AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

I use the scheduling product to support the Home Depot stores here in the United States and Canada, as well as Mexico. It works wonderfully as it is very robust.

• Durability
• The secure database itself
• Usability of it

In a billion dollar company, you want a scheduling product that is very robust, which can handle the magnitude of schedules that we run through it.

The security of it. It is a very secure product. As well as the scalability of it. You can really scale it across systems.

It helps us to be more agile as far as the business use.

I would like to see iDASH be a packaged part of Workload Automation as opposed of being two separate packages. I would like to see iDASH be incorporated with the release of CA Workload Automation. For it to be all a complete package instead of two separate packages that I would install to enhance one another. So, we use iDASH for the recording purposes of the batch jobs that CA7 actually runs. I would like to see iDASH and CA7 become one product instead of two separate products, too. 

The agent is also a different installation as well as the scheduling packages. To see all of that incorporated under one umbrella would be ideal. 

The stability is awesome. We have not had issues in twenty years. It is just that robust, with the exception of new product/new version releases.

The scalability is awesome because we use it for the mainframe schedule as well as distributive schedule.

The support also is great from the CA company itself.

I have a CA rep that always contacts me on a quarterly basis. Also, I have support that I can reach out to 24/7.

My company has been using the CA products for years, since the start of the company itself. As our company grows, we have been growing with CA as well.

I was involved with the upgrades. They were very streamlined.

We received support from CA during upgrades which made it very streamlined. 

They do a really good job for us with their improvements and new releases, especially the agents.

When you are looking for at this product, you are not looking just for at the product itself, you are looking at the total package: The support for the product, the durability of the product, and the scalability of the product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: support. By far, CA has the best support.

Enterprise job scheduling.

We have worked with CA to better understand all of the security points, the ability to lock the product down so that it's not being abused or exploited in any fashion.

• Flexibility
• Ease of use
• The capabilities of the product to schedule on multiple platforms, multiple operating systems.

Also, over time the CA workload agent has gotten much better. For our organization it's important for us to communicate in a secure fashion between the host and the other platforms, and we are able to do that with our CA product, with ESP.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

Scalability is a 10 out of 10.

We've completely turned over our scheduling area, and a lot of questions go to CA support. The people in the CA support for ESP have been there for a long time. I know some of them from the time when they worked for Cybermation, and they are very good. I trust their answers.

Tech support is a 10 out of 10.

Back in 2006, we were using CA-7 and we were looking for a product that would do better for scheduling off-platform. We found ESP, which was at that time owned by Cybermation, and we completed migration from CA-7 to ESP, and then shortly after that CA bought ESP. It had to do with scheduling on the distributed platform.

CA-7 was expensive and didn't do distributive work load very well. It was not that flexible. It didn't do everything we needed it to do.

We had Professional Services help us, and it wasn't really that difficult.

We did have onsite training and migration services and we paid for them. It wasn't hard to understand for our people.

I don't really get involved in that part of it. The one thing I would say is that people need to pay attention to how they use their ESP agents on the distributed platform. That's where some of the cost comes in, based on how many you need or how many you use.

At that time CA owned three schedulers and CA-7 was the one we were using. The other two did not necessarily apply to our environment. And there weren't too many others out there. I think we might still have taken a cheap route. We might not of actively compared with other products that were on the market at the time, other than comparing it to CA, and we thought we were getting a good deal.

I believe CA had been actively developing it, enhancing it, and attempting to make it easier to use. I think it's been a good product for us, and I think others would find that to be true as well.

We run Automator processes and applications, so we use AutoSys for batch processes. This is pretty much it.

It works well. It has its issues, but we work with support to resolve our issues and get them taken care of in a timely manner.

We are able to process hundreds of thousands of jobs a month. It is pretty good. We have failover, so we maintain continuous uptime. 

Probably WCC. The aggregator reporting utility which tells us our throughput in lag and latency. 

• A better graphical user interface. We have a lot of people using the client utility, and we want to get them away from that. It needs to be easier to use, quicker, and more user-friendly.
• Ease of implementation for upgrades. 
• Some support issues need to be addressed. Not through email, but through personal contact via phone or WebEx.

It seems pretty stable. We have had issues in the past and we have worked through support to minimize any downtime. Again, with the failover solution, we are able to stay working 24/7. 

It seems to be there. I think we have some issues that we need to address with lag and latency. We have two instances of production AutoSys and we want to collapse that into one, so we want to work with CA to figure out a better solution of how to use the single instance to process all our workload.

