Automic Automation Reviews

Primary use case is for scheduling of our LCM, our Loyal Customer Mailers. Mailers go out with coupon packets for different households. Automic is used for scheduling all of the jobs that build those mailers, and send them off to the printer.

Performance-wise, we do run into problems sometimes, because we've only had it for about a year and a half. We're still working out some kinks as far as performance goes. But overall the performance of the tool itself has been pretty good. At first, it was a little bit slow, but we've worked out a lot of those performance issues over time, it's working a lot better now.

For me the biggest one is flexibility. It allows you to do so many things on so many different platforms. We have an Oracle shop that runs off of Oracle packages that are executed from Linux boxes. With that, whatever platform it touches, it can allow you to do so many different things. We can take the power of Linux, the power of Oracle and, inside Automic, we can just build our own little packages, and our own little toys, to go out there and do things.

For instance, one that I'm working on right now is to build test data to run extracts against production data. To build smaller tables, subset tables, for the development teams on the test side. It's a little bit like building my own version of TDM. But Automic allows me to do that, and to be able to schedule it, to go out on its own and do copies of these tables, on a regularly planned schedule. It makes it very powerful.

Number one, A+, is the scripting language, and the ability to go in, and take an already robust, consistent, strong tool, and turn it into an incredibly scalable, flexible tool, that you can literally do anything you want to with.

Back in the old days, I would think, "Okay, if I need a specific job done, I would think, what type of Shell script, or maybe a Python program, would I have to right to get this done?" Now I can do everything inside of Automic itself, using Shell scripts, or using the Automic scripting language itself; makes it very powerful.

A problem we've had is where file transfers are being kicked-off from one server to another, without us doing it. It's something internal to Automic that's doing it. And it is costing a little bit of performance, and it's a time issue, on the zero client. But otherwise, it's not affecting the other product issues.

I would also like to see a little bit more connectivity, more, "Play nice with other toys." For instance, we have IServ as our primary tool for our service request tickets. In order for it to play nice with Automic, we had to actually create a file and put it somewhere, where Automic can see it. I would like to see more connectivity with other tools, or more compatibility with other tools.

A little less button clicking, in the navigation of the tool itself would also help. There is a lot out there, and I understand that's what keeps the tool robust. It keeps our options open, but it's a bit click-y sometimes. To get where you need to go, you have to go through 10 levels.

The stability of the tool is fantastic. In the year and a half, it's really only gone down a couple of times. The tool itself is very stable.

What's nice is that it splits it up into clients. We have our own client where we do our own work. We don't have to cross into the path of other people; they can do their own work on their own client. From an organizational standpoint, that makes it very easy to use. The stability of the piece itself, has been proven pretty well.

The scalability is out of this world. We're a shop that has about 40 clients. When I say "clients", we have our own group, our own area to work in - production - and a couple of test environments. That's three clients. We've got about forty or fifty clients in our company. Different groups have their production, test, and development areas. But we can scale that out to 300 or 500 clients if we need to, without changing anything. It's a logical division, not a physical one.

The scalability of the tool itself, is really fantastic. It lets you work in your own silo, and you can have as many silos as you want.

We changed out from Chronicle to Automic in 90 days, without a single outage to our business. That has never been done with Automic. The Automic people were even saying, "How the heck did y'all do that?"

But we had some people from Automic, this was before CA bought them out. Some guys from Automic came over to our site, stayed in Cincinnati for a couple weeks, to help us with this initial setup, because it was such a time crunch. We had 90 days to get it in, and we had to pull the switch on Chronicle, or else it was going to cost us $1.5 million. It was a big time crunch, and they helped us get it in, get it working. We did not have any outage, we did not miss any Loyal Customer campaigns. Nobody missed the coupons because of our switch to Automic.

In terms of selecting tools, the important criteria are 

• the fit of the tool
• cost of the tool
• support of the tool. 

That's the one, two, three I think everybody would answer.

Do the demo, and don't be scared of the Automic scripting language, because it's easy, if your team is technical at all. It's good to learn, it's easy to learn, and it just makes the tool explode with possibilities.

We don't use it in my company. We implement for our customers. They primarily use the solution for workflow automation and work close with oracle. 

This is an easy-to-use, user-friendly product. The user interface is very simple and straightforward. 

