Having a single pane of glass, regardless of which technology we're talking about has been great. A lot of time, I'm in middleware, so what will happen is people will want to say, "Oh, it's this part or that part or the other part." You can see all of them side by side in Tidal.

It talks both to web stuff, which is helpful. Everything you want to talk to is there. If you have stuff that's still more 20th century and you want to run it at a command line, you have that available to you as well.

We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. That's the biggest use for us and that's the biggest advantage.

Our impression of the solution's ability to manage and monitor workloads has been good. It does what it's prescribed to do.

The solution enables admins and users to see the information relevant to them. One of the other features that we use a lot is really a part of web services. We talk to ServiceNow. We have specific metrics to go with failures for major incidents and things like that.

The solution’s drill-down functionality so that admins can investigate data or processes has been super useful. It allows you to instrument for teams at their skill level. As an admin, I can say, I don't let you see these certain elements as you don't use the other ones and that simplifies how those technologies work. You don't have to have everyone see everything. That part's really helpful.

The solution has increased capacity in terms of the number of jobs and integrations. For example, in one of the things that we run, we actually had to expand how big the queue was as they wanted to run 300 parallel jobs. Historically, we hadn't run three parallel jobs for the whole company. So the scaling of that was just 15 minutes. Then, boom, everything was ready to go. It scaled pretty easily for us.

The teams that are smart about the Tidal usage, that basically will get it to the point of human intervention, save a lot of hours, especially when it comes to log gathering. That kind of stuff now is automatic for them. That saves a lot of hours.

Because we've been on it for 20 years, it's pretty easy for us to automate jobs with Tidal at this point. It has become second nature.

It's pretty simplistic to set up and get going, although there are different levels of complexity you can have within the product. It depends on how simple you want to keep it. If you just keep it: Job A, Job B, Job C, Job D, that becomes pretty simple. But when you start integrating some complex calendars that use sub-calendars—and you can go three, four, or five deep to set up schedules—it becomes more complicated. The beauty of it is you can go as deep as you need to. We can get really complex or we can keep it simple. We have some use cases for both scenarios.

The thing that I like the most is the reliability of the engine. The actual scheduling part of the product is pretty much flawless, but the stability of the product is what I find to be reassuring. We are a financial company, we move billions of dollars a day, and if we don't have our transactions processed in a timely manner we can be penalized and our clients can be penalized. It can have a serious financial impact.

I like the fact that I have control, and I am able to monitor. If there is an issue, I am able to respond to any jobs that fail. With any other scheduler that I know of, a lot of times, when I have a very complex script and there is an issue in the middle of it, I have to let the whole process fail and then figure out a way to recover from it. Tidal, on the other hand, will stop the process and I can resolve that issue. Once I resolve the issue, I can continue the process. This is very important for invoicing, accounts payable, accounts receivable, or any kind of financial reporting. It allows you to recover from an issue much more effectively than anything else that I have seen.

It is extremely easy to automate using Tidal Automation. It is also extremely flexible. Sometimes, its flexibility leads to there being multiple ways to do the same thing. You can do it one way where it is easy and they will often create an adapter that makes it even easier. You get more metrics out of it by using an adapter that has been created for a particular task. An example would be the JD Edwards adapter. I could submit a job by just using a command line, which is easy to use, or I could use the adapter that costs more money but is easier to use. It is more robust in terms of error reporting and letting me know when there is an issue or when it has completed a job successfully, which is helpful in grabbing the logs or being able to do something with the output at the end of it.

I like the integrations they have with ServiceNow and J.D. Edwards. A selling point to me was the fact that they actually have a J.D. Edwards driver and that works the way it should.

One of the most useful features is being able to set up a schedule and create dependencies. The calendar can kick off processes at certain times, based on dependencies that you specify, like time, or whether another process has finished. Dependencies are the most useful thing.

You can also verify that a step is finished. And some of our departments are really interested when something has started. You can send out an email saying this step has launched or this step finished normally and, obviously, we always have it notifying us when something goes wrong.

