Automic Automation Reviews

We use Automic Automation for our enterprise scheduling software. 

It automates a lot of our financial and CIS processes. It is used for file transfer processes and various business processes. Our CIS and financial processes are very deep.

It is not at all difficult to manage complex workloads using Automic Workload Automation. Once it is set up and running, it is usually a matter of monitoring. The individual developer group manages our own clients, and they are usually pretty self-sufficient and have monitors in place that will send them emails or something to keep them alerted of things that are not working. It is pretty seamless and does not require a lot of heavy lifting to keep it going.

It is very well suited for managing processes that span multiple operating platforms. We do that for several of our clients.

I am sure it has freed up staff for other projects or tasks, but I do not work with each individual team, so I do not know those details.

It has improved the compliance processes. The clients that fall in the compliance realm are always checked at least once a year to make sure their processes are not abandoned. If they are abandoned, they are being taken care of. The reporting structure within Automic Automation helps them to get results to support their findings.

We use Automic Workload Automation to automate and orchestrate processes across legacy and modern systems. We have automated CIS financials, PeopleSoft financials, and all kinds of legacy or homegrown application processes.

Automic Automation can be used with cloud and on-premises environments. This was very important when we were migrating from on-premise to the cloud. We have now migrated almost everything in our environment to Azure, but at the time, it was very important that Automic Automation was able to cross between the cloud and on-premise.

The ease of use is valuable. It is very intuitive. Usually, anyone who starts with it is up and running within a few minutes without requiring much assistance afterward. 

There is room for improvement in reporting. There is a lack of reporting capabilities.

I have been using Automic Automation since 2011, so it has been about 13 years.

There is no instability. It has uptime, and any downtime occurs only during maintenance.

It is also very scalable and capable of handling large volumes of data well.

If you put the tickets in for which you need help right away, they get back to you right away. If you tell them you do not need immediate assistance, they will keep in touch with you. If it is a medium severity, there is usually a two to three-day turnaround on answers, and that is what I expect.

Positive

We migrated from TWS to Automic, and it addressed our needs effectively. 

It took us a little bit of time to see its benefits after we deployed it. When we first deployed it, there was a lot of trial and error because we migrated from TWS. There was a lot of tinkering around to get it to work in Automic Automation, but for the most part, it transferred over from TWS pretty well.

I worked on the iSeries before, and we used a couple of different tools there. They were not ones that would run on Windows or Linux systems. They were just on iSeries. Automic does better on the Windows and Unix platforms. They have a connector for the iSeries, but they do not run on the iSeries.

We have it within our environment. It is in the cloud, but it is in our environment. It is not SaaS.

The initial setup was not difficult due to Automic Automation itself, but migrating from TWS had challenges. Putting up an Atomic Automation system would not be as difficult as migrating from another scheduling software package.

It is pretty much a one-person job. I manage the entire system and receive assistance from database administrators when it comes to the database. Other than that, it is all me.

I also do all the maintenance work, which includes doing upgrades and things like that once or twice a year. I try to keep up to date on patches and releases.

It is a comprehensive project. Be prepared to invest time in learning and understanding how an object-based system like this works. 

I would rate Automic Automation a ten out of ten.

We use Automic to schedule and automate our financial jobs. It is primarily used for our financial processes, such as closing the books at the end of the quarter or year. When closing the books, we need to load the data from one system to the other. The jobs involved in loading the data are automated through Automic. We have more than a thousand critical jobs automated through Automic that vary in complexity from simple to highly complicated. 

Some benefits of Automic were immediate. For example, we instantly increased productivity in managing our data workload. It became effortless. While those benefits were immediate, others were long-term benefits. 

It enabled us to build more complex workflows and manage all the data loads end to end in Automic, which was not possible before we implemented it. Those kinds of benefits took a bit more time. We began to realize those benefits in around a year because it took time to understand the tool, its features, and what was possible with it.

We can use Automic to manage workloads across multiple operating systems. Our systems are hosted on Windows, Linux, and the cloud. Automic's good log-capturing methodologies help us reduce workload failure rates. Those logs help us do a detailed root cause analysis, preventing those failures in the future. Some of our systems are on AWS, and some are on Azure. Our Automic installation is on Azure, so we operate across multiple cloud environments.

Automic Automation helps free up the bandwidth of our contractors and employees to focus on more important things. Our systems are financial, so they have to abide by SOC compliance, and Automic's controls and logging enable us to maintain SOC compliance. 

We have achieved productivity benefits and avoided costs. We could repurpose some of our costs in other areas that we would not have prioritized otherwise. 

