Automic Automation Reviews

We use the CA Automic solution for our complete business batch. We have several use cases, depending on the subcompany. We have an ABS system with a great batch and the lean system, therefore we have three different main batches with approximately 900,000 objects in the CA system. 

We have mostly connected our complete systems on the web front-end for the customer, so they can choose their products, manage their contracts, and get a new contract. This is all put into the automation system and handled there until, at the end, we have the output for printing, then we send it back to the customer.

We are on the user side of CA, not system engineers. We control the different batches, and this way is better for handling the systems than the way that we did it before. I like the script engine of CA, where you can build everything you want. If there are features not implemented, then you can script something around it, and it works.

• The search is sometimes a little bit slow.
• The calculation of the calendars needs improvement, as I have problems from time to time.
• I am excited about the new web GUI from the B12. However, I am not sure about it, except for the main client that we had before needs improvement.

The system is very stable. I have very impressed with it. Also, it all depends on if it is Linux and Oracle or Windows and SQL. We have both in our company, and both are very stable.

We have a large batch with many objects in the CA system. Therefore, we are always at the upper end of the performance that the product can handle.

The search is sometimes very slow. I have heard in the B12 version that there is a new solution for this issue, but I don't know if it is usable because they duplicate the database and then you can search there, not the online database. We just moved to the B12 version, so we will see how it work. The rest of the performance is okay.

From what I hear, it's good support. They always try to support us in the best way. 

Last year, when moving from B8 to B10, they have changed several features. One of our highly used features was no longer available. While it had a similar name, it was a completely different function. After calling the support and checking with them, they implemented the old feature for us again on the newer version.

About 15 years ago, we had CA-7 from CA. Then, we changed to the UC4 Automic. Now, we are back to CA.

Before we have our main releases, we always check between other products for the batch. In the last few years, it has always been Automic which was best for our needs.

I have seen all different types of scheduling systems. It is the best for my company to handle.

It has an easy to handle GUI. Because of the script engine, you can do nearly everything you want. I prefer it to other solutions. 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: It has to handle our batches, because we use many objects. It is good how we can migrate from the new tool and how much work is accepted for the migration. At the moment, we have not found anything better than the CA solution.

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.

I use Automic Workload Automation for SAP-related use cases. They are primarily functional and nonfunctional job executions for SAP Windows Unique. So, mainly for a business process or business functions, job execution, and creating dependencies related to retail like Oracle and SAP jobs execution.

I like that Automic Workload Automation has many features compared to other products. There are a lot of good features, and architecture-wise there is a valuable client concept. The architecture and the multi-tenancy is a multi-client concept. That is also useful.

The manage file transfer area could be better. The file transfer area needs improvement. Other products like Control-M have some good features in this area.

I have been working with Automic Workload Automation for the last ten years.

Automic Workload Automation is a stable solution. It's good because, architecture-wise, it has high reliability. So, we recommend it to our customers and ask them to use two or three-node architecture. If one goes down, the other should be up. So, two or three-node architecture is stable.

Automic Workload Automation is a scalable solution. Scalability depends on the architecture. We are currently running 10,000 jobs or 20,000 jobs with two-node architecture. If we want to add one node or if we're going to add more resources, you can do it online. You do not need any downtime. You can run thousands of pages and millions of jobs.

Technical support is good. I worked with a particular dedicated client, and we had to reach out to Broadcom once or twice a month for help. Whenever we raised a ticket, they responded within a day or the next day. Most of the time, it wasn't even an urgent issue.

Nowadays, they have very helpful knowledge articles. If I have an error and they share some knowledge articles, I get the solution through those articles. They are helpful.

The initial setup is straightforward. It hardly takes half an hour or one hour, but small components like agents must be installed later. The initial fresh installation will take about one hour.

I'm not sure about licensing costs, but I know the base price is about $3,000, and you can get some kind of discount per node.

I would tell potential customers that they must use third-party software like Control-M, Stonebranch, AutoSys, or Tidal to migrate to Automic Workload Automation. 

If we compare it to any market-leading software, like Control-M BMC, Automic has the same capability, but Automic provides everything as a bundled product. Others like BMC sell their products in different modules. So, you have to buy the license, and on top of that, you have to buy the separate modules. 

I would also tell potential users that with competing products, they need a job-based license if they plan to scale up and avoid penalization. But as Automic is node-based, there will be no penalty if you are running 5,000 jobs today and 6,000 jobs tomorrow. It'll be the same.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Automic Workload Automation a seven.

We use Automic Workload Automation to schedule the batch processes for all systems within the University of Colorado. We use file transfer jobs to send or receive files with each incoming file authenticated through Automic. We code Automic jobs to update PeopleSoft run controls automatically, continuously run processes for real-time results, bounce application servers, and we notify all process failures through text and email.

