Tidal by Redwood Reviews

We're running jobs on a global scale. Being a global company, we're running scheduled jobs and ad hoc jobs across different regions. Jobs cover backend processing, financials, and the like. We're running on an SAP ERP system and we're also running Informatica for data warehouse. We're running BusinessObjects web reports as well as a lot of straight Windows and Unix command-line things. We run FTP processing, PGP encryption processing, and data services jobs. We're running about seven or eight of the different adapter types that Tidal has available.

We have it on-prem. Both our test and production environments are on fault-tolerant setups.

When I started here, they had already been on Tidal for about five years. So I'm not really sure where they were before Tidal. They did a lot of mainframe things in the past. From what I've heard from people here from the "old school," once they globalized and got everything into Tidal, the ability to see everything across the scheduling universe was a huge improvement. They didn't have to give different people different access to different systems and check four or five things, just to make sure something was running correctly.

The solution helped to reduce weekend and overtime hours. We're a 24 by 7 support model. Regarding the Tidal application, the one thing that we try to explain to anybody, from a support or monitoring standpoint, is that jobs trigger through Tidal, but not physically in Tidal. So if we have, hypothetically, an SAP job failure, it's not a Tidal failure, it's an SAP failure. So it goes right to SAP support, which saves time. In the environment I came from, they didn't have that mentality. So if, hypothetically, an ERP job failed, they'd call the Tidal person first instead of the ERP support. That type of understanding, as a whole, really helps from a support standpoint. The admins don't get a lot of calls unless there's an actual issue with the Tidal application itself.

In the time I've been here, we've definitely increased staff availability. From a business standpoint, we've started utilizing file monitors more, for what they call "file events" within the application. In the past, when an end-user would drop a file in SAP, for example, they'd contact our operations team, or send an email saying, "Run in this job." There isn't a real need for that in many cases. We've implemented a lot of file events that will actually only run jobs if they need to, if a file's available. Along the same lines, we had processes that would run a process in SAP, and even though it didn't create a file, there were other jobs downstream that would be hanging out and waiting for a file that never showed up. So not from just a staff availability point of view, but in terms of resource availability, it has definitely improved things a lot. From an operator standpoint, I would estimate Tidal is saving us 15 to 20 hours per week, just in manual interaction with inserting jobs on a request, since a lot of that stuff was implemented at our end.

Regarding job counts, we're pushing over seven million a year. That varies, obviously, depending on request jobs and other things. There are some processes that we shut down for year-end processing, so they stop running for a week or two. But from an expansion standpoint, we are constantly looking to see where else we can use Tidal, for new applications that are coming online or things that people are running on their own where they haven't even thought about Tidal's scheduling. In 2019, we did 7.7 million jobs. In 2018, we were at 7.1 million. In 2017, we were at 6.1 million. So with Tidal we're adding on the order of half-a-million jobs per year.

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.

For the most part, the drill-down and the logging are really good. But if we take an Informatica job, for example: We have the ability, and the operators have the ability, to actually drill down and see, at a session level, where the failure is. There is, unfortunately, no way to extract that into an actual output email or failure email. It's not that that information is not available, but extracting it into an email would be a nice-to-have. It's minor, but it would definitely be a help. In the grand scheme of things though, you can drill down to session-level failures and get that error message to provide to support. 

Another thing has to do with job events. A job event triggers when a job completes. It sends an email or reruns a job. Right now — and I've even talked to Tidal about this — it will run all the events at the same time. It doesn't provide the logic to say, "I want this job to rerun five times. If it fails on the fifth time, then send an email: 'Out for Failure.'"

The only other thing I would like to see is an easy way to flag jobs running longer than a certain percentage of the estimated time they should take. Right now, you can hard code in a max expected run-time and you can trigger a notification off of that. The unfortunate thing is, in a consumer product-related business such as ours, Q3 and Q4 jobs are going to run longer. So you can't really put a hard-coded expected run-time, because that's going to fluctuate. So it would be useful if we could specify something like "Flag this job if it runs 25 percent longer than estimated," which the solution does track for 30 or 35 days. That's what they usually recommend, out-of-the-box, for keeping track of history.