Technical support has been very responsive to our needs and helped where we have needed help.

I was not involved in the initial setup. We did do a migration recently, which I worked on. That included setting up a new environment to move our workload from an older, unsupported version to the newer version. The sales and support team and technical teams were responsive and answered every question when I needed assistance.

It is stable, it works, and it does what it is supposed to. I would recommend this solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: support. Providing knowledge and giving us the ability to address any issues or problems of the software.

We use CA Workload Automation ESP Edition to monitor our batch jobs and workload, to process data, and in that processing of data, we make sure that we complete the jobs in a timely manner so that we meet our service levels. 

We also use the alerts within ESP to detect if there's a failure, if there's a long running job or, if there's an issue with the job, within the scheduler, that didn't trigger correctly, and things like that. So that's primarily what we use ESP for.

It performs, it definitely does the job because it's an enterprise type of software, so it's used throughout our whole company. We really liked it, and we applied it throughout the whole company.

The ability to

• monitor your critical work 
• track the service levels 
• recover the work and predict the work, if it's late or not.

It hasn't really improved things because, before that, we had something similar. It hasn't not improved, but it's just necessary to use for the type of work we do.

It's definitely helped us meet our critical deadlines and things like that.

Easier user options with the web browser part of it because it's not very friendly and you can't do as much as you can on the native software. They already know that.

It's very stable. It's highly redundant. It's, like I said, very recoverable, within the batch work and it's easy to use.

Scalability, it's all based on the agents, so we have to place all these agents on different servers. That seems to be doable, so we haven't had any problems with scalability.

We have used technical support. We have small use cases that we need their help on, and we're able to reach out to CA. Tech support is good. We get a good response.

We were using a similar product before 2008, BMC Control-M. We know that's the way we need to manage the work.

I was involved in the initial setup and it's complex because you have to convert from the old software that's not CA to the new software. That was back in 2008 so it's been awhile.

I think there was a list of different types of companies. I can't remember the names because, like I said, it's been a while.

I would say the most important criteria to us when selecting a vendor are

• usability
• operational friendliness
• cost, obviously
• and scalability, because we have a global footprint around the world in different datacenters. 

And it needs to be something that's maintainable or the maintenance is robust. That's something with which we've had good luck, and a good experience, with CA.

I would just say, based on your use case, to see what flavor of ESP you wanted, whether it's the mainframe, or distributed systems, and then understand what kind of functionality you want to achieve from it. Get users' suggestions, if they already have it set up, so you can get past some of those stumbling blocks at the beginning.

Some of the features I like are:

• Ability to monitor a complex workload
• Easily see our batch flow status
• Deal with problems before they become bigger issues

As an example, we had a stuck file watcher we weren't aware of. Due to the alerts, we were able to reach out and get the file in time to still make our batch commitments. This happened instead of missing an SLA.

I think having visibility has improved things. Our managers can see what's going on as well. It's not just a single technician that's a bottleneck trying to find out where we are. Visibility into the workflow and ease of use to be able to schedule have improved our organization. I'm happy with this solution.

The main push is the web UI. We want to be able to give it to our business users. They don't want to have to log on to a mainframe to use the product. I would like to use iDash. If we can get iDash into ESP, it would be great, even though it first has to go to the DEs before it comes to us. That would be a big improvement. This is an option that we'd like to see.

No problems with scalability. That's actually one of the competitive advantages with this product - the scalability and its ability to do the throughput we need without having any delays. We have scaled as far as we can grow. I've been talking to other companies that are much larger. I'm confident it could scale if we had a tenfold growth and we'd still be okay.

I have not used technical support. Other people in my area have. They seem easy to work with. You know, get the documentation to them; they get back to you in a couple days with what they found.

We were using CA Scheduler Job Management and I think they ended support. I wasn't high enough up to be involved in the decision making process. By the time this solution rolled out, I was happy with how I was able to get up to speed in the product, and support what I needed to support. But I was not involved in evaluating other products.

When looking for a vendor, I suggest looking for long-term relationships, a partnership. You want a vendor who is willing to grow, willing to listen to feedback, offers support, and help us do our job. Make sure you partner with them. Get buy-in from your business units before implementing. I think that's one of the biggest things to success, is let CA get the buy-in for you if you don't feel comfortable doing it yourself. Let CA explain their own product. Get the buy-in first, then move forward so you don't have the resentment of the business units thinking you forced the solution upon them.

