Automic Automation Reviews

Automic Workload Automation is a workload automation tool.

Automic Workload Automation's use cases are primarily focused on large enterprise users. With over 3,500 customers, the tool is well-suited for core automation tasks in various sectors, especially in the banking industry where Automic has a strong presence. The platform offers largest number of out-of-the-box integrations which sets it apart from other workload automation solutions. This integration capability is a key area where Automic Workload Automation excels.

Unlike other Orchestration or Workload Automation tools, Automic Workload Automation stands out as a versatile single solution capable of handling various use cases such as business process automation, workload automation, service orchestration, and DR automation. There's no need for additional tools to make it compatible with your specific use case. Automic Workload Automation can handle it all without requiring any sideline tools to be installed.

The concept is that with a single skill set, you can automate all your daily automation requirements.

Automic Workload Automation offers a useful scripting language that is built on top of JCL. Unlike other workload automation tools in the market that have to rely on third-party integrators, such as Python to develop their own scripts, Automic Workload Automation provides a scripting language that can be easily implemented with support from the vendor. This makes the implementation process smooth and hassle-free, and the scripting language can be used to run any impetus within the process. With the help of this scripting language, there are no limitations to what can be automated. Automic Workload Automation provides a flexible and powerful solution for automating various tasks.

The solution can be deployed quickly with Kubernetes which is useful.

There are frequent updates fixing vulnerabilities and other problems.

Automic Workload Automation could improve the SaaS deployment.

The vendor should provide updated features for customers to try on a trial basis.

I have used Automic Workload Automation for approximately within the last 12 months.

The solution is stable. My customers have not raised tickets in years.

Automic Workload Automation is highly scalable, such as adding endpoints. There is little maintenance required. With a Kubernetes installation, there are auto-scaling and other helpful features.

We have over 3,000 users using the solution worldwide. Additionally, we have SMBs and other customers. We have customers in all industries, such as retail, banks, insurance companies, aviation industries, and airlines.

Automic Workload Automation has been in the market for 10 to 15 years, which has made it a strong and reliable solution. The platform has a large and active community, as well as partner networks available worldwide that contribute to the community. If you encounter any issues, the Broadcom community is always available to provide support, and the technical support team is also excellent. In the past, there were some issues related to connection issues, which affected all sectors, especially the fourth part. However, Automic has been actively working on improving the support side since 2009 and has been highly accurate in providing support.

Initially, deploying Automic Workload Automation was challenging, but it has become much simpler. However, if you want to set it up in a distributed environment, it may take a day or two due to critical sites and firewall requirements. For a single box installation, it hardly takes thirty minutes to set up.

We do the implementation of the solution. We have all specialized documentation that we follow making the process simple for us. We can deploy the agents from the console ourselves.

The cost of the solution depends on the number of systems that are being orchestrated.

My recommendation to existing users is to consider onboarding more use cases on Automic Workload Automation. The platform has a lot of potential, and it is not necessary to limit its use to just one team. You can expand and expose the tool to other departments, such as IT or business vendors, to unlock its full potential. Since you have already invested in the product, you can brainstorm within your organization to identify areas for automation improvements and onboard more use cases accordingly.

I rate Automic Workload Automation a ten out of ten.

Our company uses the solution to run scripts for customers. For each use case, we create a description and use it with the agent to schedule run times. 

Our team size ranges from 40 to 50 people and varies across clients or use cases. 

The solution includes many features and is scalable and stable. 

The automation tool provides scripting that is easy to convert for specific requirements. 

The pricing has the potential to be high because it is based on the number of servers and agents. 

I have been using the solution for five years. 

The solution's stability is better than other products. We do not see the solution fail much at all. 

We had issues with other products where servers would go down or items needed to be fixed and that caused struggles. 

The solution is scalable. 

I worked closely with technical support for overall assistance during my first installation and they were dedicated and helpful. 

I have not needed support for issues but am currently working with them to complete another installation. 

Sometimes support leaves out details, but they do help a lot with tools. 

I rate technical support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The ease of setup depends on the person who handles it. The setup is a bit different because it includes four or five components that require separate installations. There are various steps and processes to follow. If you have knowledge of the solution, then setup is easy. 

Typical setups take 14 to 16 hours for server and data installations. 

We implement the solution for customers. 

The pricing is based on the number of servers and agents. 

Our developers chose the solution because of its scalability, stability, and features. Technical support is also much better than what competitors offer.

