Stonebranch Universal Automation Center Overview

Stonebranch Universal Automation Center is the #5 ranked solution in our list of top Workload Automation tools. It is most often compared to Control-M: Stonebranch Universal Automation Center vs Control-M

What is Stonebranch Universal Automation Center?

The Stonebranch Workload Automation solution, part of our Universal Automation Center platform, helps organizations automate, manage, and orchestrate their IT processes - across hybrid IT environments.

1. Workflow Orchestration and Automation: Holistically control scripts, jobs, tasks, and IT processes running across your on-prem, hybrid cloud, and/or multi-cloud environments.

2. Real-Time Automation: With our event-driven automation technology, it is now possible to achieve real-time automation across your entire hybrid IT environment.

3. Self-Service Automation: With a focus on ease-of-use, you can empower your workforce with self-service automation using member roles and permissions.

4. BI & Analytics: Centralize operational control and insight with proactive monitoring, reporting, and alerts

Product Features:

- Drag-and-drop Workflow Creation: You don’t have to be a developer to create automation. Custom scripting is a thing of the past. Easily create workflows with an intuitive drag-and-drop user interface.

- DevOps enabled: Align priorities between IT Ops and DevOps with Jobs-as-Code, Infrastructure-as-Code, and bundle-and-promote features.

- Limitless 3rd Party Integrations: Integrate into any platform or application from the mainframe to the cloud. Use pre-packaged integrations, build your own, or download integration blueprints from the community-driven opensource marketplace.

- Available on-premises or as a SaaS-based deployment, the UAC is a modern platform built to scale with your business.

Stonebranch Universal Automation Center Buyer's Guide

Download the Stonebranch Universal Automation Center Buyer's Guide including reviews and more. Updated: March 2021

Stonebranch Universal Automation Center Customers

Nissan, Coop, United Supermarkets, Groupon, CSC, Orbitz, Johnson & Johnson, BMW, Qantas.

Stonebranch Universal Automation Center Video

Pricing Advice

What users are saying about Stonebranch Universal Automation Center pricing:

"When we reviewed this solution against other vendors, Stonebranch blew everybody out of the water in terms of cost."
"We're transaction-based, as far as our licensing goes. We have 50,000 transactions a month and our licensing cost is $55,000 a year..."
"Outside of licensing fees, there aren't any other costs."
"I don't have pricing information, but I do know it's cheaper than our old legacy system. Other than the standard licensing fees there are no additional costs."

Stonebranch Universal Automation Center Reviews

Brian

Sr. System Programmer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Apr 18, 2019

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These are the simplest agents to work with - I'm up and running within 30 minutes

What is our primary use case?

It handles all of our scheduling. All our batch workload runs through it. We use MOVEit for our file process transfers, so we don't use Stonebranch for that. We have MOVEit integrated with our scheduling, so we run commands to MOVEit from scheduling. We're running about 46,000 tasks per day.

Pros and Cons

"I can name the aliases on the agent, so if we need a passive environment for an agent, that's one of the nice features. If our primary goes down, I can bring up the passive one and I don't have to change anything in the scheduling world. It will start running from that new server."
"I have found the agents to be so much simpler, when compared to ESP."

"One hiccup we've had is due to the fact that we have other internal scheduling tools. We're able to talk to them, but we have trouble with some of the networking between them, so we're still trying to work out the kinks there."

What other advice do I have?

If I were to go to another company, this would probably be the tool I would push for. It's a very sound product. I feel Stonebranch is on the technical edge. I've been to a couple of their conferences. They are going into areas and blowing my mind with where they're going with some of this stuff. They're trying to stay on top of the cutting edge. When you go to their conferences, you hear how other people are utilizing the tools. Something might spark a concept, where I say, "Maybe I can do that." We use ServiceNow as our problem management tool, so I'm trying to automate tickets to go into…

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Earl Diem

Manager Performance and Automation Engineering at PSCU Financial Services

Aug 22, 2019

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Allowed us to develop workflows without having to train and develop very specialized skillsets

What is our primary use case?