I have been using Tidal for about 13 years. I used it for about eight years at my previous company and then I came over to this company.

I came on about four-and-a-half years ago here and Tidal has been really solid. The high-availability and the fault monitoring they use is very good. I can think of twice, in the last four-and-a-half years where we've actually had to failover for one reason or another. And the bottom line was that it wasn't even a Tidal issue; it was something to do with patching. One of the patches from Microsoft was a little funky. From a stability and support standpoint, this is a rock-solid app, in my opinion.

It's very stable, especially for those who utilize what they call Fault Monitor or Fault Tolerance. When we do patching, the jobs, in and of themselves, automatically fail over from our primary to our backup. There might be a slight disconnect in the web UI that the operators use, but that maybe lasts a minute because of the cut-over time. But it picks up all of the backend PIDs, and the jobs just pick up where they left off. From a stability standpoint, this is a really good product.

From what I've seen, the scalability is very good. There are companies that I know that run millions of jobs a day. I've been through some user groups that have some people running nine different instances of Tidal, and they're running a lot of different things. So, the 7.7 million a year we run here, coming from where I was beforehand where we were running about 400,000 a year, seems like a lot. But we're still a small fish in the barrel compared to how other Tidal customers are using it.

So the scalability is phenomenal. We're always looking for that next hook and working on trying to tie into other things. We're keeping our versions updated as much as we can, in regard to OS compatibility. Take Informatica, as an example: We're making sure that we're as up-to-date as we can be with the versions that are out on the market.

In my previous company we used the Lawson ERP's internal job scheduler. There were Windows tasks that we had to check on. They were running a lot of VB6 stuff. In my current company, I came onboard years after they had already cut over to Tidal. I know they had some mainframe stuff in the past, but I don't think they converted from something like CA to Tidal. Tidal was their first choice.

I came in at the tail end of the initial setup when I first started with Tidal back in '07. The decision had been made on the application before I got the position of scheduler in the Tidal admin. In terms of the actual setup, I was on the periphery. Once it was set up, I got more involved. But I have been involved since then with the system upgrades and version upgrades.

Upgrades seem to be fairly straightforward. When it comes to hotfixes and partial, mid-version updates, it's pretty simple. You don't have to call the vendor in. When it comes to versioning upgrades, like when we'll go from 6.3 to 6.5 in a couple of years, we do utilize a third-party vendor to come in and assist, because they do a lot of backend database cleanup and scrubbing. We're running in a SQL database for Tidal, and I know just enough SQL to get me in trouble. So we do rely, especially because this is such an enterprise-based application here, on having a third-party come in and take over the upgrade part of it. We work in conjunction with them, making sure jobs are set and that the copies are good.

As for the learning curve, a lot of it depends on the individual's knowledge of the particular systems. Windows is fairly straightforward. If you know some Unix commands, you can help set them up really easily within the application, when you're setting up a job to run from the Unix command line. If you don't know SAP or whatever the ERP system of the company is, at least a little bit — enough so that you can navigate through it — there might be a little bit of a learning curve. But it's really not as big as one might think. Take the SAP ERP as an example. I came from a Lawson background. I came into the SAP environment here, which I was totally unfamiliar with. But within about a month, I was able to set up SAP jobs without an issue.

There are some little things involved in understanding how to up jobs if you want to overwrite certain variant settings. Learning to do that, and making people feel comfortable doing that, was probably the biggest learning curve.

The other thing is understanding using API hooks within Tidal to other processes. That's one thing they could improve on as far as their training materials go. I've talked about that with them during the past couple of user calls that I've been involved in. At this point it's still a little rough, but hopefully that will get better as time goes on.

The amount of training a new user needs in Tidal depends on the level they're at. We have a training program in place for our operators who do a lot of the manual reporting and failures, running jobs on request, etc. We'll start them with just an inquiry only so they can see everything that's happening, but they can't act on it. That way they can get a feel for the application. We'll give them that for about a week or so, and they'll work hand-in-hand with an operator who's been onsite and using the application. Then we can roll them out to a test version with test-operator access, for another week or so. By that time, they're through four weeks of Tidal acclimation and they're good to go with everything. Because of the operator's schedule — they work a four-on, three-off rotation, it's not like they're working five eight-hour days of straight Tidal — plus all the other things that are on their plate for their job requirements, they're not going to see every single potential issue that could come up. But they have a pretty good grasp at the end of that time.

