and it opens up a problem ticket automatically.

No, I did not.

previous scheduler was TWS 8.5.  More expensive, less stable, less capable

We had a number of schedulers over the years, leading the conversion discussion is usually surrounding vendor support as well as reliability issues.

CA7/CA11 - switched due to cost.

We used: 

• IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler
• Redwood CPS for scheduling SAP tasks
• Redwood Cronacle
• Opalis, also
• AT scheduling on Windows, and
• Crontab scheduling. 

We switched to UAC because we did not want all the other schedulers and corresponding teams. It is also more cost-efficient.

No.

No, I did not use any other schedulers. 

We didn't have one enterprise scheduling to automation tool before Stonebranch. With Stonebranch, we are able to bring all enterprise automation to once place.

At other organizations, I have used CA Unicenter. It was OK, but on working with UAC, I prefer this tool.

Our own implementation.

Before starting with this solution, we worked with CA.