Our financial processes have stringent requirements, especially during the quarter close and one-time close periods. Any deviation from our SLAs gets escalated, so we must be on top of all our workloads running through Automic. Real-time monitoring is helpful because as soon as the issue occurs, it sends an alert, and we don't waste time not knowing what the issue is. We know what the issue is and take action on it. We can reduce any impact due to the issue.

I like the connectors Automic has provided or the agents that give me the flexibility to connect to various source and target systems. It's pretty easy to manage complex workloads using Automic. Its user interface makes it easier for us to manage.

We can monitor job progress in real time, and the IT teams' visibility into the progress is excellent. In the event of any issues, the error messages that Automic sends help us to debug the problem.

From a features perspective, we still need some agents to connect to specific systems that Automic doesn't have. Expanding their available agents would make the tool more compatible with various systems that other customers may have.

I have used Automic for about eight years.

We've never had a crash or any stability issues. There have been some infrastructure-related issues that caused the server to go down, but Automic has been stable.

I rate Automic nine out of 10 for stability. We have not encountered any use case that we could not automate with Automic. From that perspective, the scalability is good for us. It has been able to meet all our needs. 

I rate Automic support nine out of 10. They are responsive and bring a lot of expertise to the table. We have been assigned an account executive, who provides fantastic support.

Positive

Deploying Automic was somewhere in the middle. It wasn't too complicated, but it wasn't a cakewalk. We are on the cloud. We started on-prem, but then as a company strategy, we moved all our applications to the cloud. Automic is also on the cloud. 

When we started implementing Atomic, we set a scope to implement Automic over many years, and that scope has gradually increased. In the beginning, it was a four-month project that included all our financial jobs and a solid chunk of jobs that we were trying to accommodate in our topic. After deployment, it's fairly easy to maintain Automic. You just need to do regular patching and updates.

We generally work with IT vendor partners and service companies. The Automic team also collaborated closely with us to ensure they provided their product expertise during our migration to our scheduling tool. Four from my company were on the deployment team. 

Before I joined this company, Automic had a contract with its parent company, and their pricing was very competitive. However, when we split into multiple businesses, the contract increased significantly, becoming an expensive tool. 

Make sure you understand your licensing requirements and the model that Automic offers. You have to count the nodes and the agents. As a product owner, you should know what your licensing requirement will be based on how Automic does the licensing counts. 

I rate Automic Automation nine out of 10. Before deploying Automic, you should ensure your team has developed some technical expertise so that the systems or scope that you identify for Automic automations are feasible with the tools. You should also ensure that the agents are available and that they work with the types of systems you're trying to connect.  

The vast majority of our clients basically execute batch and PowerShell commands. We have a few clients that execute stored procedures on databases. However, the primary use is for executing batch and PowerShell tasks.

The solution is usually pretty easy for non-technical people to pick it up as long as they have basic experience with scripting. It has been easier onboarding new clients to Automic Automation versus Dollar Universe since it's relatively easy for anyone to grasp basic workloads or workflows. Compared to Dollar Universe, which had weird terminology and was complicated, Automic is by far easier.

I find that documentation is either very good or borderline useless depending on where you go. There are opportunities where things could be documented a little bit better. Additionally, during the version 21 to version 24 migration, a lot of manual steps were required, which was somewhat inconvenient.

I have been using Automic Automation since 2018.

Broadcom has generally been responsive and supportive. Recently, for non-urgent issues, response times have been slower, however they react quickly when it is urgent. They have been good about getting us back on track when needed.

Positive

The only other solution I ever worked with was Dollar Universe, which was extremely complicated to use, especially when trying to teach non-technical users. Compared to that, Automic Automation is much easier.

For me, the initial setup was straightforward due to previous experience setting up similar systems. However, I do think there could be improvements, such as automating some tasks currently done manually. The initial setup could include more wizard-based steps to reduce configuration file work.

At the time of deployment, we had an entire team involved because we managed two production environments each with their infrastructure. Now, the environment has been consolidated, making management possible with two people.

Pricing is above my pay grade, however, the team lead mentioned that we have a good deal compared to other solutions out there.

I would rate Automic Automation as eight out of ten. I would advise staying current with updates and possibly considering improvements to documentation.

Currently, we support one of the bank's environments, which is highly complex and relies heavily on Automic Automation. This environment is massive, processing billions of batches daily across four environments, each with millions of jobs. We utilize Automic for various tasks, from simple scripting and file transfers to sending data to external parties like Bloomberg and Nets. Given the scale and scope of our operations, we primarily use Automic for most of our business processes.

We struggled with the manual process of loading data into our SQL database. By implementing Automic Automation, we've successfully automated many time-consuming tasks, significantly reducing the potential for human error.