We use it for IT workflow automation. We have three main categories: billing, reporting, and analytics. We automate the entire workflow, end-to-end, including the file movement from our managed file-transfer solution to our NAS storage point and then kick off the downstream workflows. Most of them are ETL-based in Informatica. And the loads are done to a database and/or storage with output. It's the entire workflow. We host it on-prem. It is our enterprise scheduler; we're migrating everything to it. We'll only have Stonebranch as the enterprise scheduler controlling all of our jobs when we… more »

Pros and Cons

"The Universal Agent is the most valuable feature. Being agent-based and being able to go across multiple technology stacks, which is what our workflows do, Stonebranch gives us the ability to bridge those disparate technologies. It enables us to remove the dependency-gap with the agent so we know the status of the workflow at each step."

"Occasionally, we have an agent that doesn't come back up after patching. That doesn't happen very often... It's really just a restart of the agent and it comes back up. But that might be one thing that could be improved."

What other advice do I have?

My advice applies to the implementation of any automation platform. Have a solid plan for what your approach is to automation and develop a common approach to workflows. That is what we did. We took a step back and looked at what our workflows actually do. We really only have four fundamental workflows so we built templates for those, and all but a couple of our workflows fit into those templates. So analyze your workflows, understand what they do, build templates to do that, and then go off and do the automation once you've got the templates built up. I'm not getting any complaints from my…

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Free Report: Stonebranch Universal Automation Center Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Stonebranch Universal Automation Center. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2021.

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SeniorTe1d8f

Senior Technical Analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Apr 18, 2019

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We throw a lot at it from a resiliency perspective and it stays up, reducing maintenance costs significantly

What is our primary use case?

We started off with replacing mainframe batch scheduling for some of our distributed applications, and then it grew into not just batch but workflows and file transfers. The volumes that we throw at it are in excess of 15 million tasks per month.

Pros and Cons

"We lean a lot on the multi-tenancy that they offer within the product, the ability to get other people to self-manage their estate, versus having a central team do all the scheduling."
"When it comes to agent technology and compatibility with other vendors, from a platform perspective it was the one vendor that fit all the platforms that we have, from your old platforms - mainframe, NSK, IBM i - to the new ones, going into cloud and container"

"There is a component called the OMS, which is the message broker. We rely on infrastructure, resiliency, and availability for that piece. If that could change to be highly available just as a software component, so that we don't have to provide the high-available storage, etc. for it, that would be a plus. It would just be cheaper to run."

What other advice do I have?

Look at also having the database solution be HA as well, because the product is highly available and you can stretch it to also be your BCP where you just fail over from one data center to the other. We suffer because our database solution is not. I would urge everybody to go down that path and set it and forget it. If you lose a part of your data center, this thing will stay up. The universal task is something that we started dabbling with. We haven't used it fully yet. We don't rely on the Stonebranch Marketplace a lot. It was something that we discussed with Stonebranch over a period of…

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Frank Burkhardt

Application and Database Administrator at Blue Bird

Apr 26, 2020

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Allows us to streamline the workflow so that the machines aren't sitting idle, and production is much quicker

What is our primary use case?

The primary use case is that we are now at the point where we are creating workflows and it is allowing us to shorten the time it takes for tasks to go through multiple machines. We wanted something that would give us better visibility.

Pros and Cons

"The tasks are incredibly capable, and as long as you name them with a nice, uniform naming convention, they are very useful. You can create some interesting workflows through various machines, or you can just have it kick off single tasks. All in all, I really like the Universal Task. You can do some mutually exclusive stuff, such as an "A not B" kind of thing. It has a lot of capabilities behind the scenes."

"There is room for improvement with its connectivity with the Microsoft SRS system. It is very weak. They keep telling us it works with it, and technically it does, but it does not provide a lot of visibility. We have lost a lot of visibility migrating to Stonebranch, compared with just running tasks on the SRS server. That's really about the only thing that is a sore point for us."