The solution allows us to do everything we want. We can use it for smaller items or large-scale projects with no problems. 

It is important to understand workload automation and how the solution functions. Work with your customer to determine the infrastructure and number of agents or servers. Create an infrastructure table and then starting installing to those specifications. 

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

The Zero Upgrade feature is the most valuable. 

Its dashboard can be improved. In version 12, they have already moved to a web-based interface from a UI. We are looking into this feature now. We are also looking for available APIs that we can use to interface the engine into our other systems.

There should be a subservice facility that we can use to interface with Microsoft Teams and send out authorization on job executions. We have seen a feature like this in other products that we are looking into.

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

It is stable. We are not experiencing any major issues.

It is scalable. Around 30 people are using it in our organization. 

We previously had platinum support, and we were very happy with their technical support. After we moved away from platinum support, their technical support is just not that good.

We only had MSTs previously. We shifted to Automic Workload Automation because we wanted to integrate SAP and other business requirements. 

We are now looking into other products outside Automic because of its cost. We have shortlisted BMC Control-M, Stonebranch, ActiveBatch, and IBM.

The initial setup was complex because we have multiple endings running in every country that we manage. We also have an active-active setup and two instances running on one machine. We use it to widen our range so that we can have two engines running on the same machine. 

It is currently deployed on a private cloud and on-premises. We have around ten people to maintain this solution.

It costs too much. That's why we are now looking at other products.

I would rate Automic Workload Automation a six out of ten.

The primary use case is workload automation in our SAP area. The performance is fine.

We have seen improvements in time efficiency and cost resources, because we are mainly focused on the SAP area, and its automation in that part. We also have some other complex areas where we help the applications with their processes. Unfortunately, we do not use it in the automation of those parts in the infrastructure, like other companies have talked to here. Therefore, our company is still meant to be for SAP Scheduler, and not given the necessary management attention. 

It helps in the usual business, though it does not help us get in front of our competitors.

• Flexibility
• Easy to use
• Stable automation engine
• We do not have to use a broad variety of agents to connect to different types of systems.

• We would like to have some features with the AWI with the founding technique, which cannot currently be delivered. 
• We would like some advantages, which we had with the Java UI, with the automation engine.
• One topic, which we would like, is to be able to have more differentiate in the reorganization of SAP to more precisely view which types of objects and clients would be reorganized and archived. The archive file is not helpful for us. If we write the archive file, we do not use them because in the past the tools were not that satisfying. 
• Improvements also would be good in the area of performance measurement.The system overview and performance are not being measured because we can't derive any concrete information.

The stability is fine. There are always a few little parts or points with issues, but overall, it is very stable.

It is quite stable in terms of size and requirements. The stable environment does not matter that much. However, the product, with it types of agents, and the sizeable automation engine, seems to be highly scalable.

We have been satisfied with the technical consultants. We ordered them for special situations. 

Technical support is different. Sometimes it is fast and very helpful, sometimes it seems to be bureaucratic and slow. It depends on the questions. Over the last few years, we have noticed it worsening. Ten years ago, there was more personal contact. We had the feeling that the support was much more involved in the system and better informed in the topics. Because of the very high speed of growth, there are only a few dozen of people with ten years of experience, which is another problem of size.

Initial reason was the projects which from SAP R2 to R3. That was the reason why they looked for a different scheduling system. 

Meanwhile, we are controlling nearly all SAP systems that we have, so it has a three digit number. In this area, no one has any idea of using a different tool for it. The another direction where we hope that we can move into other directions, but without the necessary management, it can't.

The people involved in the initial setup were convinced that they had the right product and absolutely satisfied with the setup in 2001.

I know that it was evaluated against other tools in 2000, but I do not know which ones.

Have a look at following:

• Technical functionality
• Attitude of the vendor
• The way that they are in contact with their customers. 
• Flexibility of the solution.
  

Most important criteria when selecting vendors: Our company wants to have strong partners. Therefore, they change the direction from selecting specific small companies for a specific question or task to have more global partners for big areas, where they can rely on the necessary knowledge in the company in terms of enough people with this knowledge, not only one specialist, and no one else can take over in the case of any problem, holiday, or leaving the company.

It is basically for workload automation. Automic has also got other features, but we are not using them. We are just sticking to workload automation. We basically do batch processing through automation. We mostly have nightly batches and cyclical batches during the daytime.

