What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for OpCon?

I am the one who signs the contract. In the beginning, when I started working here, it seemed very expensive, but after I learned everything that it does, I found it worth the price. I would recommend taking more time on the features that you or your clients want to use. I wish that I could only pay for the features that I am using, but once I buy the whole product, it is ours. I can use this product to automate a lot of different Active Directory processes that we manually do. Next year, we are going to use some of those features. The price is good for what it offers. The problem is more internal time and resources to take advantage of all those features.

While the overall cost is reasonable, I'm interested in exploring options for making the managed automation solution, specifically the mass solution, more cost-effective.

The pricing is reasonable. Given our plan, which allows us to run two productions and multiple failovers and development boxes, we find it to be a fair investment. While it suits our needs well, I'm aware that smaller credit unions may have found the cost challenging in the past. However, if an organization processes enough jobs and can justify the cost by realizing savings in employee roles, OpCon pays for itself.

Operating OpCon comes with a cost. While one could always argue that everything is expensive, especially given the array of products we use, I don't find any significant issue with it. The value proposition of OpCon, in my opinion, is tremendous. It is currently delivering value that justifies the cost.

OpCon's pricing is quite fair. The task-based model is appealing because it allows us to scale up or down as needed. We're primarily focused on scaling up, and the model has been working well in that regard for some time now. However, the introduction of à la carte offerings on top of the base price is becoming a concern. While the base pricing is reasonable, the à la carte options are making the overall cost more complicated and potentially problematic.

It was substantially less expensive than ASG-Zeke. We bought a five-year contract after the initial license fee, and then it's maintenance for five years. I would suggest that someone who is only looking at price when evaluating workload automation tools take a very hard look at OpCon because it is well-priced. OpCon is in a market where there's a lot of competition and they're trying to really get a foothold in it. If price is one of your primary concerns, consider OpCon.

The licensing and pricing model changed this last year, so we're getting used to that. I think it's ultimately going to end up being more expensive. It depends on the scale of the business. It used to be per machine, so we had X number of devices licensed. Now it's not. If we had a lot of machines, the new license might have decreased the cost. Unfortunately, we didn't see the same gains. There wasn't any consolidation of licensing with the shift.

This tool, like any other quality product, fits the idea of "You get what you pay for." The SMA Technologies consultants will help you get your money's worth of the products.

OpCon is an expensive and complex solution that will take time to learn. However, once it is in place, it removes many manual processes throughout the organization. It would be best to start small with the some of the main functions first and then build up from there.

Be sure to consider post-implementation costs. In our case, we contracted with the vendor for ongoing assistance given our lack of experience and manpower with a Windows-based solution.

The licensing has just changed recently. They just moved over to a new tiered pricing model and so I'm waiting to see what shakes out with that. When we got ours, we had bought add-ons at the time, but with the tiered pricing, a lot of those add-ons are included. I'm not aware of any additional costs at this time. The company had been recently sold and there were some hiccups with their new pricing, their tier pricing, but our salesman worked with us. Our account rep worked with us and got us something that both sides are agreeable to. OpCon does very well trying to do right by its client base. I can't fault that.

We currently renewed with one of their new technology bundles. It's around $36,000 annually. We run a query of our SQL in our SQL database to see how many jobs we run. They're charging us per usage and whatever add-ons you want to use with OpCon.

At the same time that I'm trying to keep it in our company, everybody thinks it's very expensive. We haven't looked at other schedulers or what they can do for us, but that's what I'm always told. Aside from the standard licensing fee, there aren't any other costs that come with it. We have the enterprise option so it's one annual fee for whatever we can do with it. You have to have the enterprise level for the mainframe, and that gives us room to grow.

The pricing is very reasonable.

In my last contract with Unisys, they tried to put SMA underneath my contract with them and I told them I do not want that. I want to deal with SMA by myself. I feel that I can negotiate better with them. The price is the price. They offer architects and other people to come and install upgrades and such for you. What that has done for us is that it has helped us maintain a good relationship with them and also to get at their technical expertise and ask a lot of questions and such while they're on campus doing the installation and training. The only cost beyond the standard licensing fees is when we need them to come out and do an install. We have to pay travel costs and for their technical expertise. But I do want that because we get their expertise.

Cost depends on your environment. We are doing stuff now with failover and recovery, so we have boosted our costs. Compared to AutoSys and ISE, OpCon was a lot cheaper to put in. AutoSys is hundreds of thousands of dollars to just install it because they don't have an interface into our system. You have to teach them what your system does.

The cost is based on the number of jobs. You pay for what you use. For us, the support cost is between €20,000 and €30,000 per year. It's too expensive. There are no additional costs.

This solution is slightly more expensive than our previous solution. Right now, we are paying about $40,000 a year. However, we think it's well worth the cost to keep things automated, reducing our staff.

There are different add-ons, like the Self Service or Vision model. It all depends on what agents you have in your environment. We have a mainframe and Windows, and while I think SQL is free, SAP or anything beyond that has different connectors that might need a license.

