AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

It streamlines processing really well, so we're able to cut down on our processing times.

Ease of use.

I honestly don't know I can't think of anything to improve.

Stability is rock solid. We haven't had any major issues with it, not even minor issues. It's been good.

We use technical support all the time. We would be lost without them. They're fantastic. Really good job. We're able to reach the right person to help us out right away. 

I've done multiple products. I've been significantly involved in setup. It's very straightforward. Easy installation. Just follow the steps that installation requires and that's it.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are a good reputation and good technical support.

I would suggest researching CA. It's good.

It's our enterprise workload automation scheduler. 

It performs pretty well, it's a pretty stable product.

It allows you to automate tasks, and reduce headcount, prevent errors, self-heal, self-service type technologies.

• Ease of use 
• Scripting capabilities

In the next release I would like to see the Service Orchestrator, a B2B product, and maybe a process audit.

It's very stable. Just the usual database problems, but the application, normally, doesn't have any problems at all.

The system itself is not scalable but you can add multiple connections into it. You can use the APIs to integrate with other systems.

We use tech support all the time. They're pretty good. The response time from them depends on the complexity of the problem. They could do better sometimes.

It's a requirement for all large corporations to have some type of enterprise scheduler. We went with CA because they are a good partner, and they're pretty stable, and they acquire everybody else. They only have two main competitors, IBM or BMC.

Straightforward. It's not difficult.

Our most important criterion when selecting a vendor is the partnership.

I give the solution an eight because it has a few quirks, but it's a pretty reliable system. They could do better supporting it. They have too many of the same type of products, so sometimes it doesn't get as much attention as it should.

I would advise a colleague who is looking at similar solutions to stay informed with the technology, and engage with the CA reps. 

I would recommend it whole-heartedly.

We schedule overnight and daily jobs, mainly on a Cc&B system. We do file transfers from outside agencies, things like financial pledges and meter readings.

It performs very well. As far as the product is concerned, all of our issues are really with the system that we call rather than with the AE product itself. 

We were able to eliminate an overnight operator job, for one thing. He just left, but we did not replace him.  We get better reports than we use to have. Basically it runs jobs on a schedule, but we already had the jobs. It also eliminates manual job starting.

Its scheduling and its notification to us. We need to know when things are taking too long and when it fails, but we really need to schedule jobs to run. We need to have things run in a very sequential order, so it is very useful that we can schedule the work flows.

There is a difference between a web interface and the thick client interface. We particularly like a thick client interface, and it has gone away. I am finding that is disappointing to me. Now, it looks like the web interface is where all the development is going, which means it will become more full-featured than any thick clients that might be compatible with the new version. I would hate to see the thick client be left behind. I would really like to see that thick client come along.

I would really like to see a feature where if you have a variable object and you reference it anywhere, in any object or script, that you could somehow click on it and resolve the value and display it.

This is one thing I would really like to see in a new release of it. I have no idea if that has already been implemented or not, because we do not have the latest version, but I would really like to see something like that.

As far as I can tell, it is stable. We are just transferring to the AE version, but we were using Automation Manager for two years before that. 

I can't recall the actual product failing in any way. 

The tool can probably handle way bigger stuff than what we are doing. 

We are a gas distribution company, but we also own other companies. We are only using this at one of our locations where there are several million customers. We are firing off jobs that are billing those customers, managing meter readings, and various other billing-related financials and lettering processes. We are not at a Netflix or American Airlines level. I am pretty sure we have way more capacity in the product then what we are using. 

I do not think that I called technical support, though I think we have reported a software bug. There is one bug that we noticed, which is kind of annoying. So, aside from that, I do not think we used technical support at all.

I have looked up stuff on the CA Community. I might have gone into some of the Community pages to look for a solution. Nothing really memorable though.

Since we are still using the AE product and we are just transferring into it, we are still talking to the consultants, the people who actually came in and sold it to us, installed it, and trained us. So, we still have those as resources at this time. We have not really needed the Community.

As I recall, there is a transfer application from our AM to our AE. That went very well. Any problems that we had with that we probably caused ourselves, because we wanted to rename a lot of stuff, which was probably a bad idea, but I could not control that. 

I think it was relatively smooth. It could have been smoother. I do not think it was a fault of the program. I think it was more our fault. 

I would recommend it. Actually I do not even know another automation product. I would not know what else to recommend.

I appreciate training and support from a vendor. They should come in, train us on the product, and be around for a while, or at least available, to help us with anything we should have learned or did not. Or, things we discover we need. Training and early on support are really important and we really would like to see, like the same person providing it. 

I would like to be able to contact him and say, "Hey, how do I do such and such? How do I attach this report to this thing? How do I filter this?" And he would reply with, "Here are some codes you might find useful." I know these would be available out in the community, but I should not have to look it up because I am still in training. That is just one thing I would like.

Primary use is job scheduling. It performs admirably. It really does what it is supposed to do. I have been doing this for 19 years with AutoSys.

We have ended up using it as a Tier 1 application supporting other Tier 1 applications. We schedule all jobs, everything from payroll to how to move oil around the country.

• Reliability
• Stability
• Expandability: It scales well.

A lot of what we want is going to be based on our particular solution, not for something everybody else could use at the same time. Different companies use AutoSys differently. They have different standards and different methodologies. A solution that we want in place would not apply to other companies.

From what we heard, the features we want are being included with the next couple of releases. One is to be able to work and create automatic ticketing solutions that are not necessarily CA products. It is just the automation around getting jobs to work correctly. If something fails, what do we do then.

I would like to be able to see the product grow into something that is going to be more reliable and better. The new purchase of Automic should help.