It scales well. We can increase or reduce the number of nodes as needed. 

It is easy to set up. 

The solution is stable. 

The support could be better in the future.

They should work to reduce pricing. 

I've been using the solution for around two to three years.

It is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. I'd rate the stability nine out of ten. 

The solution is very easy to scale up and down by increasing or reducing nodes. 

I'd rate the scalability ten out of ten. 

Our clients are quite sizable, at least in Thailand. They are all enterprise-level organizations. 

The solution was recently acquired by another company, and since then, support has suffered. They need to work to bring better support services back to the product. 

Neutral

I am also well-versed in Stonebranch Universal Automation Center.

The setup is pretty straightforward. I'd rate it eight out of ten in terms of ease of implementation. 

Deploying the solution only takes about one day. You simply have to install and configure, and you are ready to go. The process is fast. 

We have a team of five that can handle deployment and maintenance tasks. 

This is quite expensive. It's one of the most expensive on the market. That said, I can't speak much about the exact pricing. I would rate it six out of ten in terms of affordability.

We are partners. 

I'd invite anyone to try the solution as it is user-friendly and has an easy user interface. It's functional and scalable. Overall, the product is quite good. 

I'd rate the product nine out of ten. I'm very happy with it in general. 

We want to automate our processes. Before, we used to execute more than more than 250 jobs manually, along with a number of things related to backups, and putting files on FTP. 

Previously, in IT Operations, this function was used to induct resources. It's a type of training platform for them to understand operations as an entry point. We used to take four to six months to train a resource. After the implementation of Automic, it hardly takes a month to develop a resource.

Most of the monotonous types of jobs have been automated. We have been able to train our resources very quickly, so we can put their focus on high value things. Also, it has created a knowledge base, which has helped us to pinpoint problems. After a month, we found out that seven out of ten times, there was a specific problem. So, we fixed these issues, optimized them, and now, we have a situation where we are running with zero errors.

The best thing about the product is its agility. 

It is a complete solution: people, process, and technology.

CA needs to add a few more products in this suite, because right now they have automation, DR switching, and the third one is relief management. They could add change and release management.

It's pretty stable. After implementation, there hasn't been a single event where we shifted our jobs for the day from automated to manual.

We haven't seen any issues related to scalability.

The tech support trained our resources to be self-sufficient.

Automic has been a Greenfield project. We were the first implementation and a number of banks went with this solution after us.

The implementation was not straightforward, though it is not that complex. During installation, some database elective issues popped up. These took some time to fix, but after some back and forth communication, these issues were resolved.

A few things were out-of-the-box. However, during the implementation, a number of things popped up which required coding, implementation, or electrical work, and the Automic team was able to fix these very quickly. 

The implementation people were very good, along with the experience. They know their job. They know the product. They understood the requirements very well. It took three to four months time to rollout this project into production.

This is a support system for us, not our core business, so we purchased this product inexpensively. Later on, we came to a very good deal, but it took us three years to finalize.

We recently purchased the whole suite. 

Anything that can be automated, should be automated. The world is changing and new things are coming out a daily basis. These things take away your day-to-day spend, give you ample time to look forward, and streamline your workflow.

One of the uses that we decided to use it for is site switching. We have two data centers, and we have critical applications in both data centers. We site switch them twice a year just to make sure the DR is in place. It takes just an hour to move one system from A to B. It is so fast, quick, and effective.

The two main things about it are its versatility and stability. For versatility, we bought it to do one job, and we now use it now for several jobs on all different types of applications. In regards to its stability, it is very reliable. We have never had any unplanned crashes. 

The new user interface AWI could improve. It is quite easy to use and work around, but it has lost some of the functionality that we used to have in our Vim client user interface.

I have been working on it for about 12 years now. We have had three unplanned outages throughout the whole time, and all three were man-made errors (someone pulling the plug out).

With some of the newer features, we have been able to do new things with them. We are always in demand in our company, someone asking us, "Can you do this or can you do that?"

The technical support is very good. It can sometimes take a little long to get an initial response, but it is very good. They will persevere, and get to the bottom of whatever the issue is.