It's also very useful to do repeating steps. If you need to do something multiple times throughout the day, it's very easy to just copy that group of steps or jobs and continually process the same thing each time. And you can always have one dependent on the other.

Tidal is also helpful because, once you set a schedule, you can keep an eye on it. You can kind of have "bookmarks" where it can tell you when this step is done and that step is finished, and you know that the schedule is moving forward and nothing has been stopped yet.

Tidal's most valuable feature is the ones for adapters, like the Informatica and SQL Server adapters. They have managed adapters for most platforms. We can have integrations running on multiple platforms. That is a valuable feature that Tidal provides compared to other schedulers. That's what's beneficial for us is that it calls jobs, programs on SAP, and processes on Informatica, Windows Box, and SQL Server. Tidal has expanded the platforms that it can support. 

Tidal provides usable information from the logs, its user interface, and Client Manager.

The solution is an alerting mechanism at best, offering a comprehensive system that diligently provides timely alerts, promptly notifying stakeholders whenever a job teeters on the precipice of failure due to prolonged execution, or inversely, remains suspended in an unexpectedly protracted state, all while ensuring triumphant notifications reverberate through the digital channels upon job completion, fostering an environment of efficient operational oversight.

It's the most efficient tool for doing repetitive tasks and saves a lot of time with minimum possibility of error.

During patching activity or downtime, all the schedulers can be stopped and jobs are halted.

Tidal Workload Automation UI is very interactive and great. It's easy to use and easy to administer, and it's very flexible. Tidal had always brought us good luck. 

We can run a lot of variety of types of scripts on a lot of different types of platforms and servers. It Interacts and communicates with all of them.

The availability of the job dependency feature has set up all the jobs to run in a dependent order rather than in just chronological order.

Tidal Vendor support is the best technical support team we've had to work with. Among various other software, they're the ones our team prefers to work with.

I find a lot of them valuable. The versatility of being able to run on many different types of servers is valuable. There is also a versatility of different services that you could run jobs on. It's highly versatile. You can run a lot of different types of scripts on a lot of different types of servers. It interfaces with all of them.

The event-driven aspect of running a job when a certain condition is met is valuable. For example, if a file lands on a certain location, you can run a job. There's an interdependency feature where you can run Job 2 after Job 1 is done. You could set up all the jobs to run in a dependent order rather than in just chronological order. For example, other schedulers would only allow you to run jobs at a certain time, but with Tidal, you can have jobs run when files are present, other jobs have finished, or other conditions have been met. So, event-driven and dependency-focused elements of their scheduler are the ones I probably use the most.

Its user interface is great. It's easy to use and easy to administer, and it's versatile. It's not as complex as a lot of the other ones. I've used it at six different companies, and to me, it's the most versatile, easy to use, and dependable. I've had nothing but good luck with it. It's easily the best of the breed. It's the best scheduler for ease of use. I've used 10 of them at least, and it's by far the easiest.

They're among the best technical support teams I've had to work with. Among different software, they're the ones I prefer to work with.

It has the ability to not only schedule jobs, so they run within a certain calendar time, but we can also trigger jobs ad hoc, and we can do that via email and file triggers, and in a variety of other ways. That has allowed me to build out flexibility for different team members and different needs throughout the year, depending on our sales cycles and our retail cycles. It allows people to run a job without even having to open the system.

The Graphical Views feature is also very good for helping us to understand a job stream. It's great for providing a visual overview of the status of a workflow, especially the Critical Path view. That is one of our favorites.

I'm the administrator and I keep the system healthy, but I don't monitor specific jobs. We have different folks who do that and they find it really nice to click on a job that's at the end of a long job stream and get an idea of its health, using the Graphical Views. Not every team uses them, but the folks who do really like them.

Tidal integrates with and connects to different systems to run the different jobs and it does that very well. There are connections from Tidal to SAP ECC, the warehouse management systems, et cetera. Not only does it do a great job running the jobs, but we get very valuable information back into Tidal about the health of a job. Did it run well? If not, what happened? It becomes a nice single pane of glass to find out if things are working the way we want. 