In 2014, we saved over 9000 hours on an annualized basis when we removed the manual updating of Run Controls. Removing manual updating also improves efficiencies, productivity, and human errors.

Another example of how Automic has improved how we function is the ability to automate our abend notifications. This ability has improved our work/life balance during the weekends when we are on-call. Instead of being tasked with monitoring the system during the weekend, the abend notifications are automated to send a text to our cell phones. That enables us to go about our daily lives and only log on if something breaks. This has also enabled us to staff 24/5 instead of 24/7, saving two FTEs who would otherwise work 12-hour shifts throughout the weekend to just monitor batch.

Currently, we are in the process of rebuilding our student information system jobs in Automic. The reconstructed jobs will use Automic capabilities and coding to automatically update college terms, financial aid years, census dates, etc which will fully automate our data processing. The code uses a calendar and variable tables to update the run control values as necessary depending on the date. Fully automating term changes will eliminate 90% of our ticket load and remove the manual updating of 7000 Peoplesoft run controls per year. This will also improve our customer's end experience, they will no longer be required to submit cumbersome tickets detailing run control changes. 

An important feature is the ability to modify PeopleSoft Run Controls at run-time. We run all of the batch processes for the Student Information Systems, Finance, and HCM, which use Peoplesoft in our shop. The ability to modify dates, query names, batch numbers, etc., is paramount to my team. The ability of the Automic script/coding is also a valuable asset as it provides a way for us to meet any customer's requirements, no matter what it is, we can do it with Automic scripting.

There are some scripting elements that could be added like being able to reset a task in a schedule through Automic scripting. 

Also, some of the things we don't use are mainly because we don't know how to use them. Hands-on training can be expensive, so we find other ways to work around things to forgo the hands-on training. It is also an issue because we are a Linux shop and most trainers are Windows-based.

The product itself is very stable; we have not encountered stability issues with it.

No issues with scalability.

The technical support team is fantastic. Any ticket submitted is worked on quickly and professionally. The team is very good about following up to make sure the solution worked and, if it didn't, they will work with you until the issue is resolved. They are hands-down the most efficient support team I have come across and they are the one team that will always provide results.

We ran our Finance, HCM, and CIW processes through Unicenter. I don't believe that Unicenter was very user-friendly and they found it difficult to integrate with other applications.

We ran the Student Information System batch on the mainframe using CA7 as the batch scheduler. We switched from Unicenter to Automic and from the mainframe to Automic, mainly because Automic can integrate easily with any other application or service. When we got off of the mainframe and moved the student side to PeopleSoft, it only made sense to use Automic as the batch scheduler.

The initial setup of Automic is simple and easy. As long as it can talk to what it needs to talk to, there are no issues with the installation.

Initial setup was with a support representative. I can't say the level of expertise because I was not there when it was first installed. I can say that since I have taken over this department, any contact with Automic support has always met or exceeded expectations and any rep has always been well skilled at most things, other than Peoplesoft. 

The overall cost of Automic is minimal compared to what we can do with the product. Our return on investment far outweighs the cost each year.

Certain licenses can be a bit expensive. The PeopleSoft agents, in particular, are a bit pricey. We are using agent groups in our development environment which allows us to switch between the different Peoplesoft instances without having to change the host names in the jobs and without the need for multiple PS licenses.

I believe we looked at BMC and other CA products but chose Automic because of its ability to easily integrate with other applications and services, and because of how user-friendly it is.

It is hands-down the best product out there. You might find others that are cheaper, you might find others that sound better and cost more, but in the end, the best automation product on the market is Automic. Save yourself some time and start with the best first. It is easy to install, easy to maintain, reliable, stable, user-friendly, and versatile. One can achieve great automation with Automic.

Our primary use case would just be our production batch processing.

It's been great. We've had a few bumps in years past but it's been rock solid since the last couple versions.  We also perform all internal file transfers and many of our company's external file transfers.

We have a lot of jobs that have to run, and it's easy to see what the status is.

We've been using it for around 15 years now. We're very comfortable with it, that's probably the biggest thing. I've been using it for a long time, so the comfort level is there. I don't see any reason I would want to switch to anything else. It does everything we need. Actually, we're not even utilizing it to its fullest ability. We're probably a couple versions behind what the latest version is. And there are a lot of features we want to get to, to start utilizing, but it all takes time and does require the correct resources available.

The usability of the user interface.  It just makes sense and it is easy to see the flow of the processes.  We have been slowly migrating to the web-based user interface, which has some of the older features missing, but also introduces additional new features.