Automic has significantly improved our IT operations by reducing costs and saving time. For example, manually triggering a script at 10 AM required logging into the server and clicking at the exact time, which took at least 15 minutes. Automic automates this, allowing us to schedule scripts without manual intervention. This benefit is magnified when handling thousands of scripts with dependencies, such as script A triggering B, C, D, E, and so on while managing upstream data and multiple file transfers.

Workload automation capabilities are crucial to our operations. While we depend on databases, Windows, and network infrastructure, Automic is a business-critical application supporting our core banking batches. Its importance cannot be overstated; it's essentially the backbone of our bank. As such, any issues with Automic must be prioritized and resolved promptly.

The file transfer feature is the most valuable for process automation, as many organizations rely heavily on data transfer. Consequently, file transfer functionalities are the most frequently utilized within Automic Automation.

Automic Automation struggles with managing external dependencies, limiting its effectiveness. Built as a self-contained system, it relies on internal workflows composed of basic tasks. When external workflows and dependencies are involved, Automic's limitations become apparent. Manual scripting has been necessary to address this, but integrating this functionality directly into Automic would significantly improve its capabilities. For instance, scheduling a job to run after a delay and only if previous batches are complete is currently challenging in Automic. A built-in feature for such dependencies would greatly simplify the process.

We occasionally encounter bugs when applying new agent versions, patches, or updates to Automic. This is problematic because Broadcom, the vendor, should thoroughly test their components before release. Unfortunately, we've experienced instances where bugs have been discovered after deployment, highlighting the need for improved testing practices from Broadcom before making products available to the market.

I have been using Automic Automation for four years.

The new version experienced significant stability issues. While the vendor may share responsibility, our outdated infrastructure, particularly the ten-year-old data, also contributed to the problem. Queries on such old data were time-consuming and impacted tool performance. We identified and addressed our infrastructure shortcomings with the vendor's assistance. Although there were initial challenges, the system is now stable. We continue to work closely with the vendor to maintain optimal performance.

Automic Automation is highly scalable, with thousands of agents deployed as part of our baseline build. Consequently, every server in our large environment hosts a UC4 agent.

We can connect with technical support by submitting a ticket through the portal, and support is prioritized based on the impact on our business. However, in many cases, we have found that the vendor does not provide a thorough root cause analysis. Instead, we often receive generic recommendations to upgrade our systems or infrastructure.

Neutral

I previously used IBM Workload Automation. Both IBM Workload Automation and Automic Automation have their advantages and disadvantages. IBM Workload Automation was capable of handling all external dependency requirements. We have integrated similar capabilities using other methods, but not within Automic. While Automic might be more expensive, the cost depends on the chosen purchase and licensing model, including options like premium support.

I was involved in upgrading Automic Automation from version 12 to 21. This complex process is highly dependent on the environment and requires extensive planning. Before the upgrade, we must reboot all potentially impacted systems, release specific certificates, and upgrade the agent to ensure compatibility with the latest version. Automic release notes, accessible in their documentation, provide crucial information about potential issues and compatibility requirements. While these compatibility metrics should be carefully reviewed, the complexity of the process varies significantly based on the specific environment, ranging from simple to highly intricate.

Four people were involved in the upgrade process, which took 18 hours due to the necessary migration of our large database.

Automic Automation is costly.

I would rate Automic Automation eight out of ten.

We have a team of 31 people who work with Automic Automation.

Our expert team makes maintenance of Automic Automation easy.

I recommend Automic Automation as a powerful tool with solid functionality. It offers numerous options for completing various tasks in multiple ways.

Everything hinges on a solid foundation. Therefore, a dedicated server for Automic Automation is crucial. Sharing a machine with other applications can introduce latency issues. To avoid this, establish a separate machine with its own VLAN and database exclusively for Automic. A dedicated environment ensures optimal performance. However, installing Automic on shared infrastructure is likely to cause problems.

It's very hard to transfer the feeling when you have a platform that came to handle infrastructure issues, but at the end of the day, they are making real changes and impacting our business level, which is amazing, because it's very uncommon. That's it, basically.

We started this engagement with Automic working on basic scheduling. If you can just imagine an organization, which has around 10,000 written processes in Visual Basic or old code, and now we need to maintain these processes. They are very core processes because they are handling interactions between our customers to us; they are transferring data from our customers into our system. It's several thousands of PDFs, invoices and shipping notices, etc.

Up to the phase where we met with Automic, we just used manual stuff that we wrote to handle it. While using Automic, we created one mechanism of transferring data, and that's it. We need to just replicate it to other customers, and then you have thousands of Automic processes that are working by using only a single design for the rest of the customers, so we don't need to write code anymore.