We also integrate it with our ticketing service management system, which is Cherwell. That works very well too. If a job fails, we integrate with Cherwell to create an incident that is then acted on and that has been pretty smooth.

If you have familiarity with APIs, it's a matter of just looking over the documentation and understanding Tidal's way of using the API, and then you can build integration with PowerShell scripts. That's something we're doing with the Cherwell integration to bring data from Tidal into Cherwell.

I love the "where used by" feature where you can find out where a particular job action, job event, or even a connector is being used. That is really good. 

I've seen a lot of improvements in the logging. It has become more useful. 

I'm looking forward to working with Explorer and Repository. I haven't had time to implement those yet, but I'm pretty excited about both of those tools. 

We get a lot of use out of variables within Tidal to help schedule jobs, help track things, create alerting, etc. I find those variables have a lot of use.

Tidal is versatile and a powerful automation tool. It has helped to streamline our business and improve the efficiency. It has reduced resource utilization and helps to automate tasks without any manual effort. 

It has great monitoring and managing features that track and respond to dependencies. Errors are identified and notified by the error handling functionality. It fixes the issues automatically, and error downtime is reduced - minimizing the failures.

Tidal Workload Automation Software provides Role-based access control, ensuring that only authorized personnel can access sensitive data and workflows. This feature is essential because it helps organizations maintain security and compliance with industry-specific regulations.

Tidal Workload Automation Software offers dynamic job scheduling, allowing organizations to locate resources based on workload demands. This feature ensures the resources are efficiently utilized, which helps in improving the organization's productivity.

The most valuable aspects of the solution include:

1. Workflow automation. Tidal Automation allows organizations to automate complex workflows and processes, reducing the need for manual intervention and improving operational efficiency.
2. Job scheduling. Tidal Automation provides a centralized scheduling system for jobs and tasks, allowing organizations to manage their workload and resources more effectively.
3. Error handling. Tidal Automation includes features for error handling and recovery, reducing the risk of job failures and minimizing downtime.
4. Monitoring and reporting. Tidal Automation provides real-time monitoring and reporting capabilities, allowing organizations to track job progress and performance and identify potential issues.
5. Integration with other systems. Tidal Automation can integrate with other systems and applications, allowing organizations to automate workflows across multiple platforms and environments.

What we find most useful from the operations side is that it provides a single pane of glass for managing that workstream. It also alerts us on failed jobs, so it's our monitoring and management tool for those workstreams. 

Tidal helps administrators and users to see the information that is relevant to them in that single pane of glass. They can see jobs running, they can see job history, and they can see job progression. If you look at alternatives like Airflow and clouds, you'd have to design your own UI to monitor the progress of the different jobs that you've created in Airflow. So Tidal is huge for us.

Most of our stuff is private clouds. We haven't had an issue with its support for private cloud or its migration to the cloud. In our scenarios, we run the masters here and we reach out to agents that are running in the cloud. We also use it to kick off command-line utilities for loading data into BLOB storage and S3 buckets. We use the SFTP utility to move files around.

Tidal Automation has personalized showcases that provide real-time insights into job execution, resource utilization, and other metrics. This feature can help users monitor and optimize their operations more effectively.

Additionally, it provides compliance and audibility features that let us keep track of and manage all actions done, as well as monitor and restrict access to private data. This might improve data protection and ensure that all legal criteria are met.

The best feature is that it allows task scheduling based on particular occurrences, like the receipt of files, database updates, or system notifications. This can ensure tasks are finished as required and in reaction to particular circumstances.

We have to run about 12,000 jobs every day and the majority of them need to be launched from our ERP, JD Edwards. The native compatibility of the Tidal platform with JD Edwards dovetails with our greatest need. It's directly connected to the heart of our IT system. We couldn't work without it.

Nowadays, the UI is easy to use. Over time, with different versions, it has become better and better and now it's easy. It's very different than it was some years ago. It has improved.

We have never needed to use the REST API. The plugins provided by Tidal meet our integration needs completely. It integrates perfectly with our ecosystem, whether it's SQL Server, Windows, or our ERP.