We'll usually get a feel from not only the trainee, but also the person who is working with them, about how they are doing and if they feel that they're ready to start doing stuff in production. Generally, within a month, they're up and running as an operator, in both test and prod environments.

Developers are a different story because of all the different things that they have access to regarding scheduling and building schedules. We haven't brought on a lot of developers since I've been here. It would probably take a good two to three weeks for developer training, if someone wanted to know how to set up a job in Tidal. We'd really try to hand-feed them little things, so they don't inadvertently schedule a job, or an entire job group that runs hundreds of jobs, which could really bog things down from a systems standpoint.

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

I would say we have seen a return on investment by going with Tidal, and not only because of the volume of jobs we're running, but because of the variation of jobs that we're running. It gives us the ability to manually adjust processes on-the-fly, and having that visibility and quick reaction to failures has been a big plus for us.

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.

As with any product you're looking at, first of all, don't get pigeonholed into it. Don't have a laser-focus on an individual product. But with Tidal, especially now that they're rebuilding the customer base, reach out and work with their salespeople, and network with current users. One thing I found, especially being on some of the network boards — they used to have a Yahoo Group for Tidal — people aren't afraid to say, "Hey, this works great and this doesn't." I'll be the first to tell you what works great and what still needs some work. And now that Tidal has put its own forum together, the company is monitoring and responding to concerns and questions a lot quicker than they used to when they were under Cisco's umbrella.

The biggest lesson I've learned from using Tidal is that it's always growing. In user calls that we've had since Tidal went back to its own environment, they're really looking to rebuild and invest in the application, and make sure that things are up to date and validated. They're working on making sure they're as current as they can be with certain connections. 

It's like they have a renewed vision since Tidal was divested from Cisco. They seem to have a real yearning to get back into the way things used to be in the pre-Cisco days. I'm not trying to knock Cisco, but it is what it is, because I worked with Tidal before Cisco acquired the product. Now with the STA Group and a lot of the older Tidal developers and folks "back in the saddle," there seems to be a renewed interest in rebuilding, making it a lot easier, and opening up a lot more process availability for users and customers.

We've got a handful of developers, five or six people, who actually have the ability to create jobs in our test system. We have a team of six operators who have access to Tidal as well. They do the 24-hour monitoring and ad hoc jobs, etc. And we have two Tidal admins. We do have some other folks who have inquiry access into our production system. We'll give people who might be developers in our test system view-only access to prod. Overall we have 15 to 20 people who have access to the system, with varying security levels. I'm responsible for maintenance, upgrades, job migration, and production. I also work with people who don't have access to Tidal and on helping them get jobs set up properly. I also make sure we get the email notifications correct.

For what we're using it for, and what we have, it's very good.

We use it primarily to run SAP jobs. 

While there is other minor stuff it runs in, 98 percent is SAP. We have a number of different types of SAP systems. There are different teams who are responsible for configuring, managing, and setting up jobs. They are the ones who define the jobs and schedule them. There is an administrative team who is responsible for maintaining the system landscape and providing training for Tidal. They also provide standards, guidance, guidelines, and jobs.

We use the solution for cross-platform, cross-application workloads within SAP. Therefore, within SAP, we might run a job on one system, but wait for the job on other systems to finish first. That is our interdependency between SAP systems. However, we don't do things like run something on SAP, then go do something on a non-SAP system. We may have a bit of that, but that's not a big part of what we do. It's mostly within SAP systems or within an SAP system.

As far as investigating what ran and when, it is fine for the most part. You can investigate on the GUI and take a look at different things. 

We've been using it for 15 years so we clearly like the product. We wouldn't be able to do many of the complex scheduling that we do today without it. For us, it is a mission-critical app. Because if it doesn't work or has a problem, then SAP doesn't function. It is that critical. So, it's an essential tool for us to manage and run SAP jobs. We depend on Tidal. Without it, we wouldn't be able to function. 