By the way, another impact that we had using this process by transferring these invoices from one FTP site to another FTP site is the generation of invoices. In order to generate invoices to thousands of customers, we did some old code style process. We designed the process in the Automic, which basically does it faster.

Invoices: It's important they're faster, because at the end of the day when the driver needs to leave for the customer, I need to make sure that he will leave the logistics site as fast as he can. If I'm printing, 1,000 invoices in four hours, or if I'm printing 1,000 invoices in two hours, it makes a difference in my business process.

This is the must have in these processes for the customer, because if you are using Automic at the infrastructure level, then you have a problem because you are missing a whole step. Why? Because at the end of the day, the biggest impact that we have had when we started using Automic was when we embedded our digital processes with the tool. Today, Automic is the tool that helps us to manage all our digital strategy.

When you are going to some kind of a digital journey, you must have some kind of a tool or robotic platform that will enable you to manage the full cycle flow of the customer experience to a level of the data in the operational system process. When you are talking about putting the customer at the front of your business, if you don't have some kind of automation tool that enables you to integrate between the system, monitoring, enterprise data, analyses, trigger and action, and then to the multi challenge platforms, you don't have a digital strategy, and you need some kind of an orchestration behind it. This is what Automic is doing for us.

Today, this is the impact. In our business, we have a lot of operational costs. Let's say, we have 255 call center representatives and they are doing thousands of service transactions while speaking to our customers. By using Automic as an engine to our digital contact center, I'm doing almost 45,000 transactions per month, but it's on technology. It's our digital platform, which is orchestrated by Automic and some other tools, and few technologies behind the process.

So, if you're looking for the real impact, you must look at the integration of the Automic into your business application, in your customer journey, and into the digital process. This is what most organization are experiencing today.

We are in interruptive era at the moment, and everybody is looking how to reach customers, and how to manage a low cost operation and their digital strategy, because you need to invest a lot of resources. Instead of doing it in coding stuff and managing stuff behind the scenes, you need some kind of automation.

By the way, if you are the customer receiving an instant message from me, so an SMS, you have to understand that behind the scenes, there is a business process that somebody needs to manage, control, and make sure you are receiving this SMS. We, at O.P.S.I., are using Automic to do it because it is closing the full cycle.

We are always talking about leveraging the power of big data by automation, and we have a gap, but we didn't really implement it yet (the automation), which they have a great solution for, so the business continues in the cloud. We are not there, but we need to be there, and I think it's a little bit hard in our area.

Our area with the CA solution for DR is not really concerning directly to Automic, but to all of the DevOps, a word which is something that everybody is trying to touch on today in their daily business. There is also some gap that's a little bit hard to understand or to implement because not all the organizations are the same. When you are adopting DevOps, you may need to be more flexible in your processes.

But once again, we are not really using that because it is a little bit hard for us. We have rapid changes now in our digital strategy, because, at the end of the day, my business is to do service, and we are trying to improve in the service area and to be very near to our customer business needs. We didn't really make it to cope with the Automic road map, because we have a road map.

Around two to three years.

Yes. If Automic will be your automation platform or the orchestration platform, then you must build it in a high availability mode, which is what we did together with the guys from Automic. Now, this system is basically available 24/7. If one connector is failing, we have an HA connector that will replace it, so you must design the platform to be stable. The platform itself, it's stable. But once again, if you need to work 24/7, there is no way. I am working with the Custom Authority, and the Custom Authority in Israel is a very challenging organization. There is no way that we wouldn't be able to transfer data to customs, because if you don't transfer data, then we wouldn't be able to deliver to our customers abroad, so we need to be working 24/7 because a lot of stuff is being done automatically behind the scenes.

No, after we implemented, we didn't have any issues with the system. It's the core system today. It's one of the most important systems in our operation today, and once ensured that we had a high availability solution from them, then we started working 24/7 with no issues.

At the end of the day, I think there is an integration between good product, stable product, and a good delivery team. This symmetry, it makes stuff work well. When you're testing platforms, you know your enterprise, you have data functionality, and you have the delivery concept. At the end of the day, when you do the statistics of what you've tested, you need to decide. What helped us to decide, except from the function, the way the system works, was the approach of the guys from Automic, how they approach our business, how they help us do the analyses. They care. They just care.

I don't want to say just care. When you care about something, then you feel the difference. Then you are coming with all these big solutions and big company solutions which have tremendous platforms, but once again, they are too big, too robotic, and forgot the customer at the end of the day. It's one of the things that makes their stuff different for us.