Workload automation and job scheduling.

The graphical interface makes it more accessible to all end-users for monitoring. It also has automated failover, and flexibility in solving job scheduling challenges.

The flexibility allows us to successfully integrate an acquired business’ fiscal close with our own, even though there is a lot of variance as to when they run in the calendar month.

• Easy to use.
• Supports job scheduling on mainframe and distributed systems.

Better documentation with fully explained examples for some of the job types.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Excellent support, skilled support technicians.

Old solution did not have a distributed support model that was robust enough.

It was complex. We had to convert our old solution to the new one with no downtime.

I’m not involved with this aspect of the product.

We did not evaluate other options.

This product has allowed us to provide more business value to our company by automating more processes.

We use it for SAP job submission in our total environment. 

So far, performance has been excellent. It's been 100 percent satisfactory. We had a couple glitches in the beginning, during initial setup, but we've worked out everything, it's 100 percent satisfactory.

The actual scheduling of our jobs has helped us tremendously. Before it was all done manually, and we've totally automated the whole functionality, so there's no longer a case where somebody didn't run something. It's 100 percent reliable.

It cuts down on time, where actual people have to sit down and do things. We no longer have that issue, where we would have to bring in multiple people, or even hire multiple people, to come in to run certain jobs. Now, all we have to do is schedule it and it runs just fine.

More benefits with the agent upgrades, and that's about it. Other than that we have no complaints with it. It's been awesome.

So far, the stability has been great. We do have a couple minor issues with some of the agents, as far as release is concerned, but other than that it's a very stable product.

In terms of scalability, right now we're a new customer so we haven't scaled it up to other applications yet, but we are planning to. We've opened it up for our Windows environment and they are enjoying it right now. That's a very small group, for right now, but we plan on adding close to 15,000 servers to it. So it's going to benefit us a lot.

Yes, we have used tech support, and they are very helpful. Response time is awesome. Usually when we call them, we get a response back with an hour.

Our old product that we had with SAP was more of a manual process, but our company is going to more automation-based products. That was our main need, to get rid of the manual labor and, instead, just use the automated process.

I was involved in the initial set up.

The way that it was brought to us, in our initial setup, we had a lot of initial questions and they replied, "Well, set it up the way you want it."

It was kind of confusing from an end-user support aspect, asking them what are the best practices. They didn't say what the best practices were. So we had to come up with the best practices. That was the only downfall.

There were three other vendors involved, which didn't meet our full needs because we're cross-platform. We have Windows, IBM iSeries, Oracle, SQL, all that. And this product tends to fit in more with all of our products, based on just one platform alone.

When we are selecting a vendor, what's important to us are

• support, that's number one
• price
• maintenance

which all seem to be reasonably well in hand right now.

I gave it an eight out of 10 because of the support and the product; it is very easy to learn. It's pretty straightforward.

We actually were just advising colleagues who asked us about this product. We said it is very easy to use, it's multi-platform based; those were the main reasons, I would think. They actually ended up buying the product as well, with our recommendation.

For workload automation, I think the most valuable feature is the robustness, being able to support high availability for as many batch jobs that we process on a daily basis.

It is a key one for our company. We run it as an enterprise solution; everything from payrolls, to manufacturing, to everything in the back end, is critical. We definitely can count on it being up all the time.

A couple of key features would be really being able to support a scheduler that, instead of a centralized scheduler, maybe a distributed one, so where a scheduler doesn't come down; not everything stops all at one time and so on.

Stability is actually why we selected this solution, for being able to support high availability. Otherwise, we wouldn't go to a single instance of it across the company.

Scalability is actually what supports our decision to go with it. Being able to go from supporting one organization to all our organizations across the company, has been great.

Technical support has been outstanding. They've been able to really answer a lot of the questions that we've gone to for them. Turnaround has been great. Typically, if we put in a ticket, we get a response within hours, at least within 24 hours.

I wasn't engaged in the setup, but I know there were some complexities when we first started, because we were dealing with multiple instances and trying to get it to one and so on.

Definitely look at this product. There are a lot of key features in there that will definitely help organizations out.

It really supports, and CA's been great in showing the robustness of the tool and addressing any issues with anything that you come across with it.

I think there're still some more improvements in there, some things that we're finding out as we're using it, the tool. It's definitely on the higher end.