Stonebranch Reviews

We use it for IT workflow automation. We have three main categories: billing, reporting, and analytics. We automate the entire workflow, end-to-end, including the file movement from our managed file-transfer solution to our NAS storage point and then kick off the downstream workflows. Most of them are ETL-based in Informatica. And the loads are done to a database and/or storage with output. It's the entire workflow.

We host it on-prem.

It is our enterprise scheduler; we're migrating everything to it. We'll only have Stonebranch as the enterprise scheduler controlling all of our jobs when we get to the end of our project. So it's being used extensively. We'll be somewhere north of 450 jobs when have completed the project and we will increase usage. As more workflows come online, Stonebranch is the platform we will use to automate them.

Stonebranch Universal Task allows us to break up our workflows into tasks that are singular and focused and we're then able to string them together by drag-and-drop. What we did is we built up a group of tasks that are templates, so to speak. Once those task templates were built up, it allowed us to go in and build workflows relatively quickly, because all we had to do was fill in the particulars of what we needed that task to do, without building the task from scratch.

One of the biggest issues with workflows is that the completion of a step. When a process ends, it needs to generate a completion through Standard Error or Standard Out, or it needs to generate a completion file so that the workflow knows that the step is done and that it can kick off the next workflow task. We've been able to impress upon our ETL developers that, when they're done, they need the process to drop a completion flag so that the workflow knows it's done and ran successfully. They really didn't deal with that before, because they were using disparate schedulers in disparate systems and simply setting the clock: The file gets here at two o'clock, we'll kick this job off in this scheduler at two-thirty. And then the other technology, downstream in the workflow, we'll set that one for three o'clock. But you end up with problems if the previous workflow step isn't complete when the next step kicks off. The job fails and blows up.

Stonebranch eliminated those dependency gaps because we know for sure that the previous step was completed before we kick off the next step in the workflow. We've eliminated the vast majority of that kind of problem.

Stonebranch has saved us money. From an operational standpoint, we're in a position now where we know when workflows fail and we're not missing SLAs as much. Very infrequently do we now miss an SLA because, if a workflow fails, we know it failed. That means the support teams have the ability to go in and address it before we miss an SLA. That's been the major cost savings.

Had we stayed on Cisco Tidal, to do the caliber of work that we've done in Stonebranch, we would have had to hire additional people. I only had one person on Tidal and those resources would cost more than the resources I'm using now, because of the specialized skillsets you need to do the work in Cisco Tidal. On our automation team, we have one senior person. We took two guys out of our network operation center and put them with him. They're Linux administrators and they learned the Stonebranch product over the first year and got very proficient in it. We're doing automation but their cost to the company is a lot less than going out and hiring somebody with the skills in Cisco Tidal or Automic or one of those other platforms. So there is an HR resource savings as well. I would estimate we're saving about $20,000 a year per head-count.

Stonebranch has also saved us man-hours during implementation and production. If I compare it to Cisco Tidal, to build a workflow in Stonebranch, beginning to end, is less time-consuming and less complicated than it was in Tidal. I'm sure it has saved us money. It has saved us about 20 to 25 percent per workflow. When you spread that over 400 workflows, it's a pretty significant number.

We started off with replacing mainframe batch scheduling for some of our distributed applications, and then it grew into not just batch but workflows and file transfers.

The volumes that we throw at it are in excess of 15 million tasks per month.

Our biggest relief was the file-transfer piece, the way they do it securely and the way they do that handshake and the way they farm out that dependency to give to users - versus admins - the ability to control that little subsection within the environment. We probably would have needed a team of 20 people to centrally admin, manage, create schedules, do file transfers, and support all that stuff. Instead, we have a team of two.

My biggest pain point was the agent. When it comes to the controller, it's one point of failure. You monitor it, it's just another application. You take a look at it. You know what items you need to keep an eye on: memory, log files, entries. You can be proactive because it's one important single point. When you look at all your endpoints, it becomes a management nightmare if you have to monitor every single one of them. Past experience has been that people want to run their batches. They don't want to care about the scheduler. They want to just set it and forget it. They tend to run the machines very hot. When the endpoints are resource-starved, because people's scripts are taking over all the capacity on the box, the agents fail and their workflow gets impacted and you take an SLA hit. We have yet to see that with any of the Stonebranch agents.

Regarding digital transformation, we were already down that road before we even looked at Stonebranch. I wouldn't say that it was the reason why we did it. It does help in the journey, where you're looking at a mainframe scheduler and you think, "Oh my God, I don't think we're going to be able to use this." Going digital, everything is software-defined where you say, "Alright, APIs, plugin, off we go."