Basically, here in Israel, we have very good support. The guys from Automic are assisting us, there is the world wide web, and we have a project manager that we work with. From the global perspective of how they help us, I think that we are pretty covered, and they are always trying to push new stuff, but once again, if we are thinking about improvement, it's a very big platform. We don't cover it all at the moment, and we are doing it step-by-step.

We had a few solutions. Most of them were code reading oriented, but it wasn't the platform. We didn't have any other platforms. We had tested another platform in that time, a very big one, which is not really relevant to this discussion, because I don't have anything bad to say about them, only from the point that they were too robotic for us. I think that Automic came with a very good approach in the delivery level. It's important, because when you're working at the delivery level, you can see the ROI that you will receive from the implementation.

It's a very good product and has a very good delivery level. Especially the guys that designed the solution over here are focused on the issues in the top 10 painful issues that we had, while resolving them during a very fast implementation. It gave us the boost to go with the digital area, the application area, and the business strategy area.

When I'm saying they care and were very focused on the issues, in three months, the implementation of the system was running right. Instead of going through all the processes and trying to upgrade all of them, or change the way we work in a rapid movement of things during the implementation, once the system and the change model was up and running, we did two things:

• Good mapping process of the pain points
• Good mapping process on new projects.

Then we stared to just transfer new projects to this platform. Then, in parallel, we took all staff for the scheduling, which is the simplest way, and in two to three months, we upgraded most of the scheduling items that we needed to handle. Then, the organization saw that we rapidly changed the way we were experiencing a problem, integration, etc.

From the implementation point of view, it was straightforward, very simple, and not complicated. Of course, you always have issues with creating various servers and SQL licenses. You must handle the server optimization because you have a lot of traffic, so you need to do an optimization of the right resources. We have a private cloud on our site, so it's easier for us to do the optimization of resources in the process, which is great. Then, you eliminate more issues when you're implementing a new platform. It's tricky and complicated, but we are an organization that works with a lot of legacy systems, which has very big systems, which usually has a lot of troubles and issues in transforming between platforms, between different applications with a legacy code. So, when you have the opportunity to work on a shelf platform, on an advanced platform, then it's very easy.

It's very important to see who does the delivery for you, and what's their approach. If the approach is simple and easy, not too rushed, then you can manage the process to receive the best results. It's important because this is what made the implementation very easy at the end of the day for us.

Once again, from a technical point of view, there were no issues.

Control-M from BMC was one of the applications which we looked at or tested. IBM also has some solutions in this area, and HP in the DevOps orchestration. They have very good platforms, very good approach, very scalable, very stable, and from my personal experience and perspective, it just helped my business grow and cope with all our digital challenges.

We started the concept of working with Automic when we looked for a tool that would help us to automate our business. It started in the infrastructure level, because everybody wanted to automate their infrastructure stuff to do basic scheduling and standard things that you are doing in an organization, especially in the IT department.

Basically, we are divided between infrastructure and business applications, so in my IT department where the infrastructure recedes, we have thousands of processors that were created there manually by coding with all kind of windows applications or something like that. In Israel, we are the biggest company who is doing deliveries and managing a global supply chain operation, so we have a lot of legacy systems. It's a 25 year-old company, and we have a lot of legacy systems and a lot of old code from the past years that we need to manage or handle.

We started off looking for an automation tool that would help us to just upgrade old processes to some kind of a new system, and that is how we found Automic.

I work at O.P.S.I., which is an authorized service contractor for UPS in Israel. Basically, the first challenge is that we are not really UPS, we are just an ASC, an authorized service contractor, so we are totally independent and are working like a standalone company, but we have a lot of integration with the global UPS. We have UPS system and applications that we must use because it's part of the agreement.

Here in Israel, we are identified totally brown with the logo and everything. Just one issue, this is why I mention it, because when somebody is talking about us worldwide and in Israel, we mention our name as O.P.S.I., an authorized service contractor for UPS. People need to know that we are a subcontractor for them and not really a brown branch here in Israel. Basically, just to let you know, we have 155 authorized service contractors like us worldwide.

As for additional advice, just pick stuff where you can and go for the quick win. The first phases of this project must be dedicated to understanding the mechanism and the platform, because when you're going with the simple stuff, you have the chance or the opportunity to test the system. We had thousands of processors with thousands of challenges, but once again, we started with the infrastructure. We succeeded over there, then we went to the application.

We started at the lowest level of the implementation. After we learned the system, we learned how it behaved. We learned the ability of the system, then we went to the application. I think what has amazed me the whole time is that I have fully automated business processes in this difficult area, so it's an excitement because you started in transferring files from one server to another, then you are managing your digital business strategy with this platform (my CEO knows this platform).

