We did use a third party for deployment assistance. Our experience was very good. They are very knowledgeable about the product. They were a good partner. They helped us sort out the boundaries between when there's an error and when you've misconfigured it, and it's just telling you about it. They were very good in that regard.

We had one person to set up the servers for our whole server network infrastructure, and then my technician did the installation. We had someone from Tidal sit there with us while we did the installation, and then, I sat there and watched and answered any questions. So, there were three people involved in its installation including Tidal's installation assistant.

It was done in half a day. We were scheduling jobs and setting up personalizations. Within four hours of the conversation, Tidal's assistant was off the phone. Our interaction with him was great. He knew what he was doing. We got it up and running, and we were off to the races.

We spend eight hours a month on maintenance. That is just maintenance of the software. It depends on the number of jobs that you have out there, the number of jobs that you schedule, and the number of jobs that fail or just need a little massaging, but I can see requiring a full-time person just to maintain the software. I would almost make it two people so that there is redundancy, but again, it depends on the number of jobs and how critical your jobs are. We have eight ERP systems using this job scheduler meaning we have lots of jobs out there.

We used a Cisco consultant for installation. There were four people involved in the installation. We had the consultant working with our network people, and we had a technical support person who made sure all the libraries were in place to set up for Tidal. And there was me and another person getting all the schedules together.

The only time we've used a third-party is when we were doing a major upgrade of Tidal from 3.1 to 5.2, back in 2015.

The third-party we used was Synertech. Our experience wasn't too good with the consultant they gave us. He was very gruff and it wasn't a pleasant experience. We didn't ask him to come back. But the actual conversion to the new release went well. We used the consultant to show us the technical part of upgrading to 5.2. We also wanted to use him to train one of our new people in Tidal functions, but it never got that far.

Before implementation, it is better to get with the Tidal support guys. They usually assess the organization's features that they want to use. They will provide the specs to use based upon how many jobs needed to configure. So, it is better to work with support, because if they provide certain specs, then it is always better to go with the specs they provided.

We had this issue when we were doing some upgrades. Moving our infrastructure from one place to another because we thought we could reduce. Then, we had issues. So, it is better to go with whatever specs are provided by the vendor.

We did it ourselves. We knew the legacy systems. So, we knew what the jobs did and we were able to deploy them. It was straightforward. It wasn't necessary to bring in consultants for that.

We primarily had three people. Their roles were database administrator, system administrator, and programmer or developer. Those were the three main functions that were needed.

Its maintenance includes normal monthly update patches. That's about it. Once a month, we apply patches, and there is also an occasional hotfix when there are bugs that have been fixed. I'm the only one who handles its maintenance.

The initial setup was done by somebody else who no longer works with the company. Since then, we have moved to new operating systems over the years. These are always new systems that we build up, then migrate from the old system to the new system. I've set this up several times, so systems that we are currently running are the ones that I've set up.

We use a certified Tidal partner to help with upgrades and to be sure that everything is okay. It's so important that everything work perfectly that we prefer to use a consultant, even though we could do it ourselves. Our scheduler is in use 24/7. It never stops. It is the central piece of our IT operations. If it does not run properly, everything stops including production in our factory.

We have had a very good experience with our partner. We have been working with the same partner for 12 years and everything is working perfectly with them. We will be using their services again soon. They also help us with level-one requests.

The initial setup was done in-house.

We upgraded earlier this year, but we used a business partner (Blue House) because I did not know how to do it.  Since I watched them, I could probably do it myself going forward, as the process was fairly straight forward. We were done within just a couple of hours.

Blue House was great to work with and the process itself was easy. 

It was implemented by the vendor. They were highly knowledgeable and helped us to get used to the solution. They even explained and guided us through each step of the process.

The amount of people involved in an upgrade or deployment depends on how your infrastructure stands up. If you have a small IT department and you have one guy who administers Tidal, builds the servers, does the installations, and has nothing else to work on, then it is pretty quick. If you work in a larger organization where you have teams working in silos where everyone is maxed out with BAU and projects, then you may have to wait three weeks for your servers and a bunch of other stuff. It depends on how siloed your infrastructure setup is. Once you have the servers, then you can install the thing with probably two or three guys. Though, it depends on how complex your setup is. E.g., if you're doing HA between different regions in AWS, then you will need more people from information security along with network specialists. 

The partner we use is a Tidal partner called BLUEHOUSE. They've always been very helpful and very flexible in terms of scheduling. The way we do it here is we'll have them come onsite to update our test system. We'll bring that up online and run that on the new version for two months or so. Then they'll come back and we'll do the production update. The whole time onsite, between test and prod together, is about four or five days. But they do a lot of the prep work for production, while we're doing the test upgrade. When we're ready to go to the production, they're only here for a day or a day-and-a-half at the most for the production cut-over. When it comes to initial support right after the fact, they're very receptive to fielding the questions.

It is not like anyone can do the installation. It has to be a fairly technical, experienced person. The 6.5 version upgrade to the sandbox went well. 

The fact that we were able to install it on our own, albeit with a minor problem here and there at first, speaks to the quality of the software. It has definitely improved from the days when it was owned by Cisco.

One person did the deployment.

When we did a major upgrade about two years ago, we used BLUEHOUSE to help us, when we went from 5.31 to 6.3 That was a major change. But ever since then, we have been handling each integration or upgrade in-house.

The solution’s deployment took ten days.