Automic Automation Reviews

The production controls the test environment and test batches. The performance is very good.

Our key feature is that we have different clients for different environments. We can manage all our environments using a transport case as a name of a feature. It is very helpful to have the same setup in each environment.

The new user interface needs improvement. The previous version was good and stable. Now, we have to check the new one before using a web browser. It is not stable.

We have been waiting 11 years for release management, which will be in the next release.

Stability is okay.

The scalability is good because you can add on as many services and processes as you want.

We used the technical support in the beginning, who were easy to work with.

In the last couple of years, there was no need for it.

We had a couple of solutions in place starting from Windows, Unix crontab, and other batch controlling software (like Control-M, Redwood, etc.).

Batches interact with all applications, so the batch structure is more complex and using different tools was not a solution. Therefore, we needed to have one single workflow as a solution for us, and we made the decision to have one tool in place. Then, we did an evaluation, and the winner was CA.

The initial setup was straightforward. With outsourcing, it made it simple.

We have received a lot of time and cost efficiencies from using the product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: The tool is more important than the vendor.

• Look how comfortable the tool is. 
• How it has performed. 
• The vendor name or costs are just a second point of the evaluation.

We use Workload Automation to control all our processes and the batch control.

We are working with version 10, and need to upgrade to version 12.2.

• The product is clear and very visual. 
  
• We receive feedback right at the moment that we need it. 
• We are able to control and change our processes when necessary.

At the moment, we have clear batches to see workflows to control.

In the next version, I do not know what is coming up for us.

The workflows should be clearer and more expressive. I need this going forward.

We have downtime during every upgrade. In the normal process, it works fine. 

It is scalable.

We are now in extended support. We are now in the change process, so we needed extended support.

When we contact support, we can get through to the right person to receive the correct answers.

The product has helped save, time, money, and resources. It has given us a competitive advantage in our industry. 

Use the product. Support is good and it works fine.

Our customers use it for scheduling.

It performs quite well. It depends on the customer. Some customers do not use it with all the features that the product offers. They only use a small set of what the product can do.

Reliability: You can count on it.

It has saved my customers time, money, resources, and efficiency.

Monitoring is very good.

For power users, it does not work well for them at the moment.

The event monitoring is very good. It has become a great part of the product suite. However, most customers rarely use it.

At the moment, it is working quite well. Version nine's stability was not good. Now, it is stable again.

The scalability is very good.

Mostly, we get a standard answer. Sometimes, the support is not very good.

Maybe it is problem with some customers and the tickets that they are opening, as the tickets are not very well designed. Still, as an experienced user, when I open a ticket, I put in all the needed information. Yet, the support for me is still not great and could be better.

It is straightforward for me. Those new to this business find the initial setup complex. 

It is a complex product, so you can't do the setup with a click.

It is a good product for solution automation.

We use it to automate our business.

While we have had some issues, it is mostly perfect. If it is set up, it is running.

It does its job.

Token-based authentication: Where we do not have to use a password, and can use tokens for authentication in other systems.

Apart from the new UI, it is very stable. The new UI feels unready. It makes your browsers crash.

The scalability is very good. We can scale it however we want. We have seen new add-ons, such as the event machine. There is always something to augment.

You have to improve your systems, but there are no seen limits. 

Sometimes, it is a bit hard get through the first level of support to the second level, then to the endpoint of the solution. Overall, it is a bit tricky.

Our migration from a previous system was not easy. However, when we did a new implementation that was easy.

I do not remember.

I recommend to try the product. Our competitors mostly use this product too.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Getting things done better.

We use it for batch processing. It is performing well.

We are doing the end of day processing, as we are a bank. It is very important for us that we do not have one hour of downtime, because we are online the whole day, 24/7.

It helps our efficiency because it is a batch processing tool which works without a menu.

We are an old-fashioned company. We are only using the product for batch processing.

I would like a good AWI in the next release. The AWI is not fully functional at this time.

The stability is not as good as it could be, because we are on version 10, but it is okay.

Every time we have an upgrade for a new version, we have stability problems, because the versions are not as good as they should be. Then, after a few months, they get more stability, and we are happy with it.

The scalability is great.

Sometimes technical support is very good, and sometimes it is very bad. They do not see the problems which we have. We have to escalate it to our product manager. When we need a fix, they say, "The fix is in the next version. Please wait while we make updates."

Use Automic or CA Workload Automation, as it is the best tool.

The primary use case is automation of our business processes within the bank along with several areas of process automation. We have been using the product for 10 years now and have built it up from scratch. We do a lot of stuff with it, of which, we are mostly satisfied, though there will always be problems with it.

