Automic Automation Reviews

We are a system integrator and Automic is one of the workload automation products that we implement for our clients.

This tool provides a great versatility of options for effective digital business automation. Integration with different platforms, ERP systems, business application, microservices, big data.

We are supporting multiple customers and their environments. Some of the most common uses are : SAP, SAP BW, Avaloq, FileTransfers, FTP/SFTP, Datastage, Informatica

It has its own scripting language which allows you to be even more flexible with the objects and create your own unique environment. You can easily have a single object with smartly defined parameters (variables) and reuse that object in many different workflows, passing different values to achieve different purposes. 

The vendor support is really bad and should be improved. The engineers taking our vendor tickets are not knowledgeble enough of the product and occasionally not helpful at all. Tickets usally are bouncing back and forth with very little helpful information or investigation from their side for a issue we are experiencing/reporting.

I have been working with Automic Workload Automation for at least five years.

This is a stable product and we plan on continuing to use it in the future.

Automic Workload Automation is scalable, although it can improve on the database side. When it comes to workload automation tools, the database is always at the back of the list.

My team has approximately 25 people in it, and we have teams in America and Germany as well.

The technical support is slow, and the people that take the cases are not really familiar with the product. Most of their answers are simply "Did you check the official documentation? Did you check the knowledge base articles?"

If we are at the point that we are asking for support, most times, we would have already checked everything place that we can.

Basically, they should be faster and more knowledgeable.

In our team, we are using four workload automation tools including Automic, Control-M, Autosys, and TWS/IWS. We are supporting all of them but I concentrate on Automic because it's the one that I like the most.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is pretty easy to install this product anywhere, regardless of whether it is an on-premises or cloud-based deployment. Usually, deployment takes four hours at the most.

I have done the deployment several times, myself.

This is a good product and I can recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is for automation in the area of SAP, as a specific solution in time management and access control systems. We are providing for this for any of our customers who use the automation engine. It is performing well.

The product has benefited our organization. It saves time and manpower.

Process automation.

The user interface has room for improvement.

I would like to see the event engine in the next release.

It is a stable product.

It has a normal scale for working with the tool.

We use support when we make release changes. Technical support has been good to work with. They have been easier to reach now than in the past.

We did not have a previous solution, just something we built in-house. We have been using this solution for 20 years.

The initial setup was easy. We have used it for 20 years, so we set it up in a special way. We were installation number 30 for this product. We have been working with it for a long time.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: multi-platform usability.

• Check-out
• Check-in
• Promote
• Demote

Just that the basic functionality works.

It saves State assets, for starters. Saving State assets is part of my job, and it's important. So that's how it's improving State work. We have a tool that secures and controls State assets.

Certainly, the Visual Studio plugin has a lot of room for improvement.

We need to improve communication. It's a mistake to send all the work over to India, that's my personal opinion. I think there's a real problem with communication in India. I've been on the phone with these folks and wasted my time, where we don't even understand what they're saying. I think the development of this tool should be brought back to the United States. I think it's a mistake to have it done it in India, where a real communication problem exists.

20 years.

Absolutely.

The scalability is not as much of a problem.

Escalation comes from the technical team in the United States to Level 2 in India.

We switched over 20 years ago.

Setup was complex due to the complexity of the tool.

If we had a choice to choose again, we'd choose something different.

We've been plugged into the product for 20 years now, so it's a little difficult to do that, although I have teams or agencies now, that are breaking away and they're going and using other tools now. I got one agency using TFS. I've got another agency using GitHub, so I'm seeing the breaking down of this whole process. A lot of it has to do with the stability of the Visual Studio plugin, which has not been very good.

Don't use the Visual Studio plugin. Go and use TFS. It's more seamless and it's a bigger tool. It will cost you more money, but you won't have some of the complexities, in terms of folks being able to do check-outs and check-ins. This Visual Studio plugin has been very complicated for the State of New Hampshire. It's caused a lot of problems. It's made me lose a lot of customers. I lost 81 customers last week alone. They don't like the product and I understand why. They have people in India developing it, who don't understand English, most of the time.

Even when you try to convey your message to them, there's all kinds of problems with dialog and interpretation that sometimes you get what you ask for, and sometimes you don't. Most of the time, you don't. You end up going back and forth, and back and forth to get any fix, then you get another re-fix. Then, you get another re-fix.

• Workload and system automation 
• We run our batch schedules through the system and have also automated very complex processes to allow Operations perform tasks that were previously done by Sys Admins.

Allowed us to almost fully automate our batch schedule and to provide our Operations team with a single interface for monitoring batch and automated system processes.

• File transfer is excellent 
• Very intuitive interface (Java version) 
• Process flows are very easy to build.
• Events are useful to trigger process flows based on external factors.
• Zero downtime upgrade is a great idea!

• New web interface is not fit for purpose
• Users should continue to have access to the Java GUI 
• Support can be a bit slow responding to non-critical issues

We are using it for batch automation and protection. We can control and check it, which is the main thing. When the batches must be run, we need a perfect system for it to run. It must run 24 hours, seven days a week, with no interruptions.

Its benefit is time. When you have the automation going, it just runs. We have no problems with any of the automation. 

We have costs for an Oracle database, and it is a high cost. However, we think we can do this on a Windows database, which is cheaper. We will do this the next few years, so it will be better. 

