Stonebranch Reviews

We use Stonebranch to manage and migrate automated tasks. 

Stonebranch performs well, and the graphical representation is excellent. Overall, it requires more technical effort from our teams, but the solution is intuitive, so anybody can use it.

We've been using Stonebranch for about six months.

Stonebranch is stable, and the high-availability mode works well.

Stonebranch is scalable enough to meet all our requirements so far. We could automate 30,000 tasks without issue. 

I would rate Stonebranch somewhere in the middle for ease of setup. It wasn't too straightforward for us because our infrastructure is complex. There were a few parts we had to move. We have decommissioned 5 percent of our jobs annually. Total deployment took us around six months because we went system by system, so that's why it took a long time.

Our in-house team worked with outside consultants. 

I'll rate Stonebranch Universal Automation Center eight out of 10.

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.

Automate batch processing jobs that used to run on cron and had very ambiguous logging. It really helped us automated many manual jobs as well that were time-consuming and tedious.

UAC has improved our organization by exposing many dependencies between our batch jobs that would not be visible before. This helped us improve our job scheduling by managing dependencies and better scheduling of jobs.

Workflow editor and the ability to visually see how a particular job or set or jobs will run together, when and under what conditions. 

REST API can be improved by exposing more information about running instances. For example, the failed error message of a Stored procedure task cannot be seen through the API. Other features that would be helpful is to dynamically insert new tasks to be run at run time when certain conditions are met. Currently, that's possible with a web service task but only one task can be inserted at a time for one instance which is limiting possibilities.

No issues.

No issues.

We always get great service and support from all of the staff. Lisa has been one of the main contacts and helpful support representatives that has helped us through the years. Thank you Lisa!

No.

I was not part of the initial setup of the system so I'm unfamiliar.

I was not part of the decision process of picking a solution.

Keep up the great work and awesome support!

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.