It is very reliable. There is always been a bump here there, but it really does well for us.

It scales very well. We can add jobs and remove jobs. We do not have problems maintaining the product across multiple environments and multiple servers.

The initial contact is not very reliable. We have to escalate through channels to get to somebody who knows what's going on. It takes time that we do not necessarily have. It is because its that the support tech is not dedicated to the product and they do not know how to fix our exact issue.

We have waited years for a problem to be resolved. The tickets get closed with no resolution, and there should be a resolution but we can't get a reliable answer. We run out of patience and just close the tickets.

We take advantage of the CA Community, however it is hit and miss. There are a lot of good questions and answers, but also a lot of simple ones, where people just look at them and go, "Just read the manual. It's in there."

It was both straightforward and complex. The information gathering to get the product installed takes time and effort. Once we had everything gathered, the installs went very smoothly and quickly.

The complexity of the product has to do with the information gathering:

• What it has to do? 
• Where it has to do it? 
• How it has to interface? 
• What databases are we connecting to and to what IDs? 
• What servers are we logging into? 
• What IDs do we have to use? 
• How are the parts connecting? 
• Are there ports that need to be opened? 
• Are there firewalls that need to be adjusted? 
• Are there various things that we have to account for that we were not initially thinking about? 

The documentation covers these, but it is just a matter of gathering all of them. The information gathering can take a week. The product install takes minutes.

The actual decision to install AutoSys was out of my hands, but it was recommended. It is one of the better products on the market.

Use this product. I have used the competitors' products. I have used AutoSys. If there is a comparison, I will give them my views as to what I think of all the products. My view right now, use AutoSys.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Service
• Reliability
• Support
• If we are able to actually contact our sales reps and get solutions and answers from them. 
• If we are able to open tickets and get answers to some of the easier questions.
• Are they willing to come in and sit with us, and make sure we are getting things done correctly the first time.

Without this product we would have to manually submit jobs and it would take longer. There would also be a much greater possibility of jobs running wrong and/or not at the right time.

The scheduling feature allows us to know when jobs are going to run and makes sure they run in the order needed.

Because this product only computes processing days, it is hard when things need to be scheduled according to non-processing days. 

Some of the reports are either a bit hard to understand or don’t give you what you might expect to see.

No issues.

No issues.

Tech support is excellent, especially if you have a problem that gets bumped to level-two people. The level-two people are great at figuring out what happened and what you do next.

We switched from Burroughs to IBM, previously.

Complex, but we have a complex schedule.

I’m not involved in this aspect.

Yes, IBM’s solution.

Get on the community. Ask questions.

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.

Batch operations. Running our insurance systems.

It is wonderful. It's been everything we expected it to be.

• It gives us higher accuracy rates and faster performance of our batch processes.
• Higher reliability of our business processes. 

Reliability is a big one. When I go home at night I sleep well because I trust that the product will perform its design.

It has allowed us to automate many of the functions of our operations staff. 

For instance, we had production control staff spending two hours a day entering date parms into our daily business processes. And now, CA Workload Automation does it for us.

I am looking forward to more of their dashboard features. I think it would be very valuable for us to have dashboard features that could be delivered to our customers in the form of a URL, and they could refresh that URL whenever they wanted to get up to date performance metrics out of our systems. 

There have been a couple hiccups along the way, but then I call support and we always iron out any stability issues. It is a 24 x 7 operation product and it's highly stable.

We're currently crossing over into another insurance underwriting software product, and I see no problems with it being able to scale into this new product area.

I love those guys at tech support. In fact, I recently had a call where someone was concerned that I was upset, so they even had someone else call me to discuss with me how I felt about my call. I was not upset, but I appreciated their follow-through.

They are highly knowledgeable. They seem to be product experts.

Our old solution was losing its ability to scale. As our organization was changing, we needed a product that could change with us, and CA Workload Automation seems to be the right tool.

We chose this product for its scalability and its reliability, and the fact that it can run our business solutions on multiple platforms, in concert with one another. It can run an object on our Windows systems or our Unix systems, and then send messages to the other system when they are complete.

It was complex, but we also hired Automic business support staff to come and assist, and they helped us get through all the complexities, very easily.

We evaluated other products, but it was several years ago.

When selecting a vendor it really centers around the product reliability for us, and we saw that in this product.

I actually sat by several people today, here at the CA World conference, that were saying they were here just to evaluate this product. I mostly told them some of my personal success stories and shared with them, that it has been a wonderful tool for automating our business needs, and that they should really consider this product.

It's a cross-platform scheduler. Any kind of automation that we actually do is over different platforms.

Automation in general. You need to do less manually.

Scheduling in general. Running anything in crontab, you need to put a lot of logic into it to make it work. With this product, you don't have to worry about it. You have the schedule object where you put all the dates or holidays in it, and it does it for you. 

I would like to see two-factor authentication, since you see a lot of companies in the news for security breaches. That is a really big thing for us.

Stability is great. We generally have no outages.

We're actually going to be upgrading to version 12, so we're looking forward to it.

This is probably something you don't want to hear, but support seems to be getting worse over the years. For some reason the technical knowledge is missing. Occasionally, you actually have to get all the way to Austria to actually get a resolution, which is where the product is originally from.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup but I do the upgrades. They're straightforward.

We've been using the product for 12, 13 years, so it's been a while.

My most important criterion when selecting a vendor is stability. in general. We want to make sure our customers who use the system never have any downtime.

Give it a try. Test it out. Set up a system, play around with it. It's very easy to work with. The learning curve is not that steep.