A lot of stuff is automated. You don't need people running things on their own. They can schedule and run it, then not having to worry about it. They can even get alerts if there is a problem. People are just coming into the mix only if there is a problem. They get alerted to see what happened. From the automated aspect of it, you can run jobs based on a schedule, events, or whatever reduces manual intervention.

It just makes our life that much easier because all we have to do is define complex jobs, then they are pretty much on their own. We only intervene if there is a problem. Otherwise, people don't even know it is there unless there is a problem.

We run a very large number of jobs per day. At the end of month, in particular, we can easily build jobs and dependencies, expanding on what we do. It's not so much a factor of what Tidal can do, it's more a factor of what SAP can do. You can easily expand what you do with Tidal, but then you need to be sure that you can do it right in SAP. E.g., what happens after we started seeing SAP to do it? From a Tidal perspective, it is pretty easy now because we have had it for so long and have so much experience with it. It has helped quite a bit in terms of increasing capacity.

We are constantly adding jobs, though not a ton. Sometimes, we take some away, but that's rare. It's more that we add jobs. It simplifies the process of developing an application if I have Tidal because I can around things and automate things easily with Tidal. The solution is very important to us because it does a lot for us 24/7/365.

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.

Tidal enables admins and users to see the information relevant to them for the most part. It depends on what you are looking at. One of the weaknesses of the product is, when something happens, it's difficult to find out the root cause. There are a lot of logs you can take a look at in Tidal. Sometimes, they are useful, but other times, they're not. That is mostly relegated to the administrative team. Users for the most part don't see that and don't know anything about that. They just know they have a problem, then it's up to the administrative team to see what happened and figure out the problem.

When you need to drill further down to the lower level, that's when it becomes a bit more difficult. At the lower levels, it tends to be clearer. When you get into the guts of the app (the technical level), it is sometimes difficult to find out the root cause.

Tidal comes with two front-ends (GUIs): their Java client and web client. The Java client is a very lightweight client which you install on your desktop and terminal server. The web client just runs on the browser. They are slightly different, and what we are finding is sometimes there are discrepancies and inconsistencies between the two. One function may work in the Java client but may not work in the web client. That is because they have two sets of code with different front-ends, so they are inconsistent. I have asked if they can just use one of them. We prefer the web client because it doesn't require any installs on your desktop. However, we also like the Java client because the usability and look and feel are better on the Java client than the web client. 

We have been using this solution for a number of years, using both front-ends. Sometimes, we see it as an advantage if there's a problem with the web client to go use the Java client. So, you have two ways of getting in. Although it's a pain sometimes, because you when you have an issue you need to check both and they may behave differently. On the other hand, when you have a problem, there is a different way to get in and you are glad that you have two ways to get into it rather than just one. 

15 years.

The stability has been good. We have had the occasional issue here and there, but overall, it has been fine. Obviously, it hasn't been flawless. For the most part, it's been a pretty stable environment.

There is an administrative team at the app layer maintaining it. There is a senior administrator for it, and two other people who cover for the senior administrator, if necessary. At the Unix and database level, there is just one person maintaining it.

You can scale. Today, you can easily scale Client Manager, which controls access to the web client. I sometimes complain about this to Tidal. For example, you can add one or two to the HA, which has a master backup. However, the only way you can scale there is vertically. So, you can make the system bigger. But with the Client Manager, you can scale horizontally as much as you like depending on the volume of people that you have, though I usually find that for us one Client Manager works just fine. The reason we have it down to just one Client Manager is because they use the Java clients, so there are different ways of getting to the system. It would be a good idea to have a second Client Manager in place so you have HA if the Client Manager goes down, then you could just go to the other one.

We haven't really had an enormous increase of jobs that has caused us to scale drastically, short of increasing memory. The CPU has not been an issue at all.

We did expand it to non-SAP, but it's not huge yet. It is being expanded to things like running Windows and Unix jobs. There are a good number of jobs that it runs from a volume perspective, but not as much as SAP.

