Stonebranch Reviews

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.

The most valuable feature is the reliability of the agents, because we need them accessible and we need to run stuff. The agent technology and compatibility are top-notch. The agents are wonderful. I've spoken at several of their conferences and always give them high marks. I would put the agents' resiliency at number one in the industry.

We have used the Universal Task a little bit and it seems to be fully functional. It's good.

The Stonebranch Marketplace is decent as well.

The Universal Controller is decent for the money it costs. We host it on-promise - some local virtual servers. It still doesn't have all the features and functionality of our mainframe scheduler, but hopefully it will get there. It needs some work to have full features, compared to other products that are out there, specifically IBM's Workload Scheduler.

Also, regarding the Controller, there should be a much cleaner method of looking at dependencies between workflows. 

I would also like to see, when there is a workflow that's going to kick in at a certain date, the option to pick the time for those dates.

The stability of the agents is wonderful; the Controller, again, needs a little beef.

We have not experienced any limits, so it should be scalable.

I would give tech support 9.827 out of ten. There's always room for improvement.

We are still also using the IBM scheduler. But we completely switched off of the IBM agents to Stonebranch agents. So Stonebranch replaced the existing legacy system as far as the agents go. That went great. It was a very affordable solution, works like a champ, so it's good.

We're still using the mainframe scheduler, but we're looking at phasing that out over this next year.

The setup was straightforward. We did a proof of concept. Stonebranch came in and we had questions. Then, of course, you can always tweak things. But we didn't have any trouble.

It took us two years to migrate all of our stuff from our old agents to our new agents. And we're working on migrating work in the Controller. We got the agents first, because Stonebranch did not have a Controller until several years ago. So when we bought the agents we needed to migrate workload from the old agents to the new and that took two years. So we were done in 2010.

We did not use a third-party.

ROI is tricky because it's really more of an expense item than it is an investment. We all like to say "return on investment," but we are not a profit center. It all works itself out.

There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We price-lined options including Computer Associates, BMC, IBM's product, etc.

If you're looking at this or a similar solution, get with a company that's done it before. We have consulted with other companies and helped out a number of them to go to this solution.

We've already done digital transformation, so Stonebranch is part of our continuous improvement. I'm not going to say it's transformational, it's just continuous improvement, using our tools to exploit them for the betterment of supporting company goals.

In terms of the solution's users, we have people who build things in order to use it. We have a core of about five people who set up workloads to use them. They perform somewhat traditional scheduling roles. For deployment and maintenance, we do it all with those five.

The agents are a ten out of ten, the Controller is a nine. The agents are top-notch, Controller has some room to grow.

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.

The ability to monitor tasks that are on the open-system side as well as our mainframe side gives us a one-window view of all our processes.

I love the Universal Controller. It's been great for us. We host it on-premise. It resides here on their own servers within our network, within the company. It's High Availability, meaning there's failover from one server to the other if one goes down.

The Stonebranch Universal Task is very flexible. There are many different tasks that are available for use.

Usually, when there's something that I need from them, I put in a request for an enhancement. It typically takes a few months, but they deliver.

For instance, I have a request regarding our agent on the mainframe. It may time out when communicating to the Universal Controller, when the mainframe is extremely busy. That can cause a task which is running at that time to not see the results of the job that ran on the mainframe. It happens sporadically during times of really busy CPU usage. We're expecting that enhancement from them in the fourth quarter.

The solution is very resilient. You have multiple agents and you have High Availability, so we're able to do maintenance to one server without affecting its availability.

It's been rock-solid for us.

It's very scalable. You can run as many agents as you need, depending upon how many servers you're monitoring or integrating into it. We're running about 10,000 tasks every day. I've heard of other companies doing hundreds of thousands. I'm not concerned about scalability.

Usage is increasing at a steady rate. It's heavily used. It's a very integral piece of our batch processing daily.

I typically communicate with them a couple of times a year if I have an issue. They have a good helpdesk process and ticketing process that work very well.

Tech support is excellent.

We used a product from ASG. It was their Beta 42 solution. It's something that they purchased and it was pretty old. It ran on the mainframe. It just didn't give us the flexibility we needed to do enterprise-wide and to be able to integrate server tasks or open-systems tasks with the mainframe.

