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, or a lot of times, they will 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 of that 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 this 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.

The types of application middleware that we use it to automate include Azure Data Factory, data warehouse jobs, Azure Analysis Services jobs, our PDM database system, as well as our warehouse system that handles product reordering, picking and packing, and e-com orders.

It's very versatile. We generally have SQL jobs. We've SQL, SSIS, PowerShell, C#.NET, etc. So, whatever a program is written in, and whether it runs on Windows, UNIX, Linux, or mainframe, there are just a wide variety of jobs it runs in different programming languages. I've been an administrator for other schedulers over many years, which includes CA, AutoSys, Control-M, etc. Of all of them, Tidal is the easiest one to use. It's very GUI oriented, whereas a lot of the other schedulers have been command-line-based. It's by far the easiest scheduler to use for creating objects, which would be jobs, events, and things like that. It's all graphical. It's Windows-based. When building a job, most features are predefined. You just have to select where the executable is to run from and the time or event-based settings. You don't have to use the command line. Everything is kind of predefined for you. So, you just go through Windows and fill out different features in different jobs. It's simple. I've trained a lot of people on how to use it, and people who use Tidal for the first time are able to make jobs, whereas, with other schedulers, there are other things that you need to know, such as operating system-level commands. With Tidal, almost everything is already defined. You just tell it where to run the job from, which folder it's in, what's the name of the executable, and then the time when you want it to run. So, it can be learned within an hour. It's pretty cool.

We use Tidal to automate all the jobs within our IT applications, especially for our ERP, which is JD Edwards, as well as Oracle, and Microsoft.

It is used by multiple application teams within our organization, such as SQL, Unix, ETL platform, MFT, and our AWS team. Other application teams include front office, back office, and the accounting team. They all use the Tidal environment.