Automic Automation Reviews

The primary use case for using Workload Automation is the automation of applications in different cases for business or data warehouses, controlling programs, and ERP systems (like SAP). We have also began to use it for data center automation for provisioning of virtual infrastructure.

One of the benefits is we have one view of our automated things. We do not have different automated silos. We have one view for our operators, which are doing things 24/7, and need just one interface, not multiple ones.

The main features are the enormous, stripped function, which the software provides. Also, its many different agents which are supported in different platforms. 

After the merger, it is getting more American. Now, they do not have support in French and have limited German documentation. This is a critical problem for companies who have older generations who did not have English in school.

The big pain points are the AWI and the web interface. There needs to be a change with these features.

I am a long-time customer of the solution. The older versions were very stable. Then, there was a switch to versions eight and version nine. This was a few years ago. 

I am happy that Automic understands the needs of their customers and changed their development process, because now, the application is very stable.

It is very scalable. We have in one environment one and a half to two million executions a day. We are one of their bigger customers.

There used to be custom support from Germany, which was one of the biggest features. There was a change. It was German speaking support. That was one of the things, which I am sorry to say is getting worse. They have different support centers now, and the support is worse, not better.

I understand why there was a change. There were different mergers with other companies. There were more products, like the release automation or service orchestration. There are many platforms which are supported. It is very hard for the support to support the whole thing.

When we build a new environment, I am involved. Workload Automation environment setup is smooth, but it could be smoother.

One thing which is not so smooth is CA Release Automation. When doing a PoC of CA Release Automation, and it is not so smooth to install because of the different communications between these components.

Every time there is a task which must be repeated, the solution can reduce costs. When you do it one time manually, or when you do it perhaps two times manually, it is okay. If you have to do it more than this, because of the automation, you can reduce costs.

Possibly IBM, because we are a big IBM customer.

You should have a look at Automic, but also at their competition. There are a few things which they need to change. I would not have said this a few years ago, but now they need to improve.

Workload automation. We are using it for job scheduling and automation of our internal business processes to eliminate a lot of manual workaround.

It is performing very well. We are getting ready to upgrade to version 12. We have been running 10 for the last four and a half years, and we have had a really good experience with the product. 

It has made everybody more efficient and productive. So, it eliminates a lot of the manual workaround processes, which enables our business to get more out of its people, which is always good. 

The ability to be able to automate more of our business processes: 

1. It gives us a lot of leverage in terms of what we can do with the product. 
2. The predictive analytics portion, which is the reporting capability, gives us a lot of useful data.

Keep enhancing the analytics piece. We are just getting involved with that, so we have not had the reporting functionality previously in version 10. We have seen and heard a lot of good things about it. In talking with other customers as well, they would like to see a few enhancements done where you can pull in outside data sources to get a cumulative view from one centralized place.

I think this is something that they are currently working on. This is exciting news for us, because we are definitely looking forward to it.

Stability has been very good. We have not had any major issues or very much downtime at all. If we have had downtime, it has been planned. So, stability has never been an issue for us. 

Scalability scales up and down. We are a fairly small shop right now. I would say we are scaling. We are slowly growing, but we are not anywhere on the scale of what the product can handle, especially talking with other customers that are much bigger than we are. 

We have had no issues with the scalability so far.

On a scale of one to 10, I would say, probably a seven. 

We have had some issues recently going through the process of trying to upgrade from version 10 to 12. Working with support, we have gone back and forth a lot, and a lot of that has had to do with resources not being available either on their side or on our side. 

From that perspective, it could probably improve a little bit, but overall, we are very satisfied. 

I was not involved in the initial setup, but I have been involved in the current upgrade process.

The current upgrade process is straightforward. They have made the process much simpler. After we get to version 12 and any subsequent versions going forward, it should not require any downtime at all. It should not require any system reboots for the upgrade of other components outside of the engine itself, such as the agents.

No. We just decided to stay with what we had because we have had really good luck with it and we are very satisfied with the product. 

We are very satisfied with the solution as a whole. There is a lot of new functionality that we are excited about. We have not had any real major problems systematically with the solution. Overall, with the product, we are very satisfied. There are a few areas that we feel like, from CA's perspective, could be improved, one of those being support. The other being new additional features and functionality that we as customers are looking forward to. 