We have long-time planning and forecasts. In the forecasts, we can change our workloads in the future to save us any problems. Whether it is three days or three weeks, we will regularly change our processes if that is our problem. Therefore, we can do a long time planning, if necessary.

The features of the calendar are the most valuable, then the scripting. With the scripting, we can script all things, which is a first. As far as our schedules, if we have problems, we can create our own process in the automation, which is good.

The forecast and long-term planning could be made a little better when you work with it in the future.

At the moment, the stability is good. We are experiencing a technical problem with the system, in regards to the VPN, which we hope will be fixed in the next few years.

We can expand it. We have products and software in the firm, and we do the risk management. Risk management from Atomic could be in the next year, and this will be a difficult change for us and the product which we run at the moment.

We have used technical support in the last three months. They are good. If we have problems, we can get an answer in three hours. Support is very fast.

The initial setup was complicated and difficult.

It has helped us reduce costs.

Compared to our other products, it is a good price.

We evaluate vendors every year to see if it is possible to change. We look everywhere.

We have had Atomic since 2005. It was the only software with scheduling on the mainframe for clients. 

Look at it and test it, because it is a very good product.

We are using mainly Workload Automation for all types of jobs over different servers and operating systems.

Without automation, it would be nearly impossible to do all the jobs that we are doing.

It is flexible. We can do additional scripting in Automic script, in combination with JSL language.

Documentation is not great. It was previously much better.

I would like to see features from "Prompt" sets in read Masks.

At the moment, we are using 2.0. The job automation is okay. The main functions are stable. There are bugs though.

It is scalable.

We used just shell scripts and crontab.

The initial setup was straightforward.

In some of our departments, it has had a great impact on efficiency, costs, and resources.

I would recommend Workload Automation.

We use Automic Workload Automation (AWA) for different things in the company, e.g., batch-bookings, archiving, virus scans, flight plans, etc. It is used for everything in the travel business which has IT. We do a lot of batch things within the industry, as it is a wide field.

The company does not notice our team much, which is not so good. However, that is because we can are quick and solve problems before they happen. We monitor and see where problems might occur, so we are not noticed so much in the company, but it helps in avoiding problems.

The automation helps a company to do things without manual processes. This is the definition: Without having to do so many things manually. 

One example that we have with a new customer is that they hosted their programs and everything themselves. The developers received calls almost every second night saying, “We have a problem,” without having on-call duty, but they did not have any on-call duty. Yet, they still received calls saying, “There's a problem.” They just had to rerun something, and it worked. Yet, every second night, they got called. 

With the automated solution they are now happy, because we can easily say, “If it breaks down, it might be a networking problem. Just restart three times and after about five minutes, run it, and it will be okay." Nobody gets called and everything works. The solution is easy for them now. For us, it is a small thing. It helps a lot, not only in huge business problems, but with the smaller ones. We have a much better night sleep and can develop their stuff better.

You can create very fine, granular workflows with a lot of possibilities. It gives you the possibility to do things in many ways. We do not have so many cases where you just can copy information here and there. Our customers have special needs, and we can use the tool to do that.

I am heading up the AWI. I desperately miss the possibility to show my read-only users on the Explorer side only their folders, not all the folders. This is something I would like to have on the dashboards (for example), where I can show them from an assembly side just their folders, not all the folders. They should have only rights to their folders, so why are they able to see all the other folders? It is confusing for them and not very comfortable. I told this to the developers already.

It is quite stable. I have been with the company for a year and a half, and in that time, we have not had any major breakdowns. We do not have many issues with the stability at the moment. 

We are now testing on the new release and the AWI. We are a little skeptical about what is coming up, but we will wait and see.

I am a little new to the administration. At the moment, we are planning the new release where it will be easier to scale it to our needs. Though, I can't say anything about the actual version that we use at the moment.

I have raised several incidents. I have been quite content with how they have gotten back to me, which is good. Even with the transformation now to CA, I like the way they work.

The initial setup was very complex. This company and the one that I worked at before found the very first migration from whole systems, like TWS, to the Automic product challenging. They were not used to all the features that it had. Though, I did not hear a lot of complaints about it.

I would encourage people to use the solution.

This solution has many use cases because it's automation, so the sky is the limit. It can be useful for any workloads—DD operation, disaster recovery, data center automation—required by the customer. 

This solution is deployed on-prem. 

The most valuable features are its robustness, it's highly scalable, and it's easy to implement. 

This solution's out-of-box automation sets could be improved. They could be industry standardized out-of-box, or even runbook automation processes could be useful—just some plug-and-play automation processes out-of-box. It has many integration capabilities, from APIs to databases, but if the customer sees some out-of-box automation processes in it, it could be useful. 

As for additional features, a best practices library could be good. Also, maybe more technology connectors, in order to connect and run the automation, so more out-of-box integration points. 

We have been dealing with Automic for around three years. 

This solution is highly scalable. In our country, we have more than 30 customers using this solution. 

I would rate support an eight out of ten. From a customization point of view, it requires some technical knowledge. 

The installation is very straightforward. The time it will take depends on the implementation and the size of the project—it can range from one day to five days. A team of one to three people could be enough for deployment. 

We implement this solution for clients. 

They have changed the pricing on their licensing, and it's cheaper than before. 

I rate Automic Workload Automation a nine out of ten. I recommend this solution to others.