We just switched to task-based pricing, instead of annual agent pricing. There are the licensing fees and a maintenance fee. And we have costs for maintaining servers, our main server and our DR server.

The total cost of ownership is about the same to our previous product. The costs are relatively similar. The purchasing price was in the $30,000 or $40,000 range, but I don't remember how much of that was licensing or installation and how it was broken out.

We're licensed by the number of servers we have, and as long as we don't increase that, we just pay the maintenance on it. They've got a new pricing model out where you pay for the jobs. But looking at that, we'd pay a lot more than what we're paying today, so we'll just keep adding servers. The TCO, compared to Robot, is a little bit more expensive, but it goes across many platforms, so we get more bang for our buck.

The pricing is over $100,000 for our credit union and I believe it's $89,000 for our clients, in total, annually. There are additional costs with some of the upgrades. When we need to do upgrades, we will have Professional Services help and we have to pay for that. But the cost is maybe a few hundred dollars. Upgrades usually require two to four hours of their time.

I believe our cost is about $150,000 annually. There are add-ons you can buy, which have an additional cost, including products and Professional Services.

It is a pricey solution. Comparatively speaking, you can certainly find schedulers which are cheaper. In some cases, you can find ones that are free or use free solutions. However, OpCon is by far the superior quality product, and you pay for that. This also has a cost savings associated with an FTE, so you can more than outweigh the cost of the solution if you were to reduce the staff that you have onsite. Plus, this means that you don't need to have someone during irregular hours. One of the things that I run into is when you have staff that work irregular hours, this means you don't have that same staff (or that same availability) during the time when people are here. When people call on the phone, they don't want to talk to a system. They want to talk to a person. I would much rather pay to have a person here than have a person here during off-hours when there is nobody calling. The cost savings, removing the FTE, and having the system process everything automatically, as well as give me notifications in the same way that it does it everyday and I can always expect it at the same time, that is phenomenal.

Annually, we pay $29,000. This is for a blanket policy that covers everything, like licensing and support. If we choose to purchase consulting hours, that is an additional cost. However, we've been lucky enough that we've not used all of our allotted consulting hours. Therefore, that is not something that we have had to purchase a lot of. The last time that we purchased consulting hours was roughly two years ago. We purchased a block of 10 for $2,500. It was $250 per hour.

On a yearly basis our cost is between $25,000 and $30,000. I don't know if our contract is different from what a new client would get, but we have unlimited users with our Self Service. That gives us a lot more scalability. We can spin up different machines and different servers all over our network.

Our annual maintenance costs are $45,000. The initial cost is separate. Initially, we purchased just the standard OpCon solution. We upgraded to the OpCon elite solution, the enterprise edition. That did include some Self Service licensing. But if we want to expand to more Self Service licenses, we will have to purchase them. We may look at that in the near future.

Yearly, we're paying about $62,000. OpCon has an all-inclusive feature and module license, but you pay per task. We have a 500 daily task count. Recurring tasks only count once. There are only additional costs if you want consulting hours for working on new projects. I think that cost is $250 per hour, a pretty standard consulting rate.

It's not cheap. It's a licensing system. It costs money to put it in and it's a subscription-based system. The managed service costs money on top.

OpCon is expensive for us as a small organization, but on the other hand, it's a lot less expensive than hiring another full-time employee. We pay for licensing annually, including the Self Service module, a connector license to our Corelation Keystone banking platform, and for a license for each server that it's on. A lot of these are rolled up into one, but the initial implementation was a chunk of money. Now, we just pay annual maintenance.

There are standard licensing fees and annual maintenance. They also have a subscription model that is a hybrid managed service. We have also invested in ancillary API and connector licences specific to our environment and use cases.

Our license is for 1000 jobs. Including support, the license and upgrades are 2000 euros a month.

It costs less than our previous solution, Dollar Universe. We pay annual maintenance but we don't pay anything additional until we hit a certain number of jobs per day.

Our licensing is on a yearly basis.

Yearly, it's around $30,000. We bought consulting hours for a year at an additional cost. We're getting 85 hours a year for consulting to help us through, for example, with a complex process that we want to get done. Some of those hours might be spent for them to actually come onsite and give one-on-one training to some new people being introduced to OpCon.

This solution is certainly not the cheapest, but we win in time.

It's not expensive. It's a lot cheaper than competitors. Licensing is annual. There are only additional costs to the standard licensing fees if we go above what we've agreed to. If we were to add a new Unisys mainframe, or if we add a Unix box or a Windows box, then obviously we'd have to pay for licenses. There's nothing else. You need to be up-front and tell what SMA what you want. There are different licensing models for different setups. There are a lot of options, so it's really a matter of working out exactly what options you require. What works for our organization, Nationwide, may not work for the next company or the company after that. But they have a lot of licensing options available. And if there isn't one that you want, you can make your own with SMA.