In terms of additional features, it's probably stuff they already have available that we haven't started utilizing yet. 

I really like the idea of the Zero Downtime Upgrade, but really excited to be able to use the centralized agent upgrade. That's probably one of our biggest pain points right now. When we go to a new version, the agents have to all be upgraded. We have several thousand agents and that's a painful process because it's slow and time-consuming to upgrade. Now they have the ability to automate it, we're working on getting to that point.  The analytics that are available show great potential.

Stability has been great. My team, we call ourselves "the invisibles" because things run so well that sometimes you almost feel like you have to try to break something to actually get acknowledged.

In terms of scalability, it's been able to do everything we want and we're probably using one percent of the resources, day to day. We'll have up to 100 people logged into the system and it just runs. It still gets good response.

We've used technical support on occasion. Every once in a while you run into something that you're unsure about or not sure how to utilize it. I've been happy with the support we've received. It's definitely improved, like I said, over the years. It's been great. The response has been much quicker.

For the open system side, I don't believe we were using anything previously. Probably anything that they would have been using would have been Microsoft Task Scheduler or a Unix cron. But we were not using anything that I know of at the time. We did have CA-7 on the mainframe, which we still actually use on a limited basis, but that is being sunsetted. So we were not using anything really.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. I actually used it from an operator's standpoint. I did not start maintaining the system until about a year and a half after we brought this system in.

It was implemented prior to my time of working with the application.

I am unsure as it was before I started administering the application.

When our company is investing in a new vendor, our top criteria are 

• support
• features
• stability is probably the biggest.

I don't have a whole lot of experience with other automation systems, other than CA-7, which we're on a very old version of, but I really like the Automic Workload Automation due to its ease of use.

We use it for multiple system automation and file transfers to secure POS networks.

The speed in which data is collected form all POS terminals has changed the way our industry has started analyzing how to schedule showtimes, drive advertisements, and change concession pricing. IT is no longer a quarterly process but something that the business can change within 24 hours.

The ability the system has to dynamically create groups, schedules, and workflows is crucial to AMC. In a fast-paced, agile environment, the teams at AMC are very lean. Monitoring and maintaining of all the approximately 2,000,000 executions of Automic jobs are managed by only three employees. The system has been designed to be as dynamic and versatile as the business processes and teams that own them.

The direction in which the UI is going is concerning to me. It does not offer the security context we would need to implement future versions. While I see benefit in the Web UI, the security it would lack in separating a user's experience from an administrator's experience is an issue for us. MFA functionality is required since we're dealing with connectivity to the POS and for PCI/SOX compliance.

Another area for improvement would be SQL performance. While tracing SQL traffic, we noticed a lot of commands that cause contention/locks as well as forced waits. The efficiency of the SQL could be greatly improved (in some cases by simply replacing nested Selects and using NOLOCK hints).

Finally, re-evaluating the security model that the ECC uses would be very beneficial. While granularity is very powerful, some intelligence around it is the only way it is manageable. I should be able to grant a user access to execute a job without having to directly list every include, prompt set, output scan, script, login, etc. An inherited read for execution purposes would accomplish the same results without making the admin list every single object every time, as well as deny the user the ability to edit.

There have been some issues with performance when there is slowness with database resources. We have also discovered issues with some objects if file size/count is high. I believe a patch has been created for that though.

We do not have any scalability issues.

Technical support is amazing. They always follow through and are extremely personable. They help as much as they can, and have no problem asking others on their team for help to make sure the right answer is given.

We did not have a previous solution.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The consulting team for implementation was great to work with and taught us the system very well.

The team at Automic are great with understanding your needs as a business. They are always willing to go the extra mile to make sure the solution works for you. This is not only something they do in their software but also in their licensing.

We looked at BMC, Tidal Software, ORSYP, and ActiveBatch.

I would advise anyone purchasing this product to do the architecture work ahead of implementation. While it is easy to move objects between non-prod and prod or other environments, if you put the work up-front into designing how to move things or manage outages, etc., it makes your world a lot easier.

We have many systems, like SAP, Linux, and Windows systems. We use it for crossover and production, beginning from Host to SAP to Windows, to make a print page for all our users and customers. It is not possible do our jobs without automation software. Automic is a great help to us.

We have been using automation since 2003 (version 263.G). Today, we are at version 10 and looking to upgrade. However, we do not what version will to upgrade to due to our hardware requirements. We must check if what we have is okay, or if we must buy some more servers, laptops, and screens. Therefore, we are checking out versions 11 and 12, or we deciding if we should wait for 12.2. We are seeing what other are doing and determining what the problems for a migration might be.

The main things that we use it for are job control and batch. For these, it does very well.

