OpCon Reviews

The primary use was to automate and schedule batch processes for a banking core system. As OpCon is more capable than our previous job scheduler, we have automated more jobs. 

We quickly found it was capable of doing much more, and expanded the uses. As the ability to schedule processes is so flexible, we now use that to start SQL agent jobs, SFTP processes, file transfers, and backups. 

We also have automated daily processing on a loan servicing system as well, which lets is run batch processes during low usage times overnight without having staff scheduled for those times.

The biggest change was having a robust way to schedule critical processes. Once it was set up, things just worked. Input errors were eliminated and we can quickly see the status of jobs, with instant error reporting in case we have an issue. We were able to automate processes and increase productivity so staff could focus on more complex tasks and project work that move the organization forward. That, and the peace of mind of knowing things run on time, are the biggest improvements for the organization.

Reliability is always important, and the reliability of the system is outstanding. The ability to link processes, have dependencies, and monitor things like file arrival has let us automate some fairly complex processes that previously involved a lot of user time.   

Being able to do this, and present it to staff as a self-service button that takes one click to submit was a big win. We have a large number of files, from multiple vendors, that must be accessed through FTP, and being able to get these files, unencrypted, and process for reporting or ETL processes overnight has streamlined our mornings and lets us deliver reports much earlier than we would otherwise.

We don't have a lot of asks, and the limitations are typically in deficiencies of the APIs or interfaces on other proprietary systems. OpCon would let us, but some vendors don't have that attitude. 

A way to select multiple jobs in the UI for a quick change or to hold, release, et cetera, would be nice. For example, I was testing a process where after a job finished, a multi-instance job for splitting out 12 report runs. When I made my adjustment to re-run, I had to click on each job separately to restart. It was time-consuming.

I've used the solution for about 5 years.

The solution is very stable. We have had no outages that I recall.

It is highly scalable. We can't imagine pushing against any limits.

We rarely contact support. When we have had to, its typically a very fast single call resolution. 

We had a different product, and it was limited. OpCon was less expensive and did more.

The initial setup was straightforward and the learning curve was that after a few days building things in our test environment we rapidly moved jobs to live.

We had an OpCon person on site, and the experience was very helpful.

The ROI is hard to quantify as it is so much a part of what we do, however, it does the equivalent work of a few staff members, for much less than the cost of one person.

We found it was a better value than our other option. I'd advise users to ask a lot of questions when setting up as chances are there is a way to do it. Having a lot of examples of processes was useful in expanding. We could copy a job, modify it, and be off and running. 

We compared this solution to our previous product ISE Enterprise Scheduler and spoke with other Opcon users.

It always works and we rarely need support.

Job automation is the primary use of this solution. Processing reports, running batch jobs, processing ACH, and all other daily operations are things we have automated using OpCon. 

Without this automation, I am not sure how possible it would be for the company to finish the nightly processing by doing it manually. Working 8 hours a day is not enough for us to complete our daily process. 

In addition, we are using OpCon for testing our Dev and QA environment.                                            

OpCon is automating everything for us. I cannot imagine working without OpCon to process our daily operations. 

With OpCon, we can still do other operational tasks, troubleshooting, projects, research, etc. Without OpCon, we will be up and working until the wee hours of the morning. We are only checking our OpCon if there is a failure. Without a failure notification, we are confident that OpCon is doing its job for the company in order to process our day-to-day operations.

Self-service is one of the features I like the most. The self-service feature allows us to give control to the users to execute the job we have set up for them. This eliminated the requests, either through a ticketing system or email, to run a specific schedule for the department. 

With a simple click of a button in self-service, the department or the user can complete his/her job. Users are loving this feature, too. They are liking the option that they have control over their process.        

I would like to see OpCon being accessible using a mobile app. This will increase the convenience for the administrator. Imagine it is a weekend and you are on call. A failure email was received. You will then need to grab your laptop, connect to VPN, and access the application to find out what is going on. If you are somewhere else, you will need to bring your laptop with you all the time. If the job can be fixed with few clicks, a mobile app will help the administrators to fix the job right away even if you do not have your laptop with you. 

I have been using OpCon Enterprise Manager since I joined the IT team last 2012. Even before I joined the team, the company was using OpCon Enterprise Manager.

If you set your schedule right, you do not have to think about it until a failure occurs. The stability is good. The failure occurs mostly because the file that is being expected is not yet ready from the Core side or from the vendor side. 

The stability of OpCon is 100% stable.

Any organization size can be managed by OpCon. Whether you have one product, one staging area, and one QA or multiple staging and multiple QAs, you can easily connect them and push anything into production with few simple clicks. 

I do not have anything negative to say about their customer service or technical support. So far, all of them are so helpful. They will even send a follow-up email before closing the ticket. 

This is my first job scheduler/job automation application.

When I started here, the OpCon was in production already. I am not sure about the complexity of the setup.

When I started here, the OpCon was in production already. I am not sure how the application got installed. 

I do not have the numbers, but definitely, our ROI for having OpCon is high. To give an example, we are only two personnel on a team. We can manage the daily operations, attend to any system issues, do projects, and manage the core system ourselves.

Their setup cost, pricing, and licensing are fair. SMA Technologies will not charge you too much. I have the experience that SMA tailored the licensing for us according to our average yearly usage. 

If you want to increase your daily efficiencies, consider OpCon. Give them a try and you will notice the difference from Day 1. Ther support is outstanding. You can call them 24/7/365. They value their SLAs. SMA staff are very friendly. 