The reason we went with Automic is very simple. We were using ESP, which was a Broadcom product. So, Automic happened to be a natural fit. It was a much easier transition from ESP to Automic. We had familiarity with the vendor and the product.

There are pain points, like anything else. Sometimes, things they say work, and sometimes, they don't work. You need to find out why they don't work and then go back and have them fixed. 

We have been using it for close to a year.

Like any product, there are glitches. We had used ESP for almost 30 years. So, we were very familiar with the tool, and it was pretty stable. This is an agent-based solution. So, sometimes, the agents don't respond and triggers don't work. Those kinds of issues are still there.

Workload automation is not heavy stuff. When things have to happen, they just wake up and do the work. It is not like an E-commerce solution where your workload is going to increase by X factor and then you add X servers. It is not that way. So, from a scalability point of view, it is scalable.

They're pretty okay. We worked with CA before Broadcom bought them. So, we've got a long working relationship with them for over 20 years, and their support is pretty okay.

They work with a partner to help you with implementation and migration. The partner had tools for migration from ESP to Automic, which was helpful.

Its price is way up there with BMC. It is a little bit on the expensive side.

We only use it for workload automation. We haven't explored the tool as such. It claims to have a lot of features, but we have just touched the surface of it.

From a workload automation point of view, there are multiple tools. You've got BMC. You've got Automic, and you've got Stonebranch. Stonebranch is the smaller of the lot, and from a solution perspective, their agent can work with any other automation tool. Cost-wise also, it is much cheaper than the others. If you are a small enterprise and don't have an existing tool, Stonebranch wouldn't be a bad option.

I would rate Automic Workload Automation a seven out of ten.

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 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.

We used Automic for a multinational pharmaceutical client.

In the latest version, we can access the solution through a web browser as well. 

The web-based edition is missing a lot of the most important features available in Automic, we have absence. For example, when I'm scheduling a job, there is normally a flag that you can toggle to activate and deactivate the task, but that doesn't work properly in the web version. It's missing a lot of the calendar and scheduling features. 

My organization used the tool for almost 10 years, but we were dissatisfied when we upgraded to web-based edition because it doesn't provide all the options. It's challenging to create a new job or edit and reconfigure an existing. The web version has to be improved on various levels. 

Previously, we were using Solaris with Automic, but now I think it's Unix and Windows. I don't know what version you are going to provide for the cloud. The cloud always supports Unix and Windows, so it means the tool is cloud compatible.

In the web version, everything is moving from the on-premise server to the cloud. So in this scenario, the Automic tool has to be more cloud-oriented. We are not sure how it will work in the cloud. Since 2011 or 2012, we have been using Automic on-prem only. It would be nice to have more documentation about using the cloud version of Automic. The tool could be more user-friendly as well. Most people consider Automic to be a difficult tool to understand and use.

I've been using Automic for six years, but we just switched to another tool called AutoSys six months ago.

Automic is 99 percent stable. We've never had a problem with stability.

The scalability could be improved because we have three kinds of tools on our hardware itself, and we don't know whether Automic will accommodate the other two jobs as well. We have 200 direct users and probably 1,000 who benefit from the tool indirectly.

It depends on the terms of the support contract, but sometimes it will take two or three days to fix an issue. The impact is high because this type of job scheduling solution is used mostly for finance. For example, let's say there are 3,000 jobs scheduled, and four jobs fail. That could mean millions of dollars lost.

It should be fine If they provide support within eight to 16 hours, but they typically take three days to get a response. That won't work because on the impact side. On the other hand, it's highly stable, so we are generally okay, but we still face some bugs every six months or so. When that happens, we expect a speedy response.

The initial setup was straightforward, but it gets complex when you start using it. It will only be complex if you're a new user. The total deployment time for the original and web version was about three months. That includes installation and testing. During the testing, we found missing features, so it took three months to set the solution up, configure it correctly, and test it. 

The personnel needed to manage and maintain the solution depends on staffing and scheduling. For example, If you are providing 24-hour support 365 days a year, you need six at the most. We need one person per shift, and we have three eight-hour shifts. Including backups, that's three to six people. 

I don't have any numbers about the return handy. We didn't renew the license, and we've already onboarded the other solution and started using it. It's costly and our companies are cutting costs. They consider this an extra cost, so we didn't renew for this year.

The license for Automic is around $7,000 per year, which is somewhat costly, but it includes enterprise support. 

I rate Automic Workload Automation eight out of 10.