None of the other products I mentioned that we used was really good, once you submit a job, at indicating when that job finishes. A lot of them are submit-it-and-forget-it, so you really don't know if that next job can start running, because you don't know if the first job has finished running. And if there's an error that stops a script at a certain point, none of the others do a really good job of alerting you and then letting you try to determine the best next action.

Tidal enables you to FTP and to copy files from different locations. For any other third-party stuff that you may want to do, it is a true enterprise solution.

Also, the calendaring is much better in Tidal. The scripting is much better. You can integrate across multiple different systems and platforms. I don't know that any of the others can do that. I could literally run a job on one EnterpriseOne system, move that data over to the other one, and run another job on another system. I don't know how I would complete that task on any of the other systems, without having to run two separate jobs. Even then, how would I know that it's done before the other one started up? Tidal knows, "I can't run this until this other one is done."

There was one option back then, but by the time they wanted to come in for a demo, we had already decided to use Tidal.

We've evaluated other schedulers. Tidal checked more boxes. The main difference was that it was easier to set jobs up. Everything is Windows-based. It's versatile, easy to administer, and easy to use. It has enough features and APIs to do everything we need it to do.

A few years ago we looked at Stonebranch Universal Automation Center, and we've occasionally looked at Control-M, to see what else is out there. 

From a cost perspective, Tidal beats them both, and we've had such good support from Tidal that it makes it harder to think about leaving, especially since the product works very well. Right now, we're not looking at anything else, but I always keep my ear open because you never know.

We have on occasion looked at other options simply just to be aware of what is out there. We don't plan to change anything right now that I'm aware of simply because we don't have the time or budget. I'm not even sure we have the need. Every once in a while, we do look around because it's useful to go out, compare, and ensure that it's still something that fits our needs.

There have been a couple of times that we have looked at competitors, especially when we saw that Cisco wasn't really investing time or money into it. It wasn't clear to us if Cisco was going to continue to invest in Tidal. So we went out and looked at the market and did evaluations. 

We looked at Automic or UC4. We looked at BMC Control-M. Stonebranch was actually interesting, back in 2016.

What it came down to was that Automic was tough because it was changing hands on a regular basis. Stonebranch was more in our price range, but Tidal's price for the way that we use it was cheaper. When we started looking at what it would take to migrate from one to the other, there was no ROI.

The way we evaluated things was we looked at our use cases and ranked them from one to ten, and then costs. All of Automic, Stonebranch, and BMC would do what we wanted them to do. I'm sure, if we had dug a little dig deeper, we'd have found the little idiosyncrasies between them. But the cost for those and the cost of migration was just too much.

We started seeing how Cisco was propping it up a little bit more, right before they sold it to STA. And when STA bought it, they assured us that they would start making improvements. We stopped our analysis of other solutions there.

We looked at other solutions but there weren't a lot of choices at that time because only two, Open Scheduler and Tidal, worked natively with JD Edwards. We went with Tidal mainly because of the way it works, with plugins, with JD Edwards.

Microsoft SharePoint and Azure were also evaluated.

When we did the initial implementation, we did a full product comparison. We looked at the top four and did a comparison of the features of what seemed like the best products at the time. Over the years, I've reached out to other vendors just to get an idea of what other features are out there in the product space. We have never really found anything that had a compelling advantage over Tidal Workload Automation that made us want to switch. It has been really stable and has definitely gotten the work done for us.

We looked at CA's AutoSys at the time, but CA has so many schedulers now that it's hard to say exactly which one that is today. IBM had Tivoli Workload Scheduler, at the time. Since then, we have had someone from ISC reach out a fair amount. We looked a little bit at Control-M from BMC Software as well. JAMS was another one that popped up.

Tidal is familiar. We know how it works and what it is doing. It also keeps a fair amount of accessibility about it. One person could sit down, deploy it, do the install, get it up and running, and then it is just a matter of setting up the agents and the workload. I have not looked at the other products in so long now that it is not even relevant today, but BMC and a couple of other schedulers were overly complex, or their user interface just was not intuitive enough for our users.

My company did evaluate other solutions. They chose Tidal because it was one of two solutions which ran on the hardware that they had at the time, an AIX platform.

The customer's ability to budget for the solution, given that there are no costs for upgrades and other enhancements, is a very positive factor. I have signed on people who have left Control-M because they could not budget accurately because based on how many jobs you run, you are writing a check every month.

I've heard good things about Control-M, but their biggest problem is their pricing. You get everything, so it's expensive to begin with, then you keep paying for your usage. Technically, I hear it's a nice product, but it's more the pricing that drives people away.

I had some inights into different automation tools on the market. However, senior members of the company chose this solution over a previous solution, TestComplete. 

We have evaluated other solutions. 

There were five solutions we looked at in total. Two were ruled out right away. When we went to do demos with the three of them, the third one couldn't even do the demo, so it came down to Maestro and Title.

We did evaluate other schedulers. This was the best solution.

I was not the one who selected it in the first place. I was the one who asked to evaluate a replacement at some point. There was a time when Cisco was the owner and we felt like Cisco was not delivering the product like we wanted. We sought to move to a new solution and assessed different solutions: BMC, CA, Stonebranch, and JAMS. We installed all of them, running all our tests. It took us six months to do our evaluation. Eventually, we found out that they are very similar from the infrastructure side. I could not see any advantage using the other solutions.

We discovered that we are good with Tidal and what we have. Then, a new company acquired Tidal from Cisco and they promised a lot of things to be better. We felt that the solution was going to a better place. So, we decided to wait and see how much they invest on the stability. We have been happy with the results. They are really focused on the customer and our pain. They are trying to remediate everything that we have issues with. Therefore, we decided to stay with them for now.

I have worked with IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler previously and Tidal has many more features. Tidal is a low-cost tool and not expensive in comparison to other tools.

At my previous company they looked at IBM, CA, and one other solution. The reason my old company went with Tidal back then, was that it was the only one that offered integration with Lawson.

Going back 15 years when we bought the product, we looked into AutoSys and a BMC product. We looked at three or four solutions back then. We liked Tidal because of the user interface. It had the best user interface. 15 years ago, AutoSys only had command line.

There are new competitors now: Automic and Redwood. 

We haven't had a reason to even consider anything else. The company has used the product for a long time. As far as I know, we have no plans to get rid of the product.