Most people use the web client. There are 40 to 50 active users in the system. What we call super users use the Java client, so there are five to 10 people now using the Java client with the rest of the people using the web client. 

We have three different types of users: 

1. We have the administrative team. Those are the people who maintain the system, do the training, and set up different components of the application layer, such as user groups or server groups. This is more on the technical side. 
2. The super users usually are the most knowledgeable and capable of using some of the more complex features of the product. 
3. The regular users are the people who set up regular, simple, straightforward jobs with some dependencies. They maybe set up some calendars, but nothing overly complicated.

The technical support hasn't been perfect. Sometimes, it takes a bit of time to come to the root cause of an issue. They are pretty responsive though. 

They have been pretty responsive of late since the company changed. You see the difference compared to Cisco. In general, they have been doing a much better job, especially communicating with customers.

We were using SAP native schedule, which was fairly primitive.

We are running it in version 6.2 and thinking of upgrading to version 6.5. We just recently installed version 6.5 in the sandbox to "kick the tires". We have a very capable technical team who did it fairly quick, but they had some problems. There were some minor problem which required some help from Tidal. However, we just recently installed SP3 and that was smooth. It had no problems.

The deployment took us a bit of time because we had an issue. It took like two weeks. However, if we exclude the issue, it probably took a day or two at most. It depends though on what you are installing, if you are installing in production, and if you are installing it in a quality system, where architecturally the landscape is different. For our purposes, SP3 was done in less than a day.

This was to "kick the tires", so it was not a real implementation as the production system has multiple systems and components. It will be more complex. This was just a single server containing all components of the tool, so it was easier from that perspective. It didn't take that long. Production will be different.

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

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

One person did the deployment.

The ROI is pretty straightforward. It's a mission-critical app, and if we had to go back and do things the way we used to, it would be impossible. 

It would be undoable because now we would build a whole system that depends on functionality that is in Tidal. For example, to do something like calendars in SAP, they will be nowhere near as sophisticated or high quality. 

Could you do intrasystems dependencies? You could. However, there would be quite a bit of work to make that happen. It would be too complex. While here it is two clicks, and you're done. 

The alternative would be to go to a different product. But how? Migrating to a new product would be expensive, consuming, and complex. I just don't see that happening.

Our annual maintenance cost is competitive for what we have and what they do. 

We haven't bought anything new in terms of adapters or new agents. We did a purchase a few years ago. So, for now, we are good. It's possible that, if things change, we might buy some other stuff, e.g., a ServiceNow adapter. 

I have never had a problem with the solution’s licensing model in terms of its flexibility and its transparency regarding costs. You could debate whether it's expensive. It should be that much or less, but it's pretty clear regarding what you get and what you pay. 

It has been a bit of time since we bought something new. For the most part, the company is pretty upfront, straightforward, and transparent in my dealings with them. I don't have any issues. As far as licensing and new components, we haven't had to do that in a while.

There are project, system, and server costs. Some of the things that they are doing is introducing new products. They are introducing what they call their Repository, which is a way for you to move a job. That doesn't cost anything to us, because it is reusing a tool called Transporter. The repository is the successor to Transporter, so we already own it and are sort of grandfathered in. But that new product requires a server and database, so now we have to go out and get a server and database. So, there is a cost there.

The landscape requires a number of systems for which there are costs. You don't have to do that, as you can just live with it on one system. It all depends on how you want to design the architecture. The landscape, or the architecture, depending on what you do, and if you want to do it correctly, will need a master and backup. You also need a Client Manager. You will need those three systems along with the fourth system, the heartbeat, which is the monitor between the master and backup.

There are costs, from a licensing perspective. It has been okay. We haven't had to add anything in the last three years or so.

Lately, there are costs of maintaining, managing, hardware costs, etc. That comes with the territory. It comes with implementing a tool for managing jobs and SAP RADIUS. Tidal is cheap, not really that expensive, between the licensing, hardware, etc. We certainly have a lot more expensive products.

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.