Consider what you are trying to accomplish with a product like this. Definitely list out all the pros and cons of solutions. Make sure the solutions you are looking at fulfill your business requirements. There are a lot of solutions in the marketplace that have a lot of bells and whistles that may or may not be of benefit to certain companies. Make sure when you are looking at solutions and potential partners that the solutions that you are looking at fit your business needs.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• The level of trust. From a customer perspective, it certainly factors into that.
• The relationship with account managers. 
• How attentive they are to our business needs and how we are evolving as a company as a whole. 
• The overall functionality of the solution that the partners provide. There are a lot of other competing products in the marketplace, so that certainly factors into it as well. 
• We are looking for specific needs and requirements from our business partners, and that certainly throws a big chunk of how we interact and consider what solutions we are going to bring in for our business. 

Typically we use the product to automate the delivery of the files that we pick up from clients and use for processing. Once processing is over, we use it to deliver results downstream to the client's delivery center.

So far, it has been outstanding. We haven't had any issues with it. It has saved us both money as well improved our overall quality.

Cost savings, productivity, the overall quality. When we do have an issue, it's typically not the software that we're using.

It's hard for me to say how it improves the way the company works, because I've only been here for about six months. I know that we've come to rely on it as a standard feature, as to how our processes are designed.

Doing more with less. It's allowing us to increase our overall volumes of data that we're working with, without actually increasing the overall amount of team that we need to monitor it. Since we can rely on its availability and quality, it has not been an issue.

It seems still very technical to get the full features out, which is fine when you're an IT-based company. But once you get to some of the leadership levels, such as myself, you don't have time to go digging into it. It would be nice to have some additional performance features such as reporting, analytics, that kind of stuff.

I've not had any issues with the stability, at all. None that I'm aware of.

I don't know about scalability yet.

I do know that because of what seems to be a simple solution, we are looking at Automic and, CA in general, for ways that we can leverage the technology in our other areas.

I have not used technical support personally, but my team has used it. We've always found them very helpful.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are, overall: 

• reliability
• experience
• references.

There are a lot of good ideas out there, not a lot of proven ideas, this one seems to have proved itself.

If I were to give advice to a colleague who is looking at similar solutions, I would have them have a general idea of where they see the company now, and where they're hoping that the company can be in the next two to five to seven years. Then, look not just at this one product, but the suite of offerings that they have, in making the selection. It seems to me that if we work with Automic and it works very well, the same reasons why we enjoy that product would also apply broader to the company CA.

We have all of our payroll being done in the platform. There are a lot of different processes that need to be taken care of, and they all need to be linked together. When you put them into a workflow, and you know that you've built logic into that workflow, and you have alerting, it's something you can step back from. You don't have to be worried about every single piece of that puzzle. If something goes wrong, you have confidence that some alerting will let you know. It streamlines, it makes things go faster, less eyes on glass.

This product has really helped Comcast and the organization streamline a lot of independent jobs that we might have had. We can take something from crontab, something that's very nitty-gritty and low-level, and be able to put it into a nice interface, and be able to track it at every junction along the way, add alerting, all kinds of stuff, interdependencies. The list goes on and on.

I'll start by saying, one of the big features that they did implement, that a lot of people, us included, were asking for for a long time, is the ability to do zero downtime upgrades. They have introduced that. We haven't gotten to that version yet. That's the dream. 

Honestly, this is a hard question for me to to answer because we're so far back. I just want to get to the point where we can see and use the features that they have added, that we just haven't even been able to touch yet.

All products have downtime. In our specific example, the product has become so critical for our organization that taking the necessary plan-maintenance, to do patching and upgrading, that has become a challenge for us. We're several versions behind now. 

Outages that we incur are at least partially our fault at this point, because our reliance on the platform has become so much that it's a struggle to even upgrade. That aside, we see some downtime from time to time. But I think some of it is self-incurred. We would do ourselves a favor in working on this, to get the platform upgraded to get to the more stable, bugs-are-fixed, and things of that nature.

I just saw a session here (at the CA World conference). We're nowhere near this, but the vendor - CA, Automic - they just increased scalability way more. Like I said, we'll probably never get to this, the point that they've increased it to. 

It's very scalable. We have two nodes that are highly available. You can add new nodes if you need that. You can take a node, a total node, down and still be operating fine. It has a lot of scaling to it.

Initially, is it hard to set up? I don't really think so. I've been working with it for a while now. Once you understand how something works, it becomes pretty easy. 

I'll say this, support team there have been really great, very enthusiastic. Will answer your questions, and that helps a lot. A lot of it is, you don't know what you don't know. Once you do, you've got it figured out.