Workload Automation has become simplified by Tidal Automation.

Tidal Automation is very efficient and can quickly automate most manual and repetitive tasks. It helps you save a lot of time and provides highly accurate output with minimal or no scope for error. The software has capabilities of handling errors and detecting failures which is a great feature and an added advantage to its users. Tidal Automation has abilities to manage and monitor jobs across various platforms and it is easy to integrate with other applications and services.

Tidal Automation automates time-consuming and repetitive chores, reducing employee workload and increase productivity. 

It can also reduce error risk, enhance data and process quality and precision, and provide real-time tracking and alerting. 

It is suitable for large-scale automation environments and offers sophisticated security features and compliance controls to guarantee the security of confidential data and processes. 

It can assist companies in streamlining processes, improving efficiency, reducing errors, and saving money, making it a useful instrument for groups of all sizes.

The best feature of Tidal Workload Automation Software is its ease of integration with other systems, including ERP, CRM, and BI tools. It allows users to automate workflows across multiple systems. This feature helps in simplifying complex workflows, minimizing manual efforts, and reducing errors. 

Another powerful feature is its job scheduling. This feature helps in optimizing the execution of workflows, minimizing delays, and ensuring that all the processes are completed on time.

The software also enables the users to create, modify, and navigate to the workflows at ease using its Visual Workload Automation feature.

Tidal Automation can assist businesses in automating their processes, lowering the need for manual involvement, and boosting productivity.

It offers cost savings, quicker working periods, and greater accuracy may come from this.

Users of Tidal Automation frequently laud its simplicity, adaptability, and dependability

The product offers a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for users to generate and plan tasks.

Tidal Automation is a flexible option that can be tailored to meet various company requirements because it supports a large number of platforms and apps

One of the key features of Tidal Automation is its ability to collect and analyze real-time data from tidal turbines. This includes data on turbine performance, energy output, and environmental conditions. By leveraging machine learning algorithms, Tidal Automation can use this data to optimize turbine settings and improve overall efficiency and performance.

Another valuable feature of Tidal Automation is its ability to automate turbine control and monitoring. This can help reduce the need for manual intervention and monitoring, which can save time and reduce the risk of errors or accidents. By automating tasks such as turbine startup and shutdown, Tidal Automation can also help reduce wear and tear on equipment, which can prolong its lifespan

The first, big thing that we got out of using Tidal Workload Automation was having a centralized view of the status of all of our batch processes across all these systems. We're not a big environment compared to some of their customers, but these are all business-critical processes that we're running and there are at least 100 different systems in our environment. To manage all these processes, it gives us a single point of view. We can look into the schedule at any given time and see if things are running on track or if they are falling behind. We can also see if something failed. The big thing is having that visibility into everything.

We use it for cross-platform and cross-application workloads, although they're not that different from each other. A lot of our workloads are similar, but they're technically different platforms and applications. We have some different OS's, but they're all Unix or Linux systems that are running the same sort of back-end technology. In our world, internally, they're different platforms. It gives us a really simple view into everything that's happening. 

I've been using it for a long time, so to me, it's a pretty intuitive way to, at a glance, look at how things are progressing in the day for the batch schedule. I don't know if that would necessarily be the case for a new user. To me it's intuitive and that is what helped us choose it over some other scheduling technologies in the past. It seemed like the most intuitive way to look at a lot of different batch processes running on lots of different systems.

As far as its ability to allow admins and users to see the information relevant to them, the interface is good, once you have access to it. We have had a little bit of an issue with some browser compatibility, but other than that, it's been a good tool for people to come in and look at where is their process is at from a business point of view. They do have to have a little bit of familiarity with what it is that they're looking for, the programs in the back-end. This is nothing to do with Tidal, but our technology environment is a bit hard to digest early on. Things can be a little bit difficult to navigate in our technology stack, at times. Tidal helps those users who are new to it to get a view of: "Here's the thing that I'm interested in. I know the program name, but I don't know when it runs, or how long it takes." Without having to get into the back-end of our technology, it does give them a way to look at what's happening in the schedule.