Stonebranch replaced our old, mainframe scheduler, and we got much more flexibility in the new product, compared to the old product. Our file transfer processes are much more resilient. And one of the biggest benefits is that when a job fails it sends an email to us and alerts us about the failure. In addition, it sends it to our ticketing system and it opens up a problem ticket automatically.

Setup and installation are pretty easy. Converting from an old scheduler to a new one with all of the nuances of scheduling-criteria was a challenge. We used their Hired Services to help us do that.

In terms of the testing process, we were able to test during the next three months and we were able to run in parallel. By executing the Stonebranch version of the scheduler, we were pointing to dummy jobs but we were able to basically parallel our mainframe scheduler. That enabled us to make sure things were kicking off at the right times and in sync. That was something I did, not something that they did. That really helped us get a comfort level that everything was going to kick off properly, in the right order, and the right times. By doing that parallel running, we were able to resolve a lot of potential problems.

It was about a four- to five-month engagement for the conversion.

We used Stonebranch people to do it. It went very well. They were very helpful.

I don't have pricing information, but I do know it's cheaper than our old legacy system. Other than the standard licensing fees there are no additional costs.

We looked at a few automation schedulers. The long-term direction is that we're looking at a ten-to-15-year plan to migrate off the mainframe. It made sense to get an enterprise solution that was open-systems based. That's what Stonebranch brought to us.

Try it out, get to know the product and see how it works.

We have two system admins or schedulers, master schedulers, me and my co-worker. In our test and dev environment, we have four staff involved, counting me and my co-worker. Since everything was cut over to production and stabilized, we have had to spend about ten hours a week on it. We have operators monitoring it 24/7.

I would rate it at nine out of ten. I work with it every day and it does what I need it to do. I can't think of anything off the top of my head that I need as an enhancement at the moment.

Two people are using this solution in my company.

It's deployed on a private cloud.

It improved the batch cycles in background and helping everyone to receive the files and reports on time without miss and client is happy from this tool without much escalations, issue it is working fine and upgradation of Agents and Controllers also cheap as compared to other Tools and its easy to handle while patching of Linux and Windows servers on every month and lots of Automation can be done with help of this tool.

The features are upgraded, and every six months they're releasing patches. There are features like dependencies. Some jobs are one block, and some jobs are different blocks. That dependency can be set, and many jobs can be dependent or in one block. You can do many automations. 

The rerun portion is quite easy and very fast. If the database is good, then it is very nice.

It's not available on the cloud, so they should take that due to safety, security, and scalability.

I have been using this tool for seven years.

Its quite stable and all applications hosted on Stonebranch server runs without any issue.

It's scalable and robust and it can be used or any customer worldwide irrespective of the complexity of the Customers. 

Technical support is very good. They're not available on weekends. If you raise a ticket, they will resolve it within half an hour. They'll take the remote system and know what the problem is. 

They are very technically very sound and familiar with this tool.

Positive

I have also used Control-M. Compared to Control-M, Stonebranch is also cheap. If Control-M is down, it will be up within five seconds and will be working fine. Control-M is very stable, and many companies are using it. Stonebranch is new and has been in the market for 5 to 10 years.

Their structure is very nice, and it's better than Stonebranch. Control-M is more complex, but the security and stability are better than Stonebranch.

Setup is easy. You can install the engine controller and whatever system that people want. You can take the details from them. You can set it up and try running a job in quality test systems. Then after that goes live, you can go to production systems.

Implementation takes one to two years.

Best expertise.

Stonebranch is cheaper than Control-M, so many companies are using Stonebranch.

The license is paid every year.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. 

My advice is that it's very easy to use, and you can schedule the jobs on all applications, Informatica, and SAP, and it will run fine.

I am a part of a production support team, and we automate most of our work using this. It reduces all the manual work.

Earlier, it used to take us a lot of time for file transfers and creating a backup, but after this automation, the pain and time have been reduced a lot.

It is very user-friendly, and it is quite easy to use. Moreover, you can integrate a lot of applications by using this simple tool, and it holds all the details in a very simplified manner.

More number of FAQs should be provided because I found it hard to configure when I started using this tool.

I see it as a stable tool so far.

Customer support is really helpful.

No, I did not.

It was a bit complex for me.