We not use all features nor all the add-ons.

Version 10 is stable. New software never comes out without some problems. That is the problem when you go with new. Therefore, we are waiting a little bit, since it is very important that the software is stable. In the near future, we must have a stable software that we can do our job yesterday, today, and tomorrow. This is the most important thing; you must trust the software. 

When you look at other technical support hotlines, the Automic team is very good.

The hotline can take a long time. They will say, "I will take it and give it to the Level 2 support." That is okay. We do the same thing in our company, like a front office cleaning calls. I still do not like it. It means more team more time waiting for a good technical answer and solution. That is a problem. Unfortunately, we can't request having 20 technical support teams dedicated our business. 

We have using Automic for long time. From the first step, you need to have time to install it. When you want to use the entirety of Automic, it is heavy. In the beginning, our administration chief told us to use 10 percent of your time for Automic administration. Now, we are using 100 percent (our entire job); it is a full-time job.

Our systems are not that big. When we have trouble or have updates, it is a full-time job. We must talk with other teams. We must see that the hotfixes are updated. This cannot be done in ten minutes as some modules and add-ons come together, and we must see how to orchestrate it within our company. We must look at these things, which are part of the company, see how they can be used. We spend a lot of time of this.

We use it to automate our business processes. It is just for automation and scheduling.

We have worked about 20 years with this product. We have migrated for 20 years from CA to Automic. It is very interesting. Now, we are back to CA, because they have taken over the Automic company. The benefits also include the automation of our processes. We have worked mostly with SAP software, and we have other things in our plans. We want to automate the distribution of servers, so clients can make a request from ServiceNow. That way, companies can order servers on the internet that we normally we would build during the process for internal use. Because developers sometimes need a very fast machine for testing, you can click in ServiceNow to request a machine after two hours, then you can have a machine to plug into. At the moment, we have tried to make this a digitalized process, although we have a problem with ServiceNow.

It is easy to integrate different systems in one platform, then to automate it. You have a job, then one part of the job is going to the SAP system, and the other one is going to ServiceNow or to another system. Then, they all combine into one process.

The very special feature that we use is the connection to ServiceNow.

It does not have the same functions as the old version, which makes our developers angry because because they must work with this tool. We going forward it may not be possible.

CA has missed the product's focus. We have a lot of developers in our company, and we are experiencing the same problem. However, the CA company has not seen that developers and clients are having a problem, which is not good for the product that we do. CA took over the Automic company last year, and we do not think this was a good direction for the product.

I would like to see the rich client with the product for the developers.

It is more important for us to have a longer, stabler releases. We do not need so many features. This is a problem of bigger companies where the management wants new features, but the product has no stability after that.

It would be good to have a mobile app, where you can monitor your process, just to see if it is running or if it is blocked. The user interface on the web is not good for the developers. Features are missing, and for the client, it is too complex. At the moment, we build our own UI. We have programmers in Java API, and we have a Client which works on the mobile phone. It can start jobs, make the schedules stop and start, and see the statistics on a smartphone.

We have had issues with the performance. We have a job now in production, but the product is not very stable. ServiceNow creates problems with the Automic entry of the connector, so the stability could be a little bit better with this product.

Sometimes, we have some performance problems. I am not sure it is because of the software. It might be because we have a huge amount of objects in our system. In this case, it can happen that we often have performance problems. I am not sure if it is because of the product, it is more because of the objects in our system.

Because the product is based on the SQL Database, we have too many activations. The scalability is limited by the SQL in the background, and that is a problem. If you want to take jobs to other systems, you must build the developer our way. At the moment, we are building a new system. We have it for every country and have separated it for machines. It is mostly getting better, but the scalability to build it on new systems or to split it is not so easy.

We have technical support. We also have a connection in Austria with the support colleagues there. 

The first step: You must describe the problem. At the most, filling in a checklist.

Then: It helps to take the telephone, and talk to a technical engineer directly. 

That is why their technical support is very good.

Mostly, we contact support because our problems are very complex. Normally, we find problems that they have never knew about before. We have new technology and build actions on the automation system, then we find objects which can work with those actions, because we have technical limitations. 

We have a contact within the support, and also with a freelance in Austria. We have worked together with several people to find a solution for this new philosophy. Automic states you should build everything with actions and take multiple actions with business processes. However, not all objects are usable for actions that we see.

If you would have to start all your jobs manually, it would cost you a lot of time and money.

You do not need any humans to start jobs, so you can save a lot of money.

From the bad products, the Automic is the best. All products in the market are not good since they are simple workload scheduling. There are some things are missing in the Automic product, which our management does not see.

I would recommend using Automic.