The ease of scheduling is its most valuable feature, and how easy it is to actually schedule something. One of the best things is the calendars and how flexible the calendars can be. Or, you can create your own calendar to match whatever schedule you want or need the job to be run. That is huge for us.

We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads. The solution’s ability to manage and monitor these workloads is very easy and accurate. We use the job dependencies feature A LOT... meaning one job doesn't start until the last one finished successfully and so on. Another fabulous feature is the file dependencies. A particular job does not start running until a file exists in the location specified but that file is on a completely different server. So, it is cross systems.

It's pretty easy to understand and learn. I did not go through any training for it, we have a test environment so I 'played' a lot there and learned the capabilities of this powerful scheduler. Some guidance as to how the solution is setup and configured today is needed, so users stay within those boundaries. It takes less than half a day (four hours) to onboard new administrators.

Customers, in general, tell me that all the built-in alerting capabilities are valuable. If you want to send an email, Tidal knows how to do that, where with other tools you have to write a script. If you want to send an email or do an alert that a job failed, that is all built-in and can interact with industry standard tools to help automate the command center process.

The solution is very good in terms of user-friendliness, as it's web-based. We can use it with a number of different browsers, so it gives us a lot of flexibility.

Our admins use the solution’s drill-down functionality all the time to investigate data or processes. They use Tidal constantly to help debug their own processes without necessarily involving a Tidal person. This is just for everyday operations where we are getting file transfers or something that doesn't work, then the admins can look at the output. They can follow the stream and dependencies. E.g., maybe the upstream job didn't create the file. There are variety of things that they can do themselves.

People seem to pick it up pretty quickly because it is similar to a lot of things that they are used to in Windows with the same sort of structure. We don't give a lot of training, so they generally learn by doing pretty quickly. Creating a basic job is very straightforward. A person can create a basic job in a few hours. It is just learning some of the more nuances about how to use different dependencies and rerunning strategies that they will need to learn over time. 

The new reporting tool, Tidal Explorer, will help a lot of people with tools for looking at their overall design. It is able to drill down and get all types of statistics. It's just a really powerful tool, which has some basic searching functions to find where a variable used, etc. This is the sort of thing that a lot of everyday users are trying to find. E.g., if you don't know how something's used, you can go and search for directory to find all the jobs using that directory. Therefore, it is a really useful tool.

Tidal Automation’s most valuable feature is customization. It can work and connect with any app.

The data management on offer was valuable. It allowed for timely backups and storage. Tidal made the process of storing data on the servers simple. We could store it according to location and based on various client servers. Reverting back the data was also important when the server made a mistake or non-noticeable changes were made without information. When such an event took palace, we could easily revert the data back to as it was before.  

Tidal Automation software provides real-time monitoring and alerts, allowing users to track job progress and identify potential issues before they cause delays or errors.

Users can create customized workflows that integrate with multiple systems and applications, allowing for end-to-end automation of complex business processes.

Tidal Automation software is a valuable tool for organizations looking to improve efficiency, productivity, and accuracy.

Tidal Automation software includes workload management features, such as job prioritization and distribution across multiple servers or platforms.

There are many valuable features. I would struggle to say that there is one more useful than another. Job Events and its email capabilities are good. 

We have integrated Tidal with other automation platforms. You can integrate legacy platforms, as the integration is easy. Overall, we have good impressions of its ability to manage and monitor workloads.

The automation aspect of the solution is the most important. I'm able to construct groupings that have dependencies which automatically allow the proper jobs to run in the proper sequence. That's the strongest selling point of any scheduler.

As for the solution's ability to enable admins and users to see the information relevant to them, the security model that I use is fairly simple and straightforward. For developers and other folks, an inquiry-type access is more suitable for the production environment. I've added functionality for people in both the qual and the dev environments, based on their roles. But I haven't restricted anything, meaning that anyone who has an account can see everything. There is a lot of flexibility in the way that things can be configured with Tidal. You could restrict it down to the point of people only seeing those things that are applicable to them specifically. I found that that would be too restrictive, and result in a lot of overhead to manage. So I went with a much simpler model, but the flexibility is there.