This solution replaced an existing legacy system and the benefit was in the area of the support staff supporting those aging systems. We're no longer a bottleneck or a risk. We have a lot of those folks retiring right now, and it is tough to get that expertise on the market nowadays.

Finally, it helped us save money, and that was one of the drivers for getting it in. What I can share with you is it did 90 percent more than whatever solutions we had. We ended up saving a considerable amount every year. We got more for less. It has also saved us a lot of man-hours in support and maintenance. We were able to go down by three FTEs by implementing the solution. We went from less to more with half the staff that we had.

It handles all of our scheduling. All our batch workload runs through it. We use MOVEit for our file process transfers, so we don't use Stonebranch for that. 

We have MOVEit integrated with our scheduling, so we run commands to MOVEit from scheduling.

We're running about 46,000 tasks per day.

Stonebranch enhanced the digital transformation at our company, through the dashboard. We run a customized dashboard for our operations team, where we can quickly see the issues. We can see running task. We use a lot of started and finished, late finished, late started. We also have some gauges where we can see jobs that exceed their average runtime or estimated end-time. It's helped our operations team see issues ahead of time, instead of four hours later when we've already gone past the point of no return.

In terms of our system operators, we're bringing guys off the street that pick this stuff up within two weeks, and they're flying with it. It just seems like it's so easy, once they get the baseline down. Then it's just boom, and they're off and running. There's some work to get that initial understanding, where to go to find what you want, and then these guys are flying with it. Our older people that have been here for a few years were the ones that struggled with the new technology.

The primary use case is that we are now at the point where we are creating workflows and it is allowing us to shorten the time it takes for tasks to go through multiple machines. We wanted something that would give us better visibility.

We have different systems that do different things very well, and we previously had time frames for when tasks would have to be done. It has allowed us to streamline the workflow so that the machines aren't sitting idle. The work gets done and the information is available through production at a much quicker rate.

It really cuts down the time that multiple machines take to touch a task. We may have our ERP system create a file and send it to our integration server where it will dice and mash up some inventory requirements. We will send an order by FTP to our vendor and, at the same time, we're seeing that we have sent it in and that it should be on a truck and coming in in a few days. We see the specific time and can alert the planning group that we've already done this. It used to be these tasks were done on separate machines and would take 30 or 45 minutes per machine. If everything was clean, it only took 10 minutes from start to finish, but there was a lot of dead time making sure that each machine had time to complete its task in a base scenario. So it has really helped our abilities in terms of where we're at as a manufacturing organization.

Stonebranch has also saved us money because it has kept us from having to over-provision Windows Servers. With this solution we can put stuff in a workflow and get it through as quickly as can be, instead of allocating time on other boxes to do things. I believe it has kept us from having to add Windows Servers and drive up our costs with Microsoft.

We use it for enterprise scheduling and workload automation. For the most part, it runs our internal mainframe batch jobs and does file transfer processes in and outside the company.

Since we put in Stonebranch, compared to our older scheduler and systems, we've had better visibility, better alerting, better restart-ability, and better retry-ability. For instance, if a file transfer fails and it doesn't send, we can tell it to try 30 minutes later, and that reduces manual intervention for a once-and-done type of failure.

The Stonebranch Marketplace has been helpful. We've obtained a few items from there and have started to implement them.

In terms of our company's digital transformation, it's definitely become a central component of our processing and our workflows. It's allowed us to integrate disparate systems into this system, so we can monitor and schedule activities on those servers.

We have also saved on the licensing cost, although I don't know how much compared to our old product. The way it runs our workflows has saved people-time. If something fails and we don't necessarily have to intervene, we can take another pass at it within the scheduler and do automation in that situation. It takes away from manual intervention which would take time. There's a soft benefit there.

It has saved us about ten hours a week, depending upon who had to field the issue.

Basically, it is a workload automation that we are using to run our various SAP application jobs. The background jobs are scheduled from third-party tools. We used to trigger from AutoSys. This is a replacement product for AutoSys.

It is GUI based. The earlier product was totally on the command line. That was difficult for newcomers.  

It can be a self-service, and we get two environments. Previously, we had to copy-paste when we created a job. Here, we can just move it over. In SAP, we can say, "You create a bundle, and you move it." You just create on one side, and it will always be synchronized between testing and production.

We have 35,000 jobs that are running in SAP at different times of the day and at different frequencies. All those have been configured in Stonebranch Universal Automation Center.

Stonebranch Universal Automation Center could improve the analytics.

Our primary use case is automating the workload for the company. It's used quite extensively. We run over 500,000 jobs a week with it.

The resiliency of the agents helps us to process a lot of workload through them, reducing the latency between jobs.

The solution has saved us money over other potential vendors.