AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

Primary use is job scheduling. It performs admirably. It really does what it is supposed to do. I have been doing this for 19 years with AutoSys.

We have ended up using it as a Tier 1 application supporting other Tier 1 applications. We schedule all jobs, everything from payroll to how to move oil around the country.

• Reliability
• Stability
• Expandability: It scales well.

A lot of what we want is going to be based on our particular solution, not for something everybody else could use at the same time. Different companies use AutoSys differently. They have different standards and different methodologies. A solution that we want in place would not apply to other companies.

From what we heard, the features we want are being included with the next couple of releases. One is to be able to work and create automatic ticketing solutions that are not necessarily CA products. It is just the automation around getting jobs to work correctly. If something fails, what do we do then.

I would like to be able to see the product grow into something that is going to be more reliable and better. The new purchase of Automic should help.

It is very reliable. There is always been a bump here there, but it really does well for us.

It scales very well. We can add jobs and remove jobs. We do not have problems maintaining the product across multiple environments and multiple servers.

The initial contact is not very reliable. We have to escalate through channels to get to somebody who knows what's going on. It takes time that we do not necessarily have. It is because its that the support tech is not dedicated to the product and they do not know how to fix our exact issue.

We have waited years for a problem to be resolved. The tickets get closed with no resolution, and there should be a resolution but we can't get a reliable answer. We run out of patience and just close the tickets.

We take advantage of the CA Community, however it is hit and miss. There are a lot of good questions and answers, but also a lot of simple ones, where people just look at them and go, "Just read the manual. It's in there."

It was both straightforward and complex. The information gathering to get the product installed takes time and effort. Once we had everything gathered, the installs went very smoothly and quickly.

The complexity of the product has to do with the information gathering:

• What it has to do? 
• Where it has to do it? 
• How it has to interface? 
• What databases are we connecting to and to what IDs? 
• What servers are we logging into? 
• What IDs do we have to use? 
• How are the parts connecting? 
• Are there ports that need to be opened? 
• Are there firewalls that need to be adjusted? 
• Are there various things that we have to account for that we were not initially thinking about? 

The documentation covers these, but it is just a matter of gathering all of them. The information gathering can take a week. The product install takes minutes.

The actual decision to install AutoSys was out of my hands, but it was recommended. It is one of the better products on the market.

Use this product. I have used the competitors' products. I have used AutoSys. If there is a comparison, I will give them my views as to what I think of all the products. My view right now, use AutoSys.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Service
• Reliability
• Support
• If we are able to actually contact our sales reps and get solutions and answers from them. 
• If we are able to open tickets and get answers to some of the easier questions.
• Are they willing to come in and sit with us, and make sure we are getting things done correctly the first time.

CA 7 Edition supplies our mainframe scheduling workflow. Automation.

It's performed well over the years. Obviously we've had CA 7 Edition for decades. It just performs its job day in, day out. Very little of having to remediate any issues with 7. Obviously there are issues with jobs eventually, but those are always developer issues, with how they've coded their JCL. But, otherwise it performs well and executes as scheduled.

• Dependability
• Delivering on the execution of the jobs
• Zero downtime 

All the above are definitely important.

Day to day it actually allows the developers to execute their critical processes for the business, running the business. I can see that expanding in the future.

It's hard to tell what needs to be improved. That's kind of why I'm here at the CA World conference, to see what options are out there that may help our developers fulfill their needs in the future. I'm trying to get a feel for what other tool sets may be available to help them do their jobs better.

I can see the analysis piece and the web client being critical parts, going into the future. Especially with the aging population, the baby boomers going out. We're very top heavy at this point within the company. As those people age out and retire, they're taking a lot of business knowledge with them. 

Stability is very good. Like I said before, very little remediation needed, close to zero. We probably have two or three tickets with CA in a year.

Obviously, scalability is dependent on the mainframe MIPS. If you need more to run the jobs, once it's running jobs, it's out of CA 7's control. We haven't any performance issues, any time recently, of it not being able to get jobs into the cues.

Customer service with CA 7 has been very good. They've helped us through several upgrades, with tickets around those. Whenever we've had issues, they've been able to point out where to look to see what potentially is affecting 7 itself.

For us, when considering vendors, a lot of it's going to depend on their 

• roadmap
• ability to service and respond to customers needs
• long term durability, are they going to be there a year from now, two years from now, 20 years from now? 

Vendors go out of business. You don't want to be in a situation where you're forced into doing a product migration to something else.

Make sure you know what the requirements of your business are, and whether it's going to meet the needs of those that are going to be using and depending on the product.

I work as an engineer in an enterprise company. We have used AutoSys Workload Automation for a long time for batch processing and other automation things.

AutoSys Workload Automation has saved us a lot of time for batch processing and bad jobs. Earlier, if someone had an issue with the application, they would open a ticket, and we would take the ticket and work on the issue. AutoSys Workload Automation can pick up a ticket raised by someone, resolve the issue, and close the ticket. So, it saves a lot of human intervention.