There are certain things I can put in play, triggering events based on statuses. For instance, if I have a certain job type where a number of the jobs are going to "waiting on resource" in the middle of the night, I can configure alerts so that I can assess those and then determine if I have to raise the job limits on some of those resources to make sure that we're not having things held up on necessarily. By the same token, if we're having long-running processes, I may want to tailor that down so we don't have so many processes running concurrently. There's some flexibility in that. I haven't had to rely on it a lot, but there are some features there that can be tapped into.

The job dependency is something that you cannot have in a regular, simple cron job or simple scheduler dependency. The event-driven jobs are core for us, as we really need that. Therefore, we really need Tidal with its ability to run thousands of jobs per day.

For us, the calendaring system is very robust. Some of the teams have very specific requests for when they need jobs to run. That's been really valuable, because a lot of times, when people run scripts, if they run on a holiday, they're going to fail. We've even started adding some European holidays and other times when scripts should not run because they're going to fail, because they try to connect to external exchanges that are closed on a holiday. For things like that, things you can't do in a lot of built-in scheduling tools, Tidal has been very helpful. A couple of times a month it probably saves us work and the necessity of logging in from home and checking to make sure everything's okay.

Especially in the newer versions of Tidal, the segmentation of user permissions enables us to give people operator permissions for their jobs, to rerun jobs, but view-only for other groups' jobs. We're able to keep people from hurting themselves or other groups accidentally. The permissioning is really good. We have 20 different root-level job groups that hold all of the jobs for each team underneath it, in our shared space. I can set it so that the database group only sees database jobs, if that's all they want to see, so it's not cluttered with everyone else's jobs. But if there are teams that need to see all the spaces, we can do that as well. We can let them see only certain servers or certain users to run jobs. You can edit it too so that people don't see too much or don't get confused and lost in this sea of the thousands of jobs that they could be seeing, when they only need to see their own. That's been nice to set up over time.

In the past year, in particular, the client has gotten tremendously better. If you asked me three years ago, I would have said that the client was the biggest problem with Tidal. The backend was always really solid, but the client was pretty bad for a while. In the past year, with the new company taking over and putting a lot of development effort into the clients, especially the web client, it has really made people a lot happier when having to use the client and work with it. In the past, they begrudgingly used the client, but now they're happy to use it, which is a big change.

Because we've been with Tidal for so long, I can't compare it to the way things were before Tidal. Back before Tidal, there was much less electronic trading.

But an example of how we benefit from it is that we have Tidal jobs that load all of the trading symbols into our database every morning before trading opens. That's mission-critical in terms of getting ready for the traders to start trading on a specific day. If they don't have that updated information through the database, they can't trade.

There's a lot of overnight, big-data processing that happens, things that need to run all night. That's launched through Tidal and monitored as well. It's pretty much a 24/7 operation in terms of uptime, and we've definitely used Tidal to meet that goal.

The solution has increased productivity by saving staff hours. We have an operations team that's here 24/7. We have a runbook that says, "Okay, if this job fails, do this." I'd say 80 to 90 percent of the time the operations team is able to resolve a problem by following runbook and steps without having to contact someone overnight or on the weekends. But Tidal does save the person who owns the Tidal job from having to do work in off-hours especially.

What I like about the new company is that if you ask for something, and they feel like it would be a valid improvement, they're willing to push it out, even if it's a few months out. They make sure to provide it at some point. It doesn't just get lost in the mix.

I work for a financial trading company: stocks and options. The use cases depend on each group that is using it. We have a compliance group, HR group, and a bunch of trading groups and technologists. It's used for a thousand different things depending on the group. It's all to support a financial trading firm, and the processes that happen before the market opens and after the market.

We have a pretty good mix of Linux and Windows boxes, a good 60 percent Linux and 40 percent Windows. We launch trading scripts to start processes up, to stop processes, and to pull in data from third-party vendors; we have FTP jobs that do that. We run an Oracle backend.

