AutoSys Workload Automation Reviews

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.

We use it for running jobs of workload automation, specifically bad jobs.

The flexibility and the scalability that it can be used from the back-end. It is very user friendly.

It is more scalable. We run around 100K jobs on a daily basis. To manage that much workload on the system, it is very reliable in terms of the uptime on the system.

The scalability could be improved upon. According to the roadmap, this should be addressed in upcoming features.

The emailing feature that we have, when there is a figure, you fill it in. This should be an emailing feature that is enabled.

It had downtime, but Sevis has been very supportive in that aspect.

We run about 100K jobs on a daily basis, so this adds up to having more critical customers in terms of reliability.

We have used the Techno Global support when we have had issues. 

I was not a part of the initial setup.

I would recommend this solution.

It schedules application jobs throughout the night for different companies, various companies that AIG processes: American General Life, Life and Retirement Services, and several of their legacy partners. We monitor the input throughout the evening, make sure the cycles are complete, bring up the onlines in the morning, and run jobs per request.

• The automation of it
• The triggering
• The scheduling of the jobs
• The processes

We recently got iDash. So, we are starting to review iDash with CA-7 now, and we are using it.  

Through consistently meeting SLAs, job dependencies, and requirements.

We are not ready to go to the newest release (12.0).

It is very stable.

I do not really deal with that much. Basically, we have four processes running on four different environments.

We have gotten great support from CA. They are there whenever we need them. Whenever we open a case, they are very receptive to the issues that we have and resolve them in a timely manner.

The previous solution was very difficult to manage. The monitoring required somebody to be hands on. 

I was not involved in the initial setup.

It performs really well.

We're able to monitor a complex workload, easily see where we're at in our batch flows, and take care of problems before they become bigger issues.

We had a stuck file-watcher we weren't aware of, and then because of alerting, instead of missing an SLA, we were able to reach out and get the file in time to still make our batch commitments.

I think just having visibility into it; our managers can see what's going on too. It's not just a single technician that's a bottleneck trying to find out where we are. 

So the visibility into the workflow, and ease of use to be able to schedule.

The main push is the web UI, to be able to give it to our business users. They don't want to have to log in to a mainframe to use the product.

If we can get iDASH into ESP that would help. I know this request is the fourth... We're "in the hole," we're not even on deck. So it's going to come out to DEs, then it will come to us. That would be a big improvement, an option that we'd like to see.

No issues at all. In fact, that's actually one of the, I would say, competitive advantages of this product, the scalability and its ability to do the throughput we would need without having any delays.

We've scaled with it as far as we can grow. I've been talking to other companies that are much larger. I'm confident it could scale. If we had a tenfold growth, we'd still be okay.

I have not used tech support. Other people in my area have. They seem easy to work with. You get the documentation to them; they get back to you in a couple days with what they've found.

Yes, CA Scheduler, at that time. I think they were dropping support for CA Scheduler.

At that time I wasn't high enough up. By the time it rolled out I was happy with how I was able to get up to speed in the product, and support what I needed to support. But I was not involved in evaluating other products.

When choosing to work with a vendor, the most important criteria I look for are

• a long-term relationship
• a partnership
• willing to grow
• willing to listen to feedback
• support
• that they'll help us do our job.

I've worked with CA Workload Automation so I'm happy. I would say they're a nine out of 10 because I don't know anyone else. It's all relative. They could be a 10. I'm happy with them. I don't have any complaints. They're responsive.

Make sure you partner with them. Get buy-in from your business units before implementing. I think that's one of the biggest keys to success. If you don't feel comfortable let them explain their product. Get the buy-in first, then move forward so you don't have the resentment of, "Hey, you're forcing this product on us."

It's been great.

I find that it provides better agility in regards to job execution features.

The CA Autosys has assisted our organization by providing effective backend automation for enterprise application functionality.

This product needs to improve its graphical user interface.

I have used this product for about 12 years.

Lot of automation required and need to be aligned with DevOps.

I have not encountered any issues with stability.

I have not encountered any issues with scalability.

7/10

CA Technologies provides good technical support and I would give it a 7 out of 10 rating.

I found the installation process easy to follow.

Implement through vendor as special skills.

This product offers more jobs and stability.

After conducting extensive market evaluation, we chose the CA Autosys tool.

I would recommend to make use of outsourced software solutions such as Atgen for ensuring a stable setup process.

We find scheduling to be the most valuable feature because we can do so on multiple platforms and we can define them once then re-use them.

It's given our organization stability because we're able to perform scheduling functions that provides order and predictability to our workload.

I can't think of anything at the moment.

We've had no issues with deployment.

Never had any issues, which is the main reason we use it. We don’t use other products for scheduling on the mainframe.

We’ve never had any issues. We run over 300,000 jobs a day and we have thousands of end users, at least 10,000 who can evaluate their flows and manage schedules.

We've never needed tech support.

I've always been using it, so there was no previous solution.

The initial setup was done around 30 years ago, so I don't know whether it was simple or complex.

When we look for new products, the user functionality and ease of use are important, as is making sure it's stable. The knowledge transfer is easy.

We still use the green screen on the mainframe terminal screen instead of having a Windows-based view – though it's our decision. Overall, it's a good tool for an entire mainframe environment.

CA Workload Automation AutoSys Edition is one of the most powerful schedulers that you have on the open systems, or going between Window servers; to be able to schedule and take advantage of the different powers that the automation has with it.

I've taken advantage of not only the normal command jobs and stuff like that, but I've turned them into using the proper plugins, the job types. One of the things that I have found out is that I'm the one that's using most of the job types, because I've taken away the need for writing or scripting processes. When somebody knows the database and knows how to write SQL code, or they know how to write a stored procedure, they don't need to know how to write scripting in order to run their scripts.

It's a little bit of a cost savings thing by using a plugin and using the different job types that AutoSys has. It goes the same thing when you're running a web service and you want to update stuff.

Taking care of the customers is the number one thing for any client; the client that I'm with, it's the same thing. They want to make sure that the customers are happy.

The benefit of using this product is the fact that your return on investment is major. When you don't have to teach people how to script or how to write different codes because of the way they connect to stuff, you're saving money, because you're able to put stuff into a production environment in a much faster solution.

We're also able to update our customers and let them know via apps to be able to see from using a web service to run and they log in to see what their activity is or what the status is on their stuff. It's updated immediately.

Cost benefits are amazing because somebody doesn't have to call a customer service person and sit on the phone for 30 minutes to find out the same thing they can find out in two seconds on the internet.

To make it a lot more user-friendly, in order to make it so other people can use it without having to do much training with it; the more user-friendly it is, the easier it is to work with.

The product has been out since 2.0 which is when I started working with this Workload Automation and, have seen it grow to a more powerful system that has been able to resolve all types of different automation appliances.

Customer Service is as always a high quality and, have had great success with getting any issues resolved.

Great working with the Tech team.

I think it's one of the most powerful workload automation processes that are out there. It is able to reach across platforms. It's able to reach across appliances. It's able to update.

It's a matter of your return on investment. It goes right back to that. How much do you want to spend, but how much are you going to save?

CA Workload Automation AE (AutoSys Edition) should have a few features like the CA7 FQJOB command (to get all the downstream/upstream jobs with the batch current position).

I have used this solution for seven years.

We have not encountered any stability issues with the supported versions.

We have not encountered any scalability issues with the supported versions.

Technical support is 9/10; good and timely support.

It is a bit costly. (Again, it all depends on the enterprise and the requirements.)

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated BMC Control-M.

I would suggest implementing CA Workload Automation AE.