The most valuable feature of AutoSys Workload Automation is batch processing.

There is a recently made change in AutoSys Workload Automation's subscription model. The solution does not have a friendly subscription model because it forces users to take a five-year subscription simultaneously, charging millions of dollars. Hence, our managers are looking for alternatives to AutoSys Workload Automation.

I have been using AutoSys Workload Automation for five years.

I rate AutoSys Workload Automation ten out of ten for stability.

I rate AutoSys Workload Automation ten out of ten for scalability.

Overall, I rate AutoSys Workload Automation ten out of ten.

We use it for batch processing. We're a service bureau, so a number of our customers contract with us to use it for mainframe batch processing.

There are certain batch jobs that need to run on a regular basis in order for our customers to receive reports and updates, and CA-7 provides that for us. So that improves the function of our agencies.

The ability to create calendars, calendaring for batch jobs to run on a scheduled frequency.

The cross-platform arena, where you can run work on multiple platforms, needs improvement.

Stability is a 10 out of 10.

Scalability is a nine out of 10.

Technical support is a 10 out of 10.

We used punch cards back in 70s and 80s. This is the solution that took over from IBM punch cards.

I did not do the initial setup.

I certainly think the pricing is worth the value.

Evaluate whether it performs all the functions you need for batch processing.

We run millions of jobs through it every day using it for financial transactions, banking, credit cards, PeopleSoft, payroll, etc. We use it for everything.

It has just been in use in this organization for many years. It is just a standard go-to tool for scheduling.

It works.

I do not have any features that I need to see, but there is a lot of stuff coming out and the tools that attach to AutoSys. That will be very helpful in making it easier for our customers to view and see how their jobs are performing. 

It is very stable.

We are huge, so it is very scalable. We are probably one of their biggest customers.

The issues that we do have, they solve very quickly. Right now, we do not have any outstanding ones that I am aware of. Support from them has always been fantastic.

CA installation processes are never anything but complex.

It has been my go-to tool for 28 something years, and it has not failed me yet. There are all kinds of schools of thought as to what is the best scheduler to choose. I am an AutoSys proponent. I prefer AutoSys over the other ones out there for ease of use, ease of understanding, and getting people to understand how the tool works. Other schedulers do things differently than AutoSys. So, it really depends on what it is you need your scheduler to do in order for you to be able to choose which one to use.

I use the scheduling product to support the Home Depot stores here in the United States and Canada, as well as Mexico. It works wonderfully as it is very robust.

• Durability
• The secure database itself
• Usability of it

In a billion dollar company, you want a scheduling product that is very robust, which can handle the magnitude of schedules that we run through it.

The security of it. It is a very secure product. As well as the scalability of it. You can really scale it across systems.

It helps us to be more agile as far as the business use.

I would like to see iDASH be a packaged part of Workload Automation as opposed of being two separate packages. I would like to see iDASH be incorporated with the release of CA Workload Automation. For it to be all a complete package instead of two separate packages that I would install to enhance one another. So, we use iDASH for the recording purposes of the batch jobs that CA7 actually runs. I would like to see iDASH and CA7 become one product instead of two separate products, too. 

The agent is also a different installation as well as the scheduling packages. To see all of that incorporated under one umbrella would be ideal. 

The stability is awesome. We have not had issues in twenty years. It is just that robust, with the exception of new product/new version releases.

The scalability is awesome because we use it for the mainframe schedule as well as distributive schedule.

The support also is great from the CA company itself.

I have a CA rep that always contacts me on a quarterly basis. Also, I have support that I can reach out to 24/7.

My company has been using the CA products for years, since the start of the company itself. As our company grows, we have been growing with CA as well.

I was involved with the upgrades. They were very streamlined.

We received support from CA during upgrades which made it very streamlined. 

They do a really good job for us with their improvements and new releases, especially the agents.

When you are looking for at this product, you are not looking just for at the product itself, you are looking at the total package: The support for the product, the durability of the product, and the scalability of the product.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: support. By far, CA has the best support.

We use it for SAP job submission in our total environment. 

So far, performance has been excellent. It's been 100 percent satisfactory. We had a couple glitches in the beginning, during initial setup, but we've worked out everything, it's 100 percent satisfactory.

The actual scheduling of our jobs has helped us tremendously. Before it was all done manually, and we've totally automated the whole functionality, so there's no longer a case where somebody didn't run something. It's 100 percent reliable.

It cuts down on time, where actual people have to sit down and do things. We no longer have that issue, where we would have to bring in multiple people, or even hire multiple people, to come in to run certain jobs. Now, all we have to do is schedule it and it runs just fine.

More benefits with the agent upgrades, and that's about it. Other than that we have no complaints with it. It's been awesome.

So far, the stability has been great. We do have a couple minor issues with some of the agents, as far as release is concerned, but other than that it's a very stable product.