It enables us to build automation which is flexible in a controlled environment. We have a lot of governance and compliance requirements as a bank that we can fulfill with this product. We can fulfill them because we have an environment where everything is monitored where you have an audit trail of the product and for the executions of the development. 

We can perform across platform automation with a product, and we are not bound to one architecture or system. We can bind together a lot of systems and ways of integrating systems. That is the most positive effect on our end. It is very flexible to program around your automation.

The stability needs improvement.

The stability is not as good as it was in former years. Stability has gone down from version to version, but it is probably due to the product's complexity and transitions in the company. Stability could be better, as it was better in the past.

The scalability is okay, as we are not scaling so much. 

Technical support is good. They are doing the best that they can, but it is a complex product with difficult requirements from a stability point of view.

The initial setup was 10 years ago, so it was easy at the time. With each upgrade, it will probably have more complexity, but it has been a little hidden because it is a step-by-step process. Though, the complexity is okay with the setup.

It is not so easy to give numbers. There are just a lot of things that you cannot do without this product.

We evaluated some competitors a decade ago, and Automic (UC4) was the best choice. We look at the product and features. We did tests and an installation of the product, then we decided on Automic.

The other competitors, 10 years ago, were CA and IBM.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Product features (i.e., flexibility).
• It must fit the requirements.
• A partner that you can rely on.

Work Automation is a worldwide product which has a lot of utilities. It can be very helpful for use with customers' data, and it is very quick with utilizations, customizations, etc, so we can meet the customers' needs.

Customers save a lot of money when they use this product, because of things like the scheduling tool. I know several companies which are not using it. Overall, it seems more expensive, because Workload Automation can save a lot of time and human resources.

It does give our customers a competitive advantage in their space.

Its stability.

From Workload Automation, which is missing for me personally, is a workload portion. I can see dependencies of the job directly in the graphical view, therefore I would not have to use the search button to search for every object every time that I needed to see if it was a predecessor.  

For the user interface of version 12.1, I cannot find a lot of utilities and objects from previous versions, making me change my habits. This is not good.

I am working with Workload Automation for more than ten years, when it was named UC4, then renamed again, etc. We have never had big problems with stability of this product.

The performance is very good. If there are problems, they will be caused by somebody doing something wrong. Usually the product does not have a lot of problems, and we did recognize when the application has failed due to errors.

You can do a lot of customization and build your architecture and hierarchy as you want it.

Since you are able to save resources and costs, you can grow your business.

We do not contact support very often. Most answers are in the documentation.

When we install the version 12.0 and 12.1, AVI caused some problems, but after opened a ticket to technical support, they responded quickly with a great answer.

I would recommend to definitely try the product.

In our company, we use it for the following:

• Scheduling of SAP and ERP jobs.
• Backing up most of our servers.
• ITSM and scheduling using the automation agent.
• Running our non-ERP jobs, or for some other applications. 
• File transfer and automation services.

We were using UC4, which was very good. We have had some challenges within the application as it moves forward to the new features. 

For example, our users are used to the flatline of the UC4. When we introduced the AVI, they are not interested nor motivated to use it.

There are some challenges because of the new features and the new change of interfaces. Nevertheless, we use this application to organize our jobs and to integrate the applications within the company. It is useful for report generation and backups.

It is good and efficient in terms of workload.

• File transfer
• The solution for rocket automation, as a file transfer and its agents.
• Mostly SAP scripting.
• Integration with most of the platforms that we have within the company's Windows, Linux, and Unix. Integrating these inside the automation agent for scheduling, backups, file transfer, and SAP jobs.

We have a lot of file transfers with Quest. Hopefully, their product management can add this feature since we do the file transfers now with SharePoint.

We want to establish a service where we can be a file transfer expert for everything. We want an automation engine that we can use within our company. We would like to use this particular software to provide file transfer service.

It is more stable now. In the previous versions 8 and 10, it is more stable, but with the AVI version 12, it is more complicated and we encounter a lot of problems. We need to install hot pieces and badges every time, so it means downtime for us. This is starting from version 12, which is why we are not happy with it. 

It provides a large scale for us, because it is flexible, in terms of usage. We have done a proof of concept within this application.

I think we are known to the technical support. Unfortunately, the technical support does not help much with our problems until you get to the gurus due to the complexity of our problems.

Automation is very powerful. This solution is flexible in terms of platform integration. They need better CA support , because in terms of issues and problem solving, the support is not good. It would be much better if CA had some dedicated support to customers.

We use it for scheduling of our production and development.