It's not like you are installing some kind of a monitoring tool. When you are starting small, infrastructure and then application, then turning this application into a core system, it is something else. So my humble advice from my experience is to start small and start with the pain points. Learn the system, learn the capabilities, then slide to the business level.

In the past, I had used Automic Automation during the time when it was called UC4 for month-end close automation since we were running a shared business service involving an institution related to national healthcare. Our company used to support around 130 to 140 odd hospitals, causing a peak demand for the tool Oracle E-Business Suite, which became tedious for us. Later on, we introduced Automic Automation and automated the organization's entire processes, after which there were only two people required to monitor the month-end close automation since everything else had been automated. In the beginning, it was called Appworx, and then UC4. The areas of automation I had worked on in the past were successful. At present, I might have an opportunity to again work with Automic Automation.

The tool's scheduling capabilities allow the tool to do output scans based on the report outputs. One can read the output scans, put them into variables, and do some clever calculations for decision-making which a human can do in a normal setting. Automic Automation provides its users with flexibility and a flow chart visibility, allowing users to see how things are moving if there is a need for some action before resuming the workflow. The visibility Automic Automation provides across platforms worked well for our team in the past.

People have started moving to Fusion Cloud or the cloud in general. I wonder how the software works with Fusion Cloud since I don't know if the tool is cloud compatible. I also wonder if the integration of the tool with the cloud is done via YC or if the product has an integration capability that allows it to integrate into an Oracle Cloud. My main concern is whether Automic Automation is ready for the future.

Since I use Automic Automation on-premises, I need some clarity on whether the product can also be used on the cloud.

The tool lacks interoperability features. I would like to add an interoperability feature to Automic Automation, allowing one access to some messaging functionalities. I would like to see something in the product similar to Kafka. The tool should allow one to add subscribers. The tool would become very easy to use when you have multiple clouds in the mix, along with the interoperability feature. The aforementioned set of features in the tool can make it easy to register your different cloud consumers into the tool itself, and then based on the process, it could automatically go to the respective tool for the respective cloud.

I have experience with Automic Automation for three to four years. I am a user of the product.

It was a pretty stable tool. Now when you are dependent upon automation, the knowledge to do the month-end close process is not needed and goes away since you can automate it. There aren't any businesses supporting the automation of the month-end close very aggressively, and because of this, I don't have instances where we weren't able to complete it on a timely basis.

It was a scalable solution. We used the tool for its API capabilities, after which we could integrate it with other applications.

I contacted the solution's technical support since we did have a maintenance contract with them. If we needed any advice or if there was any specific issue, we used to raise a kind of a ticket with them, which the support used to address on a priority basis. The solution's technical support has always been excellent.

I had previously used Control-M and TIBCO. I found Automic Automation to be the best of all the tools I have used.

The initial setup was very easy. For setup, out-of-the-box APIs were there for our leverage which automatically had all your concurrent jobs, and everything was available by default in the tool because of which putting it into a chain, thread, or flowchart was very easy.

The solution was deployed on-premises.

Our company had licenses for five users at that moment in time when it was pretty okay. Our company had paid around 5,000 to 6,000 USD per license for a month.

I would definitely recommend the solution to those planning to use it.

The use cases of Automic Automation were that we were supporting around 140 odd hospitals. We had a little bit of peak resource demand when we were doing it manually. We had approximately a person handling two setup boxes, because of which we had a peak in resource demand that went up to 70 people, especially during the month's end. By introducing Automic Automation, we were able to do all of the work for 140 hospitals using two people for primarily monitoring the tool and were not doing any work manually. I think we got a kind of huge gain, though we had to pay the two people monitoring the tool for their overtime.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

It is an automation tool. We build the workflows and Linux and Windows servers with it, particularly for running client jobs and databases. We use it with a lot of big data ecosystem tools, such as Hadoop or HDFS.

We have automated regular ETL processes such as data transformation. They are loading data into databases and the HDFS file system.

We use it for data transfer jobs between servers. It is being used for SFTP-type jobs, and we run a lot of Python-based things with Automic.

It deals with business-critical processes. It is an important tool for us. For a lot of backend work, we use Automic Automation to run all kinds of jobs. We have some very complex jobs, but we also use it for some basic jobs. It is being used for very critical or high-priority jobs and complicated workflows with hundreds of jobs.

It has been easy for us to manage complex workloads using Automic Automation. The user interface allows us to zoom into a particular section of a complicated workflow. If we have 30 different jobs and scripts tied together in a workflow, we can use the graphical interface to work on one section of the job on our screen. We can also embed one workflow into another. If there is a complicated workflow, we can bunch it all into one workflow and embed that one into a different workflow. This way, we can manage more complicated workflows.