In terms of upgrading, it's very database-driven. You have to upgrade the database, and then just replace binaries, new software.

When selecting a vendor, support is really important, cost is always a factor. The licensing model can play into it. My team works with several tools, other CA tools and some other company tools. The licensing model can really be a burden, and just takes a lot of time and cycles away from other work that you want to be doing. Things like that. But yes, I think support's a big one. Definitely being able to work with them, knowing that they're there, knowing that they have the aptitude.

I'd rate it an eight out of 10 probably, being honest. I don't have a lot of experience with other tools. 

I think it's great. I think it does what we need it to do. Again, reliability. I think we hurt ourselves a little bit. But they take the product very seriously. They're improving it all the time. I get a lot of excitement. It's hard not to be excited being in this environment (at the CA World conference) and seeing the people that work on it, and seeing the TED Talks, etc. I'm excited to get to the next level. I'm tired of not being able to get there.

Primary use case is to automate our batch processing for our DNA applications, which is our core banking application.

It has helped us automate our processes. It has taken the human factor out of it, so it has improved accuracy, speed, and coordination of our batch processes. It has allowed us to have a hands-off approach to our batch processing and automate complex processes amongst different systems. 

It is very scalable and robust, and it keeps growing with us.

We are working on the 12.1 release right now. It has a lot of things that we have been asking for. I do not have a wish list right now. 

The stability of the platform has been excellent. They are very quick to reply to any issues that we have, and release any hotfixes to fix any issues we have had. We have not had any stability issues with the platform. 

When I joined my company, we were using an application from AppWorks. I was part of the decision process to do the beta with One Automation when UC4 bought them, and then became Automic. I was also part of the decision to stay with the platform and to continue to renew each year.

I was involved in the initial setup. The software itself was pretty straightforward. We converted from the Application Manager Platform to the One Automation Platform, and it was a little complex to get our jobs migrated over. Once they were migrated over, it was pretty straightforward. The software itself was pretty straightforward to install and get going.

Really take a look at Automic. They are a great company to work with and they have the best automation package out there. We did look at a lot of different packages when we were out there. I was not part of the initial decision process, but I did see the use cases that they did, the companies that they looked at, because they made the decision shortly after I came.

They looked at BMC and Tivoli. It was quite a while ago, but they were able to come and do a proof of concept very quickly with our use cases and really show value quickly.

The solution has performed excellent for us. However, the interface with the DNA platform and the partnership with Pfizer has not been as smooth as we would like it to be, but that is not the software's problem. The software itself has been very good.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: partnership. We do not like to have vendor relationships where we just hear from the vendor every so often. We like to have that partnership where they listen to what we need and work with us to fix our solutions. Every company has their own issues they need to solve, and we want somebody that is going to work with us to help us with our growth and what we are facing in the industry.

We have several corporate solutions that need to be integrated with our ITSM products.

Automic facilitates integration to ensure the correct execution of ITIL process workflows. The first was to create service offerings for provisioning virtual machines in both private and public cloud environments.

The creation of virtual machines would have to contemplate the current process of changes, releases, and configurations. Our service catalog should make service offerings available; these involved diverse operating systems, different hardware configurations, and some functioning web services.

An approval process would also be contemplated, where the main steps would be the registration and closing of the change tickets, as well as the registration and deactivation of the generated configuration items.

We have several solutions, but we opted for Automic following the natural evolution of CA Process Automation. The fact that it has native integration with ITSM solutions was also an important factor in the decision. Due to the various possible integrations, all of them need to be in accordance with the ITIL process. This would facilitate the actions that would come in order to implement a DevOps culture in the organization.

The service support is acceptable and response times are fast, whether from the manufacturer itself or from partners.

Due to the fact that we have several solutions to be integrated into the ITSM processes, the possibility of having multiple client areas is important because it favors organizing integrations and automations.

We have other products from Broadcom (CA Technologies) in operation, and integration with these products was very smooth. It integrates easily with CA Service Desk Manager, CA Service Catalog and CA Process Automation, and more.

Adding that to the various packages and plugins available at Marketplace, the learning curve to make automation work was very fast.

We found that some Actions Packs and plugins do not have documentation, are incomplete, or are of poor quality. In most of the packages available, it took time to study and gain knowledge of the features and resources due to poor documentation. This time could be reduced if the documentation was more complete.

If the documentation is not well built, there will always be extra time for testing and some of these generate doubts that turn a simple job into something complex. With the project's schedules in progress, it is difficult to set deadlines, even if they are adjusted for more.