We originally liked the product for the user interface, because of it was easy to use and the features, such as calendaring, dependencies, etc. I don't think the solution is difficult to implement and learn. Though, it depends. It certainly has some very advanced features which require more than cursory knowledge of other products. It takes time for that, and there is always a learning curve for whatever product you do. In general, it is a fairly easy product to install and use, if you are flexible as far as how you want to deploy it.

It's very straightforward to understand and install, but you need to have the right people who have the right knowledgeable and can do this type of stuff. E.g., you need strong technical people. Though, we certainly have dealt with more complex products, deployments, and systems.

The tool is complex because it can do many complex things. One of our requirements is before anyone gets on it that they get two hours of training sessions. This is just to give them a minimum of the basics. Almost right away, people learn the basic stuff: create a job, monitor a job, etc. The more complex tasks takes more time, but are not used by everybody. Most people just do the basic stuff, so learning doesn't take that long. The majority of people learn the tool fairly quickly.

It is a mission-critical app. We depend on it to run our SAP trials. Without it, I don't know how we would do them. It's just that critical. We know if Tidal has a problem, because everybody knows. It's that critical to us.

I would rate the product from a seven to eight (out of 10). We have been using the product for a long time. We like it. We plan to upgrade soon, hopefully this year or next year. The users are very familiar with the product. It has become such a critical tool for us that we depend on it. We have built a relationship with the company now. I believe that the product is in good hands. They want to do right by the customer and listen to them. They are doing a lot of good things.

It's a company-wide batch scheduler.

It runs tons for us. It runs Windows, Unix/Linux. We connect with a lot of databases: Oracle, SQL, Sybase. We have BusinessObjects BI adapters, we scan emails, and we incorporate it with TriZetto Facets healthcare solutions. There's so much. It's our core enterprise scheduler.

It helps because we have brought in a lot of other applications and systems where we're able to use an enterprise-level scheduler that is consistently monitored and backed up and has a ton of redundancy so that we don't have any downtime. We're pretty close to 99 percent uptime on our scheduler.

It has reduced some of our weekend and overtime hours. For us, it's all based on the programming around the scheduler. For some teams, it has greatly reduced weekend and night hours, but for some people it hasn't because they babysit the process.

Tidal has also helped us increase capacity in terms of the number of jobs. Over the last three years we've added between 10,000 and 15,000 jobs.

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.

Before STA bought this product, Cisco owned it and, unfortunately, they did not update things as well as they should have. We're just now seeing improvements to the product and bug fixes.

The biggest improvement they need to work on is doing better QA checks before they release new patches and service packs. We do find that you can't trust getting the new product right away, as they have to get some bug fixes out. They do tend to have some bugs in the first iteration.

In addition, something that they already know about is that speed can be a little bit of an issue in the environments and the viewers.

And while everything is nice in the GUI interface — they recently upgraded it — they could take it a step further. I would like it to have more flexibility and the overall look of the product could be better. Before this recent patch that we're doing to 6.53, in the 6.5 series it still looked like a product from the 1990s. They recently did a mini-refresh on graphic user interface, but it still looks a little bit clunky. It doesn't look as smooth as I would expect from a 21st-century product, but it's getting there. But this a secondary item, versus the speed and working on bug fixes.

I, myself, have been using Tidal for six or seven years. Our company pretty much runs all of our core processing through scheduling. Tidal is the default and has been the default for many years. So it's hard for us to come up with numbers for how it's improved our operations because we're not a company that just brought Tidal in, brand-new, and it suddenly revamped our company. We've been using it for close to 20 years and I enjoy the product very much.

Tidal is pretty stable. We haven't had any major issues, at least in the last three years that I've been working here, and especially since we upgraded. We haven't had many major issues, and we do have redundancy, which is great. We have redundancy for the primary master backup master, and fault tolerance. That that helps with keeping things stable. As of mid-year 2020, I am decreasing the product stability from 8 to 6 stars due to the amount of bugs we are constantly facing.

It's very scalable. As the company grows you increase the resources. I've worked at a small company that has Tidal and I'm now working at a pretty big company that uses Tidal and it all works pretty seamlessly.

It's pretty extensively used in our company. We have 25,000 jobs in production, and we keep growing. We keep adding jobs.