It helps us manage production and provides an overview of production along with a review of past performance.

The most important thing is having no downtime. We do not have any downtime for support or release changes.

It is easy to manage and customize the system. It performs well.

Today, we use a rich client for this product. In the future, or for the next release, they will be using a web interface. This web interface is not as scalable as the rich client for us. The web client is not 100 percent programmed as we need it.

It is 100% stable. We have no downtime. We have 24/7 production throughout the year.

It has a good source code that we administrate. We can expand the system.

It has endless scalably. We can add new Clients from zero to 9,999, and we only use 10 Clients. We can add agents up to 500,000. We can also add RAM, disk space, and CPUs. 

In the early years, when using the product, we had many phone calls with technical support. Sometimes those calls were good, sometimes they were bad. It has been getting better.

In the past, we had CA-7. CA built this mainframe schedule. Then, we have canceled the contract to CA, and decided to go with UC4. Now, UC4 is a part of CA, and now we have a contract with CA again.

Sometimes it was simple, and other times, it was very difficult. However, we had good technical support from Automic designing our system.

We had an employee from Atomic design the system for us.

I would recommend Automic with some restrictions.

We use it to automate our business processes. It is just for automation and scheduling.

We have worked about 20 years with this product. We have migrated for 20 years from CA to Automic. It is very interesting. Now, we are back to CA, because they have taken over the Automic company. The benefits also include the automation of our processes. We have worked mostly with SAP software, and we have other things in our plans. We want to automate the distribution of servers, so clients can make a request from ServiceNow. That way, companies can order servers on the internet that we normally we would build during the process for internal use. Because developers sometimes need a very fast machine for testing, you can click in ServiceNow to request a machine after two hours, then you can have a machine to plug into. At the moment, we have tried to make this a digitalized process, although we have a problem with ServiceNow.

It is easy to integrate different systems in one platform, then to automate it. You have a job, then one part of the job is going to the SAP system, and the other one is going to ServiceNow or to another system. Then, they all combine into one process.

The very special feature that we use is the connection to ServiceNow.

It does not have the same functions as the old version, which makes our developers angry because because they must work with this tool. We going forward it may not be possible.

CA has missed the product's focus. We have a lot of developers in our company, and we are experiencing the same problem. However, the CA company has not seen that developers and clients are having a problem, which is not good for the product that we do. CA took over the Automic company last year, and we do not think this was a good direction for the product.

I would like to see the rich client with the product for the developers.

It is more important for us to have a longer, stabler releases. We do not need so many features. This is a problem of bigger companies where the management wants new features, but the product has no stability after that.

It would be good to have a mobile app, where you can monitor your process, just to see if it is running or if it is blocked. The user interface on the web is not good for the developers. Features are missing, and for the client, it is too complex. At the moment, we build our own UI. We have programmers in Java API, and we have a Client which works on the mobile phone. It can start jobs, make the schedules stop and start, and see the statistics on a smartphone.

We have had issues with the performance. We have a job now in production, but the product is not very stable. ServiceNow creates problems with the Automic entry of the connector, so the stability could be a little bit better with this product.

Sometimes, we have some performance problems. I am not sure it is because of the software. It might be because we have a huge amount of objects in our system. In this case, it can happen that we often have performance problems. I am not sure if it is because of the product, it is more because of the objects in our system.

Because the product is based on the SQL Database, we have too many activations. The scalability is limited by the SQL in the background, and that is a problem. If you want to take jobs to other systems, you must build the developer our way. At the moment, we are building a new system. We have it for every country and have separated it for machines. It is mostly getting better, but the scalability to build it on new systems or to split it is not so easy.

We have technical support. We also have a connection in Austria with the support colleagues there. 

The first step: You must describe the problem. At the most, filling in a checklist.

Then: It helps to take the telephone, and talk to a technical engineer directly. 

That is why their technical support is very good.

Mostly, we contact support because our problems are very complex. Normally, we find problems that they have never knew about before. We have new technology and build actions on the automation system, then we find objects which can work with those actions, because we have technical limitations. 

We have a contact within the support, and also with a freelance in Austria. We have worked together with several people to find a solution for this new philosophy. Automic states you should build everything with actions and take multiple actions with business processes. However, not all objects are usable for actions that we see.

If you would have to start all your jobs manually, it would cost you a lot of time and money.

You do not need any humans to start jobs, so you can save a lot of money.

From the bad products, the Automic is the best. All products in the market are not good since they are simple workload scheduling. There are some things are missing in the Automic product, which our management does not see.

I would recommend using Automic.