In-house.

Pricing is very comparable to other tools in the market.

No.

Centralized scheduling and file transfers running on a couple of hundred agents (Windows/Unix/Linux).

• We migrated multiple scheduling applications to UAC for less costs and more efficient management.
• Scripting is also centralized in one library.
• UAC has a lot of scheduling options for various tasks.

• The possibility to connect multiple tasks in a workflow across domains and operating systems.
• Also the UDM file transfers and the possibilities which can be achieved with UDM scripting.
• The GUI is also easy to operate and does not need installation since it is web-based.

• Virtual resource priorities could be better.
• Maybe in the future, the use of queues.
• Promoting objects to multiple environments at once.

Stability of UAC is good. When problems do arise, they can be quickly solved most times, so downtime is minimal. We are running a high-availability environment.

Its processes are easily scalable.

Throughout the years we have been working with UAC, the experience we have had with support has been very good. Technical know-how is great and also second line support is very helpful.

We used: 

• IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler
• Redwood CPS for scheduling SAP tasks
• Redwood Cronacle
• Opalis, also
• AT scheduling on Windows, and
• Crontab scheduling. 

We switched to UAC because we did not want all the other schedulers and corresponding teams. It is also more cost-efficient.

Since we do have many security rules in our company, we needed to use some external scripting for setting permissions, etc. Without these, installing is a breeze.

We hired an external business consultant who helped us with the installation. Also had a small vendor team (one person) to help us migrate one scheduling application to UAC.

No clue.

Choose an enterprise license to have unlimited agents, tasks, etc.

We did look at UC4 (Automic Software), but after evaluation, UAC had more to offer.

No additional comments.

Scheduling Unix and Wintel batches. Full package - finance, backups, transfers. Three environments.  

Our organization could enter the cloud at full speed. 

Triggers separate from tasks contrary to the competitors.  

Lifecycle management.

More than five years.

solution in general stable however last OMS updates are blurring out this opinion.

scalability is good however it is lacking alternative to extend controller cluster's node numer.

reaction time is fair, however it happens that their will of help it not necessary handy, especially when you hardening the solution.

previous scheduler was TWS 8.5.  More expensive, less stable, less capable

a basic setup is straight forward however during setting some more advansed option it could be complex to achive

in-house

for sure unlimited license

control m

We are currently converting a segment of our distributed batch scheduling requirements from another vendor. The new model will give each application the ability to build, maintain and monitor their own batch flows.

This product will allow us a safer HA environment both in production as well as development /preproduction.

The bundling promotion feature will greatly save time and improve implementation by reducing the manual intervention required to move workflows from our test/staging environment.

• The API's need to fully meet the capabilities of the user interface.
• Better support of workload balancers (F5).

We had a number of schedulers over the years, leading the conversion discussion is usually surrounding vendor support as well as reliability issues.

We evaluated seven products and brought in three for proof of concept.

Originally purchased as a replacement for CA7/11, now used for full-blown enterprise automation. We utilize agents on Linux, Windows, iSeries, and zSeries machines.

Made the job of automating tasks easier, especially tasks that cross application boundaries.  Since we have applications that cross multiple platforms, this simplified where tasks get automated from several locations down to a single controller.

Workflows in general. It's great to automate across multiple servers through multiple applications. It is also useful to be able to use the universal templates to create our own automation types. We have found this useful for several different applications, as well as our own internal FTP task type.

The FTP tasks. Ever since UAC changed to using cURL for FTP, we have had a lot of issues.  90% or more of our FTP tasks have been moved away from the UAC task type to our own FTP task using WS-FTP pro (which has more flexibility, that UAC does not offer such as PGP encryption)

In some of the earlier releases (5 and prior). Nothing in newer releases.

No.

Customer support was superb! I can't say nearly enough great things about Lisa and the whole gang!

CA7/CA11 - switched due to cost.

I was not there for the initial set up of the single environment. That being said, I implemented a tiered environment and it was very easy to set up.

StoneBranch assisted setup.

Unknown to me.

The pricing of this product, compared to competitors is great. There is a general ease of set up for agents on all systems (except the mainframe which can be a little trickier).

I was not there at the time of the switch.

UAC is a wonderful product, and as an end user, I would fully suggest looking into this product.