We have about eight engineers who create jobs and we have about 10 people who are operators who monitor the production schedule. And we have 200 to 300 other users who are developers. They create code that integrates with Tidal and they work with the engineers to create the jobs in Tidal. They access Tidal to view and check their jobs.

We have an architect and two admins to keep the environments up and running. We have the eight engineers who create, monitor, and edit the jobs and the general environment. They are on-call as well. That's the core team for Tidal. And the NOC manages alerts if something happens, to reach out to the on-call people

Technical support is great. They're fantastic. They're very responsive and detailed when we ask them questions. A big thing that I like since STA bought it is that their support has been very responsive and very quick.

Each upgrade has gotten a little bit better. I remember back in the day, when I first started working Tidal, upgrades were a pain, but they're slowly making improvements on the upgrades. One thing I would like to see them improve a little bit on is the documentation, because some parts of the upgrade are not exactly clear and I've had to go through support to help me on what to fill out in certain parts. But their support is actually fairly quick and they have been able to help me with it.

We've done major upgrades, and that's always a multi-month process because you have to do the change-process testing. That depends on the corporation. But the recent upgrade that we're doing from 6.35 to 6.53 has been going really well and has been pretty fast in terms of the actual setup and installation. Other than a little snag that I had to work through with support, it has gone very well. To upgrade each environment has taken an average of an hour-and-a-half to two hours.

There is some very complex strategy for updates. The main thing is to start with the lower environments and back up everything, the database and the servers, and go through each environment in a slow and steady process. We come up with a testing plan before moving on to the next environment. We have to make sure we test each environment thoroughly, over time, before moving to production.

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

We purchase a seven-year contract. Once that's up, we'll look at renewals and costs and compare them again.

The main thing is to look at whether you really need an enterprise scheduler in general. After that, implementation is very important. Setting up standards from the beginning for the scheduling and the jobs is very key. My biggest advice is to analyze all these processes and come up with a good plan for how to incorporate everything into your scheduling. That would be one of the most important things for Tidal or for any scheduler in general. From the admin side, for the technology itself and the technical stuff, work with and trust Tidal support at the beginning to get to a certain level of how to scope everything out, and then go from there.

I'd rate it an eight out of 10. The main thing is whether or not they come out with a better rollout of their upgrades and patches so that they are less buggy. Unfortunately, they still do come out with a consistent number of bugs. They also need better documentation at the admin level. Those are the two core areas that they're truly lacking in, and a little bit on speed. However, the newer version that we're still testing is supposed to take care of that. We'll have to see when that comes into play.

Tidal Automation by Redwood is a user-friendly solution.

I have been using Tidal Automation by Redwood for one and a half months.

I rate Tidal Automation by Redwood a nine out of ten for stability.

Around eight users are using the solution in our organization.

I rate Tidal Automation by Redwood a nine out of ten for scalability.

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

The solution’s deployment took ten days.

I would recommend Tidal Automation by Redwood as the first priority for users looking for any automation tool.

Overall, I rate Tidal Automation by Redwood a nine out of ten.

We primarily use Tidal Automation to schedule batch jobs. 

We are a solution provider and the automation that we implement is for our clients.

Using this solution has improved the way our organization functions because support is available whenever we have problems.

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.

There are several improvement points that our team has provided to the vendor. 

Our client has been running Tidal Automation for more than three years. We started taking care of it for them between two and three years ago.

This is a stable tool and we use it extensively.

We have thousands of jobs that are scheduled in a batch and run using this tool. It is scalable, and there are a few hundred users.

Our usage may increase to some extent but maybe not because there are competing forces.

Our team is in touch with the product team and whenever there is any problem, we reach out to support and they take care of the issues.

As we are working for a client, we have an arrangement such that we can raise tickets with the vendor. Once we do so, the problems are addressed.

Overall, the support is good.

We did not use another similar solution prior to Tidal.

The initial setup was completed by our client's team.

We do not maintain the system, aside from the case where an upgrade is needed.

It does generate ROI but I do not have specific metrics available because it is known by my customer. When a customer continues to use the same product for a number of years then it seems that they are happy with the return on investment.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.