In terms of scalability, right now we're a new customer so we haven't scaled it up to other applications yet, but we are planning to. We've opened it up for our Windows environment and they are enjoying it right now. That's a very small group, for right now, but we plan on adding close to 15,000 servers to it. So it's going to benefit us a lot.

Yes, we have used tech support, and they are very helpful. Response time is awesome. Usually when we call them, we get a response back with an hour.

Our old product that we had with SAP was more of a manual process, but our company is going to more automation-based products. That was our main need, to get rid of the manual labor and, instead, just use the automated process.

I was involved in the initial set up.

The way that it was brought to us, in our initial setup, we had a lot of initial questions and they replied, "Well, set it up the way you want it."

It was kind of confusing from an end-user support aspect, asking them what are the best practices. They didn't say what the best practices were. So we had to come up with the best practices. That was the only downfall.

There were three other vendors involved, which didn't meet our full needs because we're cross-platform. We have Windows, IBM iSeries, Oracle, SQL, all that. And this product tends to fit in more with all of our products, based on just one platform alone.

When we are selecting a vendor, what's important to us are

• support, that's number one
• price
• maintenance

which all seem to be reasonably well in hand right now.

I gave it an eight out of 10 because of the support and the product; it is very easy to learn. It's pretty straightforward.

We actually were just advising colleagues who asked us about this product. We said it is very easy to use, it's multi-platform based; those were the main reasons, I would think. They actually ended up buying the product as well, with our recommendation.

What we really like is that it's an enterprise solution and it really allows us to do the "normal work," the different operating systems and platforms, but it also allows us to manage and control our ERP systems, and things like Informatica and Hadoop, and all those good things that are coming down the line, in the way of big data and things like that.

The really nice thing is that, as the business grows, we're not seeing the infrastructure grow. Regardless of how much new business we keep on, the team is pretty stable. We have a dedicated team of eight people. We maintain today nine instances of DE: three production and six pre-production. We're probably going to add a couple more in 2017, but we don't anticipate having to grow the infrastructure. We'll be able to keep serving the customers the same way we have historically and we'll be able to do that into the future, without seeing any degradation in service.

We would like to see good improvement on the historical reporting capabilities. It's always been, I think, a bit of a weak point. Currently, if you know a SQL programmer, he should become your best friend, but I'd like to see it get to the point where somebody with really basic skills – where they understand the information they want – can easily extract it. That's really the big area with room for improvement.

The development team has been really good about keeping up with not only our requests but the user community as a whole. We're pretty happy about it, but that's the one exception.

It's extremely stable. We put in the Canadian systems about three years ago, and we have not had an incident in the three years that has kept us down for more than a couple of hours.

Support has been really good. If we need to call somebody, generally they're on the line in a few minutes, and we get right into the diagnostics and we're set to go again. Extremely stable; the agents are perfect. They never give us a problem at all. The servers are getting awfully close.

It's our impression that we're probably one of the larger installations in the world. We have two instances controlling our Canada operation; it’s really Canada and the rest of the world. It was suggested that we spin up the second instance, but we really haven't seen a good reason for doing that, other than we keep some of the competing lines of business separated. Other than that, it seems to scale really well and we can keep going with it.

Tech support, as I’ve mentioned, has been great. I know that CA has kept some people in support for a very long time, so they're very comfortable with the product. They know how the thing works. They know if it ever makes a particular hiccup, what's exactly causing that. We actually are on the Platinum support program, so we have a dedicated support resource. Historically, that person has been outstanding. He's always just a phone call away. He's knowledgeable not only about the product but our environment. Based on that, he can do a really, really good job for us.

Before I came to my current job, I was actually an independent consultant. The last job I worked before I came to work here was converting all the material into the system. I've been there since day one. Initial setup has always been really, really straightforward. Architecturally, the solution make sense. There's a very good separation of functions and features. The security is outstanding and because the solution is English language-based, we don't really need to go out and put in a lot of infrastructure support to do the normal stuff. Basically, if you want a job to run on Tuesday, you simply tell it, run on Tuesday, and it miraculously works.

We were in a situation where we had one of everything and we really went out to do a consolidation in the solutions that we were using. We really saw the CA solution as something that would give us the reliability and the scalability to move us forward in the future. We really didn't see that from a lot of the other solutions in the industry, so we chose them.

When we are selecting a vendor, the support is really the first and foremost criteria, and then I guess support going forward, so, the development organization: How are they addressing changes in the industry, changes in the solution? That sort of thing.

Look really hard at what your requirements are today. Know that you're going to have a solution that you're going to be able to stick with for as long as you care to stick with it; also, something that can address audit requirements, address things like scalability, and usability. If you have to become an expert on how to make the product work and use it, then it's probably not as usable as you need it to be. Look for something that you can talk to, like you were talking to your little brother, and move forward from there.

The reasons for my rating are usability, reliability, and scalability of the solution.