What other advice do I have?

Go at this slowly and methodically. When they came in, they did a lot of things very quickly, and we didn't really understand the implication of the answers we were giving. We have gone back to re-do a lot of that work. Now that we're smarter, and much better at this, we have found that being slow and methodical pays off in the long-run. The solution has enabled digital transformation at our company but it's been a very slow process, and that is because the people we have are very traditional, old-school people. This is a little outside of the norm for people who grew up using the Windows Task…

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Mike Booher

Systems Programmer II at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees

May 29, 2019

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Allows us to monitor tasks on our open-system and mainframe sides, giving us a one-window view of all our processes

What is our primary use case?

We use it for enterprise scheduling and workload automation. For the most part, it runs our internal mainframe batch jobs and does file transfer processes in and outside the company.

Pros and Cons

"The ability to monitor tasks that are on the open-system side as well as our mainframe side gives us a one-window view of all our processes."
"I love the Universal Controller. It's been great for us. We host it on-premise... It's High Availability, meaning there's failover from one server to the other if one goes down."

"I have a request regarding our agent on the mainframe. It may time out when communicating to the Universal Controller, when the mainframe is extremely busy. That can cause a task which is running at that time to not see the results of the job that ran on the mainframe. It happens sporadically during times of really busy CPU usage. We're expecting that enhancement from them in the fourth quarter."

What other advice do I have?

Try it out, get to know the product and see how it works. We have two system admins or schedulers, master schedulers, me and my co-worker. In our test and dev environment, we have four staff involved, counting me and my co-worker. Since everything was cut over to production and stabilized, we have had to spend about ten hours a week on it. We have operators monitoring it 24/7. I would rate it at nine out of ten. I work with it every day and it does what I need it to do. I can't think of anything off the top of my head that I need as an enhancement at the moment.

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Doug Perseghetti

Consulting Systems Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Jul 15, 2019

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Agent resiliency helps us process a lot of workload, reducing the latency between jobs

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use case is automating the workload for the company. It's used quite extensively. We run over 500,000 jobs a week with it.

Pros and Cons

"The most valuable feature is the reliability of the agents, because we need them accessible and we need to run stuff. The agent technology and compatibility are top-notch."

"The Universal Controller is decent for the money it costs... It needs some work to have full features, compared to other products that are out there, specifically IBM's Workload Scheduler."

What other advice do I have?

If you're looking at this or a similar solution, get with a company that's done it before. We have consulted with other companies and helped out a number of them to go to this solution. We've already done digital transformation, so Stonebranch is part of our continuous improvement. I'm not going to say it's transformational, it's just continuous improvement, using our tools to exploit them for the betterment of supporting company goals. In terms of the solution's users, we have people who build things in order to use it. We have a core of about five people who set up workloads to use them…

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reviewer958518

Architect & Technical Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Jan 4, 2021

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Scalable, stable, and very user friendly

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use the solution for our clients.

Pros and Cons

"The interface is very user-friendly and easy to navigate."

"It would be ideal if they had the exact same features as the CA Workload Automation DE series. It would be helpful to have calendaring options."

What other advice do I have?

We are a reseller. We are a software company. So far, we've had a pretty good experience using the solution. We need a bit more time with it, however, to get more comfortable with everything. Overall, I would rate it at an eight out of ten, as so far the experience we've had has been positive.

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reviewer1391487

Application Architect at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Apr 5, 2021

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Reliable, scalable, with multiple workflows

What is our primary use case?

I am a consultant. Stonebranch was used for retail businesses.

Pros and Cons

"I like the dashboard and the various workflows."

"It can't handle negative written codes."

What other advice do I have?

The project using Stonebranch has finished. I don't have access to the Stonebranch environment now. We last used it six to twelve months ago. It was not complex for me, but you have to follow the documentation. Spend some time to learn about it, then it's no big deal. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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