AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

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.

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.

Scheduling, mainframe, workload.

It has performed great.

Its stability and reliability, that it's been there for 20 years and 30 years, and it's always been the number one scheduler.

We can handle large workloads, and put a lot of jobs into scheduling very quickly, and we can control a lot of workload through CA 7.

We're looking at distributed AutoSys to integrate with CA 7. And iDASH is another product that we're looking, at and we need the two to be able to talk to each other and be able to view the dependencies across the platforms.

If they can integrate the distributive side with the mainframe side, and a better view to both sides of that, that would be good.

Stability is awesome.

Scalibility is great.

Technical support is very good. We reach the right representatives.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. They were already a CA 7 customer when I joined. I have been involved in some of the upgrades. They can be a little complex. It's just a big complex product that takes a lot of evaluation.

When we are researching different products or vendors we do a pretty thorough evaluation of all the products. They have to meet our objectives of reducing the risk and cost. Those are the two most important: risk, cost.

I would recommend CA 7.

Enterprise job scheduling.

It has helped to simplify cross-dependency between MVS and Open systems jobs.

Also adding new agents is easy, scheduling is easier and faster.

• Enterprise cross-platform scheduling
• MVS scheduling

We have couple of hundred thousand jobs scheduled monthly via ESP so it is critical.

Reduce the number of operational files. This would make the job of a system programmer supporting ESP easier. In the present design, there are too many operational files to maintain.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

I would rate them nine and a half out of 10. CA technical support is doing a great job.

We had to choose an alternate scheduling tool.

It is relatively simple.

Great tool, excellent technical support, stable product.

SME for Cross Platform Agent installation and configuration. We have taken over ownership from the Unix Ops Team for installing, configuring, and administering the Systems Agents. I have also installed and stood up the Web Client. Currently, rolling it out to the general population of our company.

Scheduling workload across multiple platforms from a single point of contact and integration with ERP/ETL type platforms and products, such as Oracle and SEQUEL.

• Flexible agent configurations
• Integration with multiple services and applications across the enterprise.

Sunset CA-7 and stop leading people on with it. 

ESP, Dseries, and now Automic are CA's strategic vision. Not much engineering being done with CA-7 any longer. As a "batch scheduler", it is and always has been a workhorse. As we all know, batch scheduling is antiquated. Workload Automation is the future and changing the product name to CA Workload Automation, CA-7 Edition does not make it a modern WLA Platform.

Our challenge is having a centralized schedule on a single pain with 180,000 jobs each day. We are looking to move to iDASH with predictive analytics. We don’t have many SLA’s. We're looking to do better with predictive analytics and we want to further integrate.

We were using a lot of homegrown stuff. This solution provides us with more details on jobs failing. It also gives us restorability. For the last 10 years, it's become more complex, but it's also bridged our platforms and gave us the ability to recover.

I'd like to see automation pushed even further, giving us greater looks into other systems. I'd like more enhanced process automation and have it manage a few more platforms without relying on another orchestration platform.

We've used it for 10 years.

We've had no issues with deploying it.

It's stable. It’s so busy finding maintenance windows, and we are currently going through exercises.

We can leverage multiple servers with ease.

Technical support is knowledgeable and I don’t have a whole lot of complaints. We don’t get the run around.

We had already had some other CA technologies, so it was a good fit and we knew what we were dealing with.

Initial setup and upgrades were straightforward.

Understand your needs, don’t complicate it, and understand what you are looking for. You don’t want to create an automated mess.

We use CA Workload Automation AE r11.3.6 to automate enterprise-wide scheduling and file transfers using an FTP plugin.

It has improved my organization by automating IT applications. The solution is used to invoke scripts and batches across multiple systems and the dependency is managed.

Administering with the command line: The feature creates similar jobs in bulk using the command line.                                                                                                                                                               

• Managing agents centrally (installing, changing configuration, starting and stopping, and upgrading).
• The WCC could be improved.