It is easy to use. We previously had a thick client which was Java-based, and now, we have the web-based one. Both have been easy to use. Building jobs and doing the admin side of things, such as monitoring jobs, checking reports of the jobs, and checking job statistics has been easy. It is one of the easy-to-use tools.

We could see its benefits immediately after deploying it. We were replacing a legacy tool with Automic. It was a new solution, and we could see all the new features in it.

We have a lot of alerting features and notification features. It even has a feature to notify us when a job takes longer than usual. If our workflow usually takes two hours to run, but it is taking longer, Automic Automation can notify us. It helps to reduce the error or failure rates.

Automic Automation has freed up staff to do other things more. By automating routine things with Automic, they can move on to doing other things. It surely frees up people's time. It is saving time for our staff.

Automic Automation helped reduce our operational costs. We used to get called often with our old tool because of more failure rates, agents going down, etc. In that sense, it is saving time for staff. If more tickets are generated, we would have to hire more people offshore. With fewer tickers and fewer job failures, we need fewer people.

Automic Automation has helped improve our ability to meet SLAs by being more reliable and more stable. It is a stable tool. Our jobs are not failing because technology is failing or agents are going down or not responding.

Since we bought it, we have not had any big issues. We are satisfied with it. We are able to run multiple jobs. We can build and run complicated jobs. There are no issues. The user interface and other things are easy to use, and people are generally happy with the tool.

We use Automic for both legacy and modern systems. We have automated Linux workflows, shell scripts, database jobs, and big data jobs such as HDFS jobs and Spark jobs.

Integration with the cloud is an area for improvement. They have to make it somehow fit or usable for cloud use cases. Right now, it works great for our on-prem data center, but they have to come up with a very good reason why people should be using it in the cloud. 

We got the tool in 2015, so it has been nine years.

It is stable. We have not had any issues related to stability.

It is scalable. We only have a two-server cluster. We never had a need for more than that. We have the licenses to add more servers in case we need more throughput from Automic.

I have interacted with them a lot of times. They can be better, but overall, they are okay. If we have a severe or high-priority issue where we need help immediately, we get very experienced engineers, but if it is a routine issue, there are a lot of emails back and forth. So, for low-priority issues, there can be some improvement.

Neutral

We used to use a tool called Redwood Cronacle previously. We got separated from our parent company, and our managers had more autonomy to select the tech stack and switch to a different technology.

So, we had an old tool before, and we wanted to replace it. Back in 2015 or 2016, when Atomic was selected as a vendor, we were looking at all the features, the integrations with HDFS, and the agent architecture they have. We were also looking for the stability of the tool. With the previous tool, we had a lot of stability issues, such as agents going off, so we were looking for a more stable tool. We also wanted to have a more modern tool.

Given the number of jobs we had, it took us a long time to move to it, but we expected that. We were able to do it within the allotted time. In that sense, we did not have any unforeseen issues when we moved to Automic Automation.

Given that we had hundreds or thousands of jobs, it took us about six months to complete the move. We totally deprecated our old tool and moved 100% of our jobs to Automic Automation.

It does not require anything big in terms of maintenance. It just requires upgrades. Other than that, there is nothing. The platform is stable.

They have increased the license price a little bit. It is more than what we expected about two years ago. So, there could be some surprises when it comes to pricing.

It is an easy-to-use tool. You do not have to spend too much time learning the interface and other things. It is a stable tool. It is reliable.

We have not used the predictive modeling provided by the AAI capability. We tried it for a while, but we did not have any advanced use cases where we had to dig deep into the system. We have some basic reports, and people seem to be happy with that.

We predominantly use it for on-prem jobs. We never tested it on the cloud. It seems complicated. It needs a lot of setup such as opening the network and the network's firewalls and other things. It seems difficult. We may also need a different type of licensing to run from the agents in the cloud, so we did not try it. In the future, we may use Automic Automation with the cloud.

I would rate Automic Automation a nine out of ten.

We have many different use cases. One use case is to back up all our servers. This is a big usage. The next one is to schedule things on SAP systems. We have SAP reports. We have processes where different SAP systems are involved and we can build up dependencies. We create business process flows. This is a big use case.

We use Automic Automation for managing databases, such as SQL databases, Oracle databases, and SAP databases. We have customers who use UC4 for general monitoring, system jobs, and other things. These are the main use cases.

We have some business-critical processes. For example, if a file is there, then the file has to be loaded to SAP. The customers can then, for example, print the papers to transport the goods. If our UC4 process does not happen, the papers cannot be printed and the goods cannot be shipped to a customer.