We bought this back in 2004. We were upgrading all of our systems to SAP systems, and we wanted a scheduler. We did not want to use the SAP scheduler, so we were recommended UC4 (as it was at the time). That is why we brought it in. It was for our SAP system, but we use it on all applications now.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward. There is an awful lot of planning because it is such a critical application for us. We have to test everything before we go ahead. It could take us up to three months doing all of the testing, maybe putting the infrastructure in place for an upgrade. The actual day when we upgrade only takes about an hour or so. It is very fast, and we have never had an issues.

Because of its stability and versatility, I give it a nine out of 10. I never give tens.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Support is very important. Also, if we are looking for a solution, we might go to Automic, and say, "We want to do this. Can you help?" They are always very good. They will come over, sit down, and talk with us, helping us where they can.

We build jobs and transfer data from A to B, then start SQL jobs and customize them for our customers, etc. We automate the system for our business.

The FTP agent: We use it excessively, and the connection is easy to handle between our company and the outside.

Up until now, we have to solve many problems from the business unit to handle the connections from SFTP. We had to shut down the FTP protocol, and we had to connect the business with external partners.

• To automate the business.
• The SQL agent

I am hoping version 12.2 has everything that we need.

We have had some problems with the SQL handling that should be fixed. The calendar also has some problems in it. There are some other little problems, but they should be fixed in 12.2.

I would like to see more stability in the product and have the transition between versions be more seamless. Every time we have the same mistakes from one version to the next version. It is terrible. You have to test it every time for the same mistakes when a new version comes out. 

12.1 is very stable. We started with 10.6, which was okay. 12.0 was terrible, then we switched to 12.1, and now it is okay.

Scalability is okay. We have tried to integrate it everywhere. My boss tried to get it on everything, so we have to stop him sometimes. However, normally, it can handle everything that we have.

Support has been very good. Unfortunately, every time we message support, they tell us to scale. This is terrible. While the support is good, I do not want to scale every time. It is terrible and makes everything complicated. I want support to answer me, then I am happy. I write them an email, and every time I receive the response, "Scale it," and I hate it.

The product is okay.

I mainly use this solution for batch job processing.

The most valuable features are the predefined templates for application-specific jobs and the access for different users.

The interface could be made more user-friendly in terms of job creation and scheduling, especially when doing bulk job creation and modification. Drag and Drop to create conditions dependency between jobs

I've been using this solution for three years.

This solution is stable.

This solution is scalable.

It can be very difficult to reach the support team, and they don't have support available in all locations, so you sometimes have to wait to hear back.

Positive

The initial setup was very straightforward and quick.

The implementation was done in-house using cloud automation, which provides the functionality to upgrade or install the agent and clients.

This solution is pretty well-priced. I would rate its pricing as four out of five.

Automic Workload Automation is a good, clear automation tool that's reasonably priced. I would rate it seven out of ten.

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. 

The primary use case is automation of our business processes within the bank along with several areas of process automation. We have been using the product for 10 years now and have built it up from scratch. We do a lot of stuff with it, of which, we are mostly satisfied, though there will always be problems with it.

It enables us to build automation which is flexible in a controlled environment. We have a lot of governance and compliance requirements as a bank that we can fulfill with this product. We can fulfill them because we have an environment where everything is monitored where you have an audit trail of the product and for the executions of the development. 

We can perform across platform automation with a product, and we are not bound to one architecture or system. We can bind together a lot of systems and ways of integrating systems. That is the most positive effect on our end. It is very flexible to program around your automation.

The stability needs improvement.

The stability is not as good as it was in former years. Stability has gone down from version to version, but it is probably due to the product's complexity and transitions in the company. Stability could be better, as it was better in the past.

The scalability is okay, as we are not scaling so much. 

Technical support is good. They are doing the best that they can, but it is a complex product with difficult requirements from a stability point of view.

The initial setup was 10 years ago, so it was easy at the time. With each upgrade, it will probably have more complexity, but it has been a little hidden because it is a step-by-step process. Though, the complexity is okay with the setup.

It is not so easy to give numbers. There are just a lot of things that you cannot do without this product.

We evaluated some competitors a decade ago, and Automic (UC4) was the best choice. We look at the product and features. We did tests and an installation of the product, then we decided on Automic.

The other competitors, 10 years ago, were CA and IBM.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Product features (i.e., flexibility).
• It must fit the requirements.
• A partner that you can rely on.