Tidal by Redwood Reviews

I am a part of the sales operations team which deals with the pricing of products, getting the pricing set-up up in the system, collecting sales data from sales teams from various geographies, converting the files to a consumable format of Excel, getting the data uploaded on to the database, connect the database to reporting and data visualization tools like Power BI which helps us build reports, dashboards, and analyze business trends.

All of these tasks include a lot of manual processes that take a lot of time and effort.

The data needs to be uploaded to the database every time new data comes in. It could be a single line item or a thousand line item, data upload needs to be done manually and the DB job needs to run later we refresh reports and dashboards so that the new data gets populated. And all the necessary changes are made to the reports before they are published to services.

This is just a part of the daily routine and just this itself includes a lot of manual intervention. Tidal Automation has made it so simple by using time-driven and event-driven job scheduling and management. A significant amount of time and manual effort is now saved without compromising on the quality of the outcome.

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.

The initial set-up of the Tidal Automation is a bit complex and time-consuming; this can be eliminated by fastening the set-up process by reducing the number of steps involved.

The software can be made more user-friendly by producing effective training modules for new users and beginners.

The tool downtime can be reduced.

Understanding and using Tidal Automation could be overwhelming for someone with minimal programming language.

The above are minor challenges I can across, the product is cool and provides great services, and have not observed any major issues.

I've used the solution for less than a year.

The product is highly stable and will remain stable in the long run.

I find the software very useful and solved most of the problems on my team. I believe Tidal will be a great competition to other automation software out there.

My experience with customer service and support is great.

Positive

There were no automation tools used before.

The initial setup is a bit complex.

The initial setup was done in-house.

In terms of ROI, we have witnessed an:

• Increase in Productivity by ~28%
• Increase in Accuracy by ~8%

Tidal Automation licensing comes at affordable pricing and it is worth the features offered.

Microsoft SharePoint and Azure were also evaluated.

It's a great workload automation software that will simplify a lot of manual tasks.

Tidal Automation can handle batch processing task scheduling and implementation, decreasing errors and increasing productivity. 

Data handling and administration duties such as data merging, migration, and transformation can be automated using the program. It can also automate duties related to IT operations, such as software deployment, server upkeep, and backup and recovery. 

By automating procedures for data retention, audit records, and security controls, the software can help guarantee legal conformance. 

It can be used in a variety of sectors to help companies automate processes, increase efficiency, and reduce errors.

Tidal Automation automates time-consuming and repetitive chores, decreasing 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 intended to enable large-scale automation environments, making it appropriate for companies with complicated processes and big data volumes. 

Tidal Automation also 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.

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.

Tidal Automation is a complete automation program with an easy-to-use interface. However, it could be better in terms of user experience, customization, and cost. 

Some users have complained that the initial setup process is complicated and time-consuming, while others have suggested that the software could offer more freedom in customizing processes. 

Furthermore, Tidal Automation's pricing system may be a barrier for some companies; therefore, the software should consider providing more flexible pricing choices or discounts for smaller businesses.

My primary use case for using Tidal Workload Automation Software is its ability to handle job scheduling and automation. The software allows organizations to schedule and automate tasks across multiple platforms, applications, and systems, which helps in reducing manual intervention and improves efficiency. 

It can automate millions of jobs at very ease without any downtime. The software manages the workload very effectively. 

It provides real-time visibility into workload status and ensures that resources are being used for high-priority tasks.

Tidal Workload Automation Software helps organizations manage complex workflows, applications, and infrastructure in a more streamlined and effective manner.

Tidal Software also provides audit tracking and compliance reporting, allowing organizations to track job execution, changes, and approvals. Overall, it improves the compliance and governance of the organization.

The software can automate business processes such as financial reporting, order processing, and supply chain management which improves efficiency and increases productivity.

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.

The current user interface of Tidal Software is functional. However, it can be improved to make it more intuitive and user-friendly. This could include better navigation, more information dashboards, and customizable views.

For the next release, the software can be more involved with integrating machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities that could enable the software to make more intelligent decisions and optimize workload automation based on historical data, user preferences, and other factors.

I have been using Tidal Automation Software for the past year.

The solution is used to automate and manage intricate and crucial business workflows across numerous systems and applications is the main use case for the Tidal workload automation software solution.

The workload automation software from Tidal is especially helpful for sectors like banking, production, transportation, and healthcare that have high volumes of time-sensitive processes. Any delay or mistake in finishing tasks can have serious repercussions and affect the bottom line in these sectors.