Some departments use it to handle the databases. If the process is stuck, then perhaps for Oracle databases, the archive files will not be moved to another folder, and the folder will grow and grow. There would be no space on the file system, and the application that is using the database cannot work anymore. We have some very critical processes and also many processes that are not so critical.

The biggest benefit is that we have one point of view on the processes. We can build dependencies, and we can have access to different platforms. We can integrate different platforms. This is the biggest benefit of Automic Automation.

Our systems are very big. At times, we have more than 11 million jobs per day or executions per day, and we have struggled with this amount in the past, but Broadcom has improved the application so that we can avoid such struggles. We have a big environment. When new functionality is implemented in the system, very often, we are the first ones to struggle with something, and then Broadcom has to improve it. Normally, it is a very stable product for us.

We have some very big workflows, which include more than a thousand objects, so it can be very hard for us to have a good overview of it all. That is why we build our processes in small steps. This way, it is much easier to handle them as one very big workflow. This is our experience, and we try to go in this direction.

We have the agent, or we can use the REST API. It is easy to implement in the end. The big challenge is that if you have many components in your systems, you have to update the components from time to time, and this, of course, is a big effort.

Automic Automation has saved time and helped free up staff for other projects or tasks. We automate many things with Automic Automation. If we had to do these things every day manually, we would lose a lot of time. It helps us save time for other projects.

Automic Automation has helped us reduce our operational costs. I am from the admin team, and we have to roll out the new version of our agent. We have more than 30,000 agents in our system. To update each agent manually, we would have to log onto the server, move the binaries to the target system, stop the agent, and start the agent. It would take a very long time to do this manually for 30,000 agents. With Automic Automation, we have the possibility to just say that we want to update this agent. The binaries will be moved to the platform, and the agent will be stopped and started automatically. We do not have to log in to the servers. It will be done in the background. Therefore, it is a big help for us in saving time.

It has so many possibilities, and many functions are important for us. We use it very often, so it is difficult to say which is the best one. In general, the complete functionality that Broadcom offers is very good. It is very flexible in terms of using the functionalities and build processes. The biggest benefit perhaps is that we have so many possibilities in UC4 or Automic Automation to reach the target. We can more or less build each requirement from our customers.

The visibility and control that Automic Automation provides are good, but it could be improved. In case we run into performance issues, it is sometimes hard to find out what is the real cause for it.

At the moment, the REST interface does not include everything. It was improved a little bit, but some functionality is still open. This is something that can be improved. There is nothing critical that is missing for that we cannot use Automic Automation.

I have been using this solution for more than 25 years.

I would rate it an eight out of ten for stability.

It is easy to scale, but the database should support that scalability. We can scale processes, and it is easy, but in the end, the database must be able to handle that. We sometimes struggle a little bit there. 

In our experience, when we want to scale, we do, but we then see some negative side effects, and we have to go down again. We have to contact the support. In most cases, we need a patch.

Some errors are checked directly if you create an object, and for some errors, it is always best if Broadcom checks whether it fits or not, but, of course, not all of them can be done in this way. If we run into an error that we cannot solve immediately at our end, we have the possibility to create a support ticket. We have the possibility to specify the priority one, two, three, or four. If it is priority one, we normally get very fast support on the phone, and they help. If it is a normal error, a ticket is created, but it takes time to get a solution, which is okay.

I have good experience with technical support. We also have a TSE partner. If we have some problems, we can contact this colleague directly. That makes life very easy.

Positive

In the mainframe environment, we had our own solution, but it was a long time ago. It is not comparable with Automic Automation.

We are not using cloud environments at the moment. We work only with on-premises environments. We have databases. At the moment, we are focusing on on-prem because most of the automations are still on-prem. I guess it will change in the future, but I do not see the change to the cloud environment happening in the next two years.

I have not practiced the deployment process, but I know that we could support some of our customers. They really benefited because of this.

In terms of maintenance, maintaining the processes is easy, but before we roll out a new version, we have to test all the things. This is a big effort for us every time. We struggle every time a new functionality is implemented because in most cases, the product is tested in a smaller environment, and it works. However, we usually reach the limit and then we have to adapt the product. We have to get in touch with Broadcom for that. Before we can roll out a new version, we have to test it properly. This is a big challenge on our end. If you are a customer with a small environment, it is easier to install the application because you have not adapted many things. You can more or less use it as you installed it, but in a bigger environment, you have many adaptations.

We have our TSE as the contact person.

We do an evaluation from time to time. We check out the market from time to time to see if there is perhaps a better product, but at the moment, we are concentrating on this solution.

I could recommend Automic Automation, but it is a bit challenging if you want to implement it in a very big environment. If it is a small environment, it can easily handle that.

I would rate Automic Automation a nine out of ten.