From talking to the Tidal people, we have a lot of agents connected to masters, compared to most other firms. But we're probably middle-of-the-road in terms of how many jobs run per day. We're only slightly over 100,000 jobs per day, throughout the whole space.

With other tools, you do not have the ability to schedule jobs on their own. You need to create a group and then assign everything to that group. Only then will the job be able to execute. In Tidal, you can schedule a single job and there is no need to create a group. That's what I like the most.

There are other helpful features as well, like SLA monitoring and the data book so you don't need to maintain other documents.

We also use the Graphical Views feature because our end-users want to see how their jobs are being executed and to monitor flows. They want to see how a job flow is going or where it stopped.

The feature that I find to be valuable, as I'm working with other folks, is the ability to cross-schedule across platforms, and the flexibility that comes with that. I'm kind of biased, as I've only used Tidal. I haven't used CA or IBM or any of the other scheduling platforms that are available on the market.

From a management standpoint, when using the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads, I've never had a problem with the application. It's very interactive, especially with the different security levels that they offer. We have two or three operators who are at a certain level where they can actually rerun jobs. If they fail, they don't actually have to get ahold of a Tidal administrator. The only thing they don't have access to is changing the master settings on the jobs. That flexibility of access is a big plus.

We do have a few developers who will actually set up processes within Tidal, but only in the test systems. They get a little bit more access that way, but they obviously have to have training prior to that, from me, on how to properly schedule things in Tidal. So the security and flexibility are valuable features.

They have a lot of pre-set stuff, but you can actually create something like: "Run the third Wednesday of every third month on a blue moon," going to the extreme. Their scheduling functionality is really advanced enough where we can create a lot of different kinds of customizations, based not only on a regular calendar year, but on fiscal calendars and regional calendars. We have jobs that process files for our EU operation and when they have a bank holiday over there we don't need to run the job. We can tie up those jobs that don't need to run on their local, European bank holidays.

The solution also enables admins and users to see the information that is relevant to them. The admins have super-user access, so they can actually adjust and transport different jobs from test to prod. Whereas the operators can adjust a job that's already scheduled if they need to, based on direction from support. They can change this variable, or change this setting, or change this text. But they don't have the access to actually change the master copy of that job. So, a one-off change is literally just that, a one-off change of the next compile scheduled. Otherwise, it's going to run as it's normally set up.

Another good thing that Tidal has is in regard to the history retention of job failures. Whereas our SAP ERP system usually has an eight-day history retention for jobs, Tidal can actually go back longer than that. So if somebody says, "Hey, why did this job fail three weeks ago?" we can bring up the failure message, which is something they can't do directly in SAP.

We use quite a few of the features:

• Calendaring 
• Complex dependencies
• Intra-system and inter-system dependencies, respectively, within a system and within systems.

There are a whole host of features that allow us to fairly complex scheduling which wouldn't be possible otherwise.

It's very

• user-friendly
• intuitive
• robust.

Most people, once you give them a quick tutorial on it, can figure out how to use Tidal. For the basic user and developer, it's very intuitive. I don't think it's very hard. I teach users how to use this in a quick, 30-minute conference call, and people are usually very quick to learn it. For a basic user, 30 minutes should be fine.

We use the solution for cross-platform and cross-application workloads. That's one of the core reasons we chose it. It's one of a few things in the industry that can be used for cross-platform integration. It has the schedules to monitor the workflow. We have a 24/7, 365 department that monitors the batch schedule. It's fairly easy and intuitive and we could easily set up the alerting systems around it.

Admins can do more because they have more access but you can set that up the way you would like it. That's all configurable, at least in the GUI. In the back-end, obviously, it's only the admins who have access. But both admins and users can see the schedules.

The drill-down feature makes the GUI interface and the scheduling interface load faster because you don't have as much to load into the screen. I personally use it more, but I do know a lot of users don't. It's all dependent on user experience and how much they choose to use it.

Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution.

The most valuable feature is the job scheduler, where you can schedule thousands of jobs to execute at specific times. It will schedule dependencies as well.