We primarily use JHA SYMITAR Episys (Currently running through EASE). Our Episys server is now hosted at Symitar and they run most of our OpCon schedules, and we run a version of OpCon in-house and connect to the Episys server at Symitar through OpCon "Ease Connector". We've used Episys Batch/On-Demand in-house job scheduling (2014-2019) and Episys Batch/On-Demand Ease Connector job scheduling (2019-present). We also use OpCon to schedule non-related Episys jobs, such as file transfers to/from vendors. Everything is automated.   

It has eliminated the need for a full-time Operator. All Batch jobs are automatically scheduled. We do not have IT Operators overseeing Batch jobs. All FTP's are done through OpCon also. We have OpCon set to notify the team by email if any job fails, or notify front office staff when a job is completed. Some jobs are scheduled with the OpCon feature "File Watcher" and will run a job when a file is present in a Network folder - eliminating the need for intervention by staff. If files are not present when they should be, OpCon can be set to let you know a schedule is past normal run time.

On-Demand access allows the front office to run jobs on their own, making it unnecessary to contact IT when they need on-demand reports run.

We get email notifications for failed jobs, jobs completed, schedules past run time, etc.

File Watcher can run jobs when files are made available in a folder. 

We would like to keep a previous version of a job/schedule just like UC4 used to do. 

We would like a display of the created date, created by, and last modified date, as well as modified by.

I've used the solution for 7 years, since September 2014, and I have used 5 OpCon in-house and 2 OpCon EASE Connectors.

The stability is excellent.

The scalability is excellent.

Technical support is excellent.

The setup is a little complex. We couldn't have done it on our own. You must work with SMA to get set up and have training, but once you become familiar with it you should be good to go. The only time we consult them now is when we are upgrading to a new version. The instructions have never allowed us to do it on our own.

We have an in-house team for the in-house version.

We needed the Symitar OpCon team to work with us when we switched to Symitar Ease and to document all the schedules/jobs. 

We could not work efficiently without OpCon. It eliminates the need for full-time operators.

The primary use case for us is automation. This platform has the ability to automate tasks between different operating systems (AIX, Linux, Windows, Apple). We use the products to automate tasks that interact with the Federal Reserve Bank, downloading files to be processed into our core banking solution, which is in an AIX-based environment. 

The system will also move human-readable report files to a Windows-based server, for reporting and historical-based purposes. The Self-Service Solution Manager allows users to initiate a task after other criteria are met even when that criteria cannot be determined by the automation system. 

Creating automation enables users to put their time and effort into areas more important than mundane tasks. In addition, automation reduces errors, by removing human mistakes. Automation tasks can be scheduled around the clock, so tasks can be set to run in the middle of the night (when system resources are more available or will less likely cause an impact to users). 

Errors can be reported in a variety of ways. We can set errors to be reported via text message (SMS) if the error is critically urgent or via email for errors less critical and time-sensitive. 

Self-Service Solution Manager enables automation to be triggered by a human, but still provides the benefits of reducing the workload of the user, and reducing the possibility of human error. 

Often times there are criteria that cannot be determined by the system, which allows a human to make the determination and use the Self-Service Solution Manager to trigger a job. 

This also helps restrict the permissions of the users that have Self-Service Solution Manager access to only areas or systems that they need. 

The products are extremely powerful and capable. Anytime you have such capability, the programming/configuration that goes into making it work can be complicated. 

Fortunately, the professionals at SMA Technologies are always willing to help. The technicians at SMA Technologies are available via telephone call or email for issues. Their response time is always in line with the critical nature of the issue. If I have a big project that needs dedicated support, I can request one of their consultants to provide assistance. 

I've been with my company since September 2015 and have been using the OpCon automation solution that whole time. 

We've never had an issue with the stability of the platform. For example the platform/server itself has never been the point of failure. The only issues we've experienced is when the in-house human created configurations were done with errors. Even when errors are identified, the system produces an error output that helps determine the point of failure, so it can be resolved. 

The server is based on a SQL database, so it has tremendous capabilities and the system can be scaled up by adding additional resources to the single server, or by setting up multiple servers to operate in unison. 

Technical support is the best! They always prioritize the urgency of our issue, with the impact it has to our production environment. Their top priority is not allow our production environment be be offline. 

When I came to the company, they were already using OpCon. I had used this solution in a previous job, so I was thrilled to see it being used. In my opinion, there's nothing better. 

The initial setup was complex, however, the SMA Technologies consultants are there the whole time, guiding the process, and making sure you'll have success. 

We worked directly with SMA Technologies. 

We've saved thousands of man-hours with automation and reduced errors significantly. It's been money well spent.

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. 

We did not evaluate other options.

SMA Technologies provides great products with extraordinarily great service. 

We run thousands of processes/jobs on z/OS (mainframe), Unix/Linux, and Windows. In many cases, these processes have cross-platform dependencies. 

We also have two separate OpCon databases - one for production and one for development. This is the usual case of implementing and testing new jobs/schedules in development prior to promoting them to production.

We literally run our business on OpCon and as such OpCon needs to be, and is a 24/7 enterprise scheduling system. It cannot be down. Thus far, we have found it to be very resilient.

It is still early in our OpCon implementation, however, thus far it has shown its value in ease of use - both in terms of maintaining and implementing jobs/tasks and through its use of a relational database, which gives us enormous power in reporting and updating information.

Change does not come easily to people. That said, due to OpCon being a modern, graphical system our schedulers and developers have enthusiastically embraced it and this has made the transition from our previous system much smoother than we had anticipated. 

The most valuable aspects of the solution for us are:

The GUI. Our previous scheduling software had a graphical user interface but this was nothing more than an add-on. It constantly had problems and eventually was abandoned due to its unreliability. Since migrating to OpCon we are now in a purely graphical environment. This provides more information in a smaller space and makes administration a point-and-click process.

The Database. OpCon uses an SQL Server as its data repository. This has given us substantially