The software solution from tidal can assist organizations in achieving regulatory compliance and supports compliance requirements.

Tidal Automation offers extensive monitoring and reporting features that let users keep track of the status of their workflows and quickly spot any problems. 

The tool's high degree of adaptability also enables users to design processes that are tailored to their particular company requirements.

The Tidal software utility offers a wide variety of automation features, including exception handling, sophisticated dependency management, and event-based scheduling. Helped our organization to meet SLAs.

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

Tidal's adaptability and user-friendliness could be increased by integrating it with additional programmes and platforms.

By enhancing its analytics and reporting tools, Tidal could make it simpler for users to monitor and evaluate their tasks.

Added security elements may raise the product's general security posture.

Also, Tidal's adaptability could be increased by integrating with cloud platforms, which would also make managing tasks in these settings simpler.

Users may be more likely to adopt and use Tidal if the setup and configuration process is made simpler.

Tidal Automation uses advanced algorithms and machine learning techniques to analyze real-time data from tidal turbines and adjust their settings to maximize energy output while minimizing maintenance requirements. This can help increase the efficiency and reliability of tidal energy systems, leading to cost savings and improved environmental sustainability.

Overall, the primary use case for Tidal Automation is to help manage and optimize tidal energy production in a variety of settings, ultimately contributing to the growth and success of the renewable energy industry.

One of the main benefits of Tidal Automation is increased efficiency and productivity in tidal energy production. By automating the process of turbine management and optimization, Tidal Automation can help reduce downtime, improve turbine performance, and ultimately increase energy output. This can lead to cost savings and improved profitability for organizations in the tidal energy industry.

Tidal Automation can help improve the reliability and safety of tidal energy systems. By analyzing real-time data and making adjustments to turbine settings, Tidal Automation can identify potential issues and prevent equipment failures before they occur. This can help minimize the risk of accidents or other safety incidents.

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 solution could be improved via:

1. Integration with other systems. Tidal Automation could be further integrated with other systems used in the operation of tidal energy systems, such as weather forecasting tools, energy management systems, or asset management software.
2. Customization. The ability to customize Tidal Automation's algorithms and settings to better fit the needs of individual installations could be added in the next release. This would allow for greater flexibility and adaptability to different environments and operational requirements.

We use it to manage our batch processing. For us, it came in as a replacement for a lot of different systems running crontab. In our case it's primarily for Unix/Linux systems that don't have their own mechanism for kicking off all these batch processes. It's the coordinator of all of our background processes and batch jobs that are running overnight and during the day.

We use it to kick off custom Unix/Linux scripts that will launch our application processes. It's almost entirely Windows and Linux shell scripts that it's kicking off.

For administrators, the alerting has been a big plus, in addition to having a place to go and look at the status. They can be notified when there's something happening in a schedule, like things are falling behind schedule, or something unexpectedly fails. It definitely helps speed up the time to jump in and address an issue and get things back on track.

It has also given us a framework for standardizing a lot of our processes. Before we had all these things in Tidal, there were so many custom services and applications written. Tidal has given us a way to say, "Here's a standard way for you to get your jobs scheduled and automated." It hasn't necessarily enforced it, but it has given people an opportunity to say, "Oh, if I use the tool and if I set up my jobs to be able to run in the scheduler, it will be that much easier for me to get this delivered to production, or to test it and validate it." It has helped us put a framework around how developers are going to get their application code deployed. It's not really pushing the code, but it has encouraged some consistency in how they design their processes.

It would be really hard to quantify how much staff time it has saved, but for sure, before that initial move into the solution, some things would take forever. It was just complete spaghetti going through dozens of boxes with different crontabs trying to figure out: "Okay, I had an incident in the middle of the night. What ran, what didn't run? What ran but didn't complete successfully?" and those kinds of things. Tidal has resulted in a huge gain there. I don't think there's any way I could quantify how much it's simplified those outage scenarios. 

And even a planned maintenance was just as hard as an outage before we had Tidal. Now, with a scheduler, we can schedule a big maintenance that's going to require a lot of people to be on hand, one where time is of the essence. The more efficiently we can adjust a schedule for an off-hours maintenance and essentially disrupt what our typical schedule is, the more it helps us with those maintenance procedures. We know in advance that we have the capability to move jobs earlier and to move jobs later so that they're outside of the maintenance window and that we're not going to conflict with anything. When we're done with our maintenance, we're able to just press a button and let everything run and go.