I have been using Automic Workload Automation for two years.

The product demonstrates excellent stability, regardless of whether the installation has high availability or not. We have not seen any problems in this regard.

It is a product that scales easily, but with a short aggregate in its version with high availability.

The most experienced support team is international. Some professionals at the time of implantation are no longer available. The service responds quickly to doubts and so far we have had no difficulties in this regard.

We have also used CA Process Automation, MS System Center Orchestrator, and Control-M.

Complexity only exists when installing high availability. Support from the manufacturer was required.

It was through a Broadcom partner. The team was very experienced in the product, including with use cases in a company in the same area in which our organization operates.

We don't have enough time to calculate ROI yet, but we are optimistic.

There are different licensing fees for cases where high availability is important. There is also a certain complexity in this type of installation.

We only evaluated Broadcom (CA Technologies) products.

Overall, the user experience is extremely good. The monitoring and troubleshooting features are rich and with the dashboards and other features, automation work is made easier.

We use it for the following:

• Automation
• Server positioning
• File transfer solutions
• Daily business processes
• Different processes.
  

• All the possibilities, like scripting different objects. 
• All the components that can be used to design workflows; process automation. 

There are some problems when using the new interface, which is normal, as it is a new technology. In the future, it will be much better. Hopefully, Automic is working hard on the issue.

We would like to see critical path analyzers. I am not sure if it is coming. If it does, out-of-the-box would be nice. We would also like improved SLR monitoring. There are SLR objects, but I can't define an SLR object plus one, or end days. I can only do it for one day. As we are time shifting to another day, it is not possible. This should be improved.

The performance is nice. The stability is very good. We do not have any problems concerning the stability. We have never had any major problems. We have had minor problems, but it has not crashed hard. It runs our business safely.

We have one server, and it has enough hardware with no problems at all. 

In the last two years, the reaction times were not so good. However, in the last four to six months, my experience has with them has been a lot faster. People are called back five minutes after I establish a ticket or incident. They are often doing WebEx and web sessions to get to the point, not making us write 50 pages, then not providing a solution.

It was 13 years ago, we previously used Control-M and switched to UC4. This was a management decision.

I did it 13 years ago at different companies. In the past, we did not use the wizard. We set up the components standalone, then combined them in configuration. It was easy and well documented. 

Presently, there is a problem with the translation. It is some type of hybrid. We have some parts in German and some in English. It should be completely in German and completely in English. It should be better in the future.

We receive time efficiency from this product. For example, some users use to manually transfer many files from A to B, and we have automated this task. We used to have complex solutions just to gain information from files, read files, put in a customer filter, or share something. In the past, many people had to look into the files manually. 

No competitor has this mass possibilities to design processors for automation solutions.

Test it for a long time. You have to look if it fits into the mindset of your company.

Main criteria when selecting a vendor: 

We look to other companies about the following:

• What do they use? 
• How is their experience? 
• Does the support work? 
• How quick is the support? 
• How good is the documentation? 
• How good is the vendor concerning new technologies and time to market new solutions in the software?

We primarily use it for job scheduling and business automation.

It is the automation. Saving time and money is the key. We automate everything. 

We are able to use notifications for escalation, so if there is a problem, we can find out about it quickly.

The workflow allows us to integrate multiple applications into one flow and come up with a business result.

The one big issue that we have is around passwords and not being able to update passwords through a different tool. This is not available yet. It is packed in there with 12.2 and the login objects, but not with the connection object, which is a big thing for us to allow us same password updates without having to manually update them.

We have had no big production issues in the five years that we have had this product. So, it is really stable.

It is scalable. Though, it costs to scale. While, it is scalable, the add-ons are expensive.

Technical support has been good. Though sometimes it varies from time to time, where it transitions from good to bad. We have not had to use them so much recently, because we almost know enough about the product at this stage to support it ourselves. For the critical issues they are very good, but for the the lower priority stuff over the phone it is a bit difficult to engage them sometimes.

We were replacing AutoSys. We saw Automic as a better version of it, which it definitely has been. We replaced that an existing solution because it was no longer fit for its purpose.

It was straightforward. We made it difficult on ourselves at the time. We have recently changed and made it simpler. As regards to a mixed environment, it was fine.

We have seen big improvements in automation and automated tasks allowing our people to work on more important things for the company, as well as getting financial data quicker. It also provides us time savings from a company point of view.

There were a couple other vendors.

I would definitely recommend the product.