Tidal has definitely reduced weekend and overtime hours. In our environment, there's no way to eliminate those hours, but that's nothing to do with Tidal. That's our own design. 

Our team does the majority of the work with the scheduler. It gives us the ability to do a lot of the scheduling tasks pretty quickly, so that the developers or business folks who are making requests don't need to deal with it. It gives us the leverage to make what they feel is a bigger change to the schedule, and to knock it out really quickly. They don't have to code something or make changes to handle it. We can do a lot of those adjustments from the scheduler itself.

The solution has enabled us to do more in terms of job capacity because, in the past, we had all these different crontabs running around out there. There was really no good way for people to condense jobs together, as soon as the previous one finished, unless they customized every process flow or job flow into a script. Doing so was essentially a custom program or process that they'd have to create for each one, and that's pretty difficult to manage. With the scheduler, we can squeeze those jobs together with their native process runtimes and say, "Okay, we're going to run through steps 1 to 10, allow those things to run in a sequence, and get them done in the shortest window possible. It has definitely helped with that.

Our environment is really different now compared to what it was when we started with Tidal all those years ago, but there's really no way we could have sustained that old model without having the functionality that's in the scheduler get our schedule done quickly. As our company has grown, it's been difficult for us to find maintenance windows or quiet periods. Every minute that we can save reduces the time an overnight batch process impacts daytime business users. The quicker we can get things completed, the better it is for the user experience and our environment.

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.

Their software installation and update process could use some improvements. I'm pretty sure they're working on that, but that's definitely an area where it could be streamlined a lot. There's still a lot of manual work that you have to do with the schedule when you deploy masters or do the agents. 

The other thing is that the performance of the web interface has not been great. It's feedback I get quite a bit, that the web interface can be sluggish at times. We've got to recycle it to get it to be more responsive. We brought up this issue a while ago. A lot of what we may be dealing with is that we are running on an older version. A lot of the performance stuff, I suspect, has been corrected in the later versions. We are running on 6.2.1 but they have got 6.3.5 out there now.

As for stuff we'd like to have, I'd love to see the database back-end have PostgreSQL or MySQL. Right now the choices are Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle.

I've used Tidal Workload Automation for about 15 years.

It's been rock solid for us. We've had it for 15 years and I have really never had to make support calls to either Cisco or Tidal. The only times I ever really have to contact them are when we do our renewals or we migrate to a new version and we have to get a different license key.

I don't think we've ever pushed a limit of the schedulers, the masters. We haven't really had any kind of scalability issue with regard to the scheduler or the agents. The only thing that we've run into as far as scalability goes would maybe be the web interface, which can get pretty slow at times, so we've got to cycle it. The web client is just sluggish and has an issue where that performance degrades over time. That's why we do the recycle and we notice it helps quite a bit to recover it.

I really don't have to make support calls almost ever.

I'll ask a question sometimes, and they've been great. They've been very responsive. I haven't even had to do that for quite a while now. We set up our current implementation when they were still with Cisco. 

It was a little bit difficult with Cisco to get to the Tidal software engineers who are now their own entity. It's definitely gotten a lot better now that they're not part of Cisco. I can just call in. They know who I am and what I'm asking for right off the bat. When it was with Cisco, there was a whole triage system you had to get through, and a lot of people at Cisco didn't even know what the product was or that it existed.

We only had crontab on a bunch of Unix systems. We looked into Tidal because we were having so many missed processes. Our environment is so much bigger and more complicated now compared to 15 years ago. But even back then it was almost like having things in crontab made it easier for there to be issues because they were all arbitrarily set to run at different times, different users, different systems. If there was some sort of conflict or collision, there was really no way to even regulate the fact that there were too many processes running at given time. 

It actually helped prevent some issues then, and now we have so many things cranking through Tidal. Getting all this to work in crontab would be impossible.

Installing is not terribly complex. I don't have experience with other scheduler products, so I can't compare it to them, but it does have more manual install steps than some other software in general. For instance, there isn't an RPM installer. We use a lot of Red Hat in our environment. We can use RPMs for our Unix platforms and our Linux platforms. It would be nice if it was just packaged like that, so you could run the install or do the configure, perhaps with a few prompts. It's not far from that. It does have a shell script that runs, which isn't too different. But it would be nice to run updates for our scheduler along with all the other OS updates that we do in our environment.

If you know what you are doing, you can really get through the deployment, easily, in under an hour. I don't even know if it would take that long. If you have access to create your database and you already have your OS environment provision, the install and setup is really not very time-consuming. There are just the few manual steps you need to do, here and there, to configure it. But it's definitely doable in an hour. 

Assuming someone has access to do each of the steps that they need to do, one person could definitely do the install. I've done it in a VM lab and definitely knocked it out in under an hour. As long as you can create your database, create your database users, and run the software install, it's definitely a one-person job.

In terms of an implementation strategy, we've really stuck with one model. There's not a lot of leeway there. Essentially, you are going to have three master servers, a client manager, and you're going to have a database somewhere. The only difference might be the choice of operating systems or whether you're going to run on a VM or a physical server. But that's pretty removed from Tidal itself. There isn't a whole lot of variation there.

When it comes to a learning curve for Tidal, I've been using it a long time, so it's pretty intuitive to me. New users need to get their bearings and to know how they can filter, and what they need to filter on to answer the questions they have. It takes them two or three times of logging in and working with it. Sometimes we provide some guidance on best practices to find their program. It can be a bit overwhelming. I don't think Tidal necessarily makes it hard, but it's just the nature of all these processes running and the things that are there. Tidal helps with it, but it doesn't keep it from being a complicated thing to try and follow and to try to understand.

Tidal Workload Automation is a no-brainer for us, given the importance of the processes that we have. The cost for coordinating, managing, and getting all these things to complete, while warning us when things are not running on time, to me, makes it a no-brainer. 

I do not know how to quantify our ROI. We get everything that we pay for in the product, and there are even features that we do not use.

Another advantage of Tidal is that it is a pretty affordable scheduler tool that lets us do a lot. You get a lot of bang for the buck. It has always seemed pretty reasonable to me.

The licensing model is hugely flexible. In fact, sometimes we get a little bit lost on which model should we go with. Over time, it has adjusted and changed. But the current model that we have is to run with enterprise license agreements. We do not have to worry about how many agents we add and remove. That has been the easiest for us.

They have options to do one-, two-, or three-year renewals. You can space out your renewals or do things like an enterprise license agreement. You can dial into, "Hey, I just want to run this many hosts." They cover a lot of options for you. It may not make sense for a smaller shop to run an enterprise agreement. They might just want to run five agents. In their case, having that option is huge.

Given that there are no costs for upgrades and other enhancements, it is really easy to budget for Tidal. We have not had any issues.

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.

The big thing I would say to someone who is deploying this new, aside from having a naming standard and the structure, would be to get their security groups right, up-front. That is a pretty big one. Set your owners and who your users are going to be. Think about how you are going to structure it from a user point of view.

We have two core systems here. One is for our loan origination system and the other is for allocating leads and directing leads, and they both rely on Tidal heavily. If the scheduler were to shut down for some reason and we couldn't run it, it would have a huge impact on our business. Thankfully, that's not a scenario that we encounter, but we really rely on it to drive so many of these business processes. In terms of increasing our usage of it, other business areas have started take some interest in it, but we haven't made a dedicated effort to get, for example, our SQL Server systems to be managed by the scheduler, or to do things with Amazon. We haven't really had anyone driving that effort.

In our environment, one person, me, maintains the Tidal software. That's more an organizational question of how many people do you want to have who are capable of supporting it. We have a team of six people, all systems engineers. They're not all as up-to-speed on it as I am, but if I gave them my notes for doing the install, I'm sure they could all do it.

The number of users of Tidal, in our organization, depends on the definition of "users." It touches things that impact every user in our organization. But with respect to users of the interface who log in and use it, it's only about a dozen people. Aside from the system engineers, the next biggest users would be developers or program engineers. They are people who are involved in researching updating a task to a procedure or process and they want to know what the scheduled processes are and when they run. They are also looking at what their rules are for running and how long it takes. Sometimes business analysts will be involved in that as well.

Tidal is a nine out of 10. I would say it's a 10 if we didn't have some performance struggles with the web interface.

We primarily use it for scheduling our JD Edwards ERP software batch jobs.

The solution runs on Windows. It also integrates with our Unix & AIX systems. We use it for automating EDI transactions, so it reaches out to FTP sites as well.

The solution’s drill-down functionality is really good. It can be limited to just seeing a specific job or a group of jobs, depending upon the person's location.

We utilize Tidal for updating other computer systems used within the plants with JD Edwards transactions. This functionality alone saves a lot of time so personnel didn't have to manually run jobs to update the other systems. 

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.

I know they are working on improving this already, but there needs to be better reporting. Currently, there are only like three or five reports that we can get off of the system. They already have a solution to this in the new version. I.e., a schedule of all the jobs running for one day, specifically calling out what dependencies that a job relies on. It would be like a flow chart of how the day's jobs would run.

Over 14 years.

The stability is excellent. There are days we don't even log into the product because it just continues to run seamlessly.

We don't have it open to our users and don't actually see a need to do that at this point.

The system administrator is the regular user of the solution. They do the maintenance of the solution, if needed.

We have jobs that run every 2 minutes all throughout the day as well as hourly jobs that run.

Luckily, I haven't had a need to use the technical support.

Except for one time, when Java got accidentally upgraded, and it slowed our performance terribly but they were absolutely amazing and great to work with!

In my past job, I have used HelpSystems Robot. At the time, HelpSystems only ran on an AS/400 or iSeries while the Tidal solution runs on various platforms. They are pretty comparable though for functionality.

It was already at the company when I got here.

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. 

We have seen ROI from savings in time. We run on average about 2,200 jobs a day. This is a cost savings for us due to the fact that our users do not have to run these jobs manually since Tidal will do it for them.  As an estimate, this has probably freed up 10 full-time people, in the various departments, about an hour or two a day.

We pay maintenance annually through BlueHouse of about $9,000. That i's for our two environments: production and test and some adapters to integrate with other systems.

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.

It's a great product. I endorse it because it is stable, and that is a big thing for us!

Give it a shot. Get a trial. Test it out. You'll come up with probably the same thing that we did and purchase the product.

I would give it a nine (out of 10). There is a little room for improvement, but overall the solution is exactly what we need and rely on.

This solution does enable admins and users to see the information relevant to them, but we do not have that enabled for our users.

Because we run 24/7/365 and are open all the time, the solution has not really reduced weekend hours for us.

For most of the companies where I have put Tidal in, it runs everything. It does back office, handles trading, reporting of time, doing a lot of file transfers between vendors and regulatory bodies, etc. We use it to do a whole variety of things.

File transfers are our most valuable use cases because those are the ones where we tend to have service level agreements and potential fines.

Right now, we are just in a traditional installation with local servers.

We use the solution from Hadoop and Workday and are not using adapters from them.

It saves times due to automation. With some files, we do hundreds a day for a particular vendor. This would be hard to do manually. Also, the speed at which we can do this is excellent. We do all types of stuff, like we print checks for customers at the local office, which used to take a bunch of time, but now, we can do it in a minute or two.

Windows and Linux are our servers. We use it there, then we do things between Workday or the business application for Oracle. We can do processes which include local scripts or work with these different tools, then they can blend them altogether with Tidal. It does a very good job of managing cross-platform, cross-application workloads. It lets our command center monitor a bunch of things from one screen.

The solution enables admins and users to see information relevant to them. We do a lot of this as we have different teams who want to monitor their own jobs or be involved with their own support. They can do that. With the different levels of security within the tool, we can allow people to rerun jobs or just view information and different things based on their need and security requirements. This helps us decentralize a lot activity. If users can look at things themselves, or potentially certain groups can rerun jobs, we can offload that from the command center or other support teams.

We need to have less Tidal specific support people and more generalists, as they know their own applications in more depth than any of us. It lets them more effectively do their support, and not need to have other people do support, like in the command center or Tidal team. The solution has increased productivity by getting people's problems resolved faster. It also helps those teams understand how things work a little better, so maybe they can improve their processes.

If we can get the problem solving closest to the people who know the resources, we don't have to bring in the Tidal team since a lot of this stuff is not an actual Tidal problem. It's more a problem with their script or server, etc. Therefore, they can get work on their specific issue themselves. For example, we can't fix their script or if there's a problem with their server. That's not our team's function. They can get to that faster. Or, the people who are monitoring, like the command center, can help get their ticket to the right group faster.

Until recently, I had to be available on call. Now, that has greatly dropped. We have these different groups who take more responsibility for themselves. Before, if anything went wrong, they called Tidal, who would say, "Your script is not our problem." Now, they're able to route those tickets more effectively, and those of us who are on the Tidal team don't have a standard on call anymore.

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.

I would like more involvement with the cloud. That is something I know we were interested in, as we are moving applications. One client's management team has told Tidal that they would like to see integration with the new application.

They have been doing a pretty good job on improving it. The update of the client to not have a separate database has been a big improvement because that could add another bottleneck. Right now, it's a much faster process, where it has an in-memory database instead of having to go to a database until you read all this stuff.

About 20 years.

The basics have always been strong. What is useful for most people, the addition of cloud support and different applications which can use adapters. That comes into play. The ability to interface with Internet functions makes it a pretty strong tool.

Deployment and maintenance depends on the size of the organization. One or two people are probably need, but it can even be a part-time function. The roles of these people also depend. Companies can set up administrator type work, which is to set up the environment, providing the care and feeding of it, such as adding new agents or new users. They are just overseeing the day-to-day maintenance and running of it. There is not much activity with that. Then, there is creating jobs, which is sort of the application side. This is usually the monitoring side where somebody is watching the actual status of jobs and responding to failures or other alerts.

The scalability has been very strong. We haven't been able to hit any limits. I feel like with this technology the speed of systems and networks increases, and what might've been a problem 10 years ago, is not a problem now.

The role of the end user depends on the team, but some of them can create their own jobs. In other cases, they will give us the specifics and another team will create the jobs for them. So, it depends on how involved your team wants to be. We'll give anybody read access, so they can see the output of their jobs, for example. But other teams, who have a little more knowledge, might give more access where they could rerun or create their own jobs.

I don't know about specific plans to increase it other than bringing in those cron jobs which are not using it.

The technical support is very good. They are very responsive when we have an issue. The last issue that I worked on was that we had an issue with the Transporter and they got a patch for that.

Their initial response is very quick, less than an hour. Then, depending on how long it takes to work with development, it may take a bit more time to get a patch, about a week. This is for non-emergency cases. For something that is a higher priority, they can get things faster.

Tidal, the organization, has been really easy to work with. They are interested in making the tool and use of it as easy for customers as possible. For example, recently they have added onto the support site and there are all types of video training that you can take which are included in your support. Even if you are a fairly large company, you do training. I would typically be brought in to do training when people are first using the tool. But they don't keep doing the training over time, as they expect people to learn it from the other guys. Having this availability so you can look at a video based on your time, and it's free, helps you to look at some features you don't normally use, use some other ideas, and help you pick up skills that you don't necessarily have time to do sitting down with somebody. You can watch these videos as you need them.

I have worked with other workload automation solutions before, but nothing that is still around. 

Even though we have been a Tidal user for quite awhile, there was still stuff being run with Windows Scheduler or cron. We have been able to pull that stuff in and reduce the workload on teams.

Having done the setup many for different customers, it is pretty straightforward. In most places, if they took the time to look at the documentation, they could do a lot of the installation themselves.

A traditional deployment takes half a day or less. You get the basic Tidal setup going, then you have to start getting your agents. That's going to depend on how many servers you have. However, setting up the basic and backup master, fault monitor, and client manager can typically be done in half a day.

The documentation is pretty straightforward. You first want to install the master and client manager to sort of test your basic configuration. Then, you add on the fault tolerant parts of the operation.

Overall, the TCO is pretty good. There has never really been a conversation where any customers I have worked with complained about it.

The pricing is pretty reasonable. That seems to help a lot versus other companies. There are no other fees aside from the standard licensing fees. There are other products out there where you pay based on how many jobs you run and so on, and I know that's very frustrating for users.

The solution’s licensing model in terms of its flexibility and transparency regarding costs is pretty good. A person can buy the license, and if you decide to stop support, you can do that but still have the product. So, it's not like you're paying constantly to keep that license alive. Certainly, you want to keep support going too. Once you buy it, you own it. It's not like I have to keep paying somebody to keep using it.

If you are willing to shop around to other vendors, you can possibly get a good price on your support license.

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 used to work for Tidal and Cisco, supporting Tidal. I'm not an everyday user. I haven't worked for the current Tidal people, but I worked for the original Tidal. When I started back with the original Tidal, Cisco didn't put as much money into it as maybe we could've used. So, it sort of stagnated in some people's view. Now, the new people are putting a lot of money and effort into it.

In some ways, Tidal has kept me from having to learn more about different operating systems or tools because I can automate stuff. I don't have to necessarily know all the internals of different things. It has expanded the areas that I can work in without necessarily having a lot of training in different things. E.g., I don't need to be a Informatica expert to be able to run Informatica jobs.

You now have the ability to start something from the cloud, and that is the most powerful way to go forward. Because there is cloud support, if I was going to be starting new, I would look into doing a cloud implementation right from the beginning. E.g., one of my customers did a major data center move, and we had to rebuild all their servers and duplicate all their software. If that had been in cloud, it would've been just been a drag and drop type of a thing. You wouldn't even know what building you were in.

I would rate it an eight (out of 10). There is room for improvement, but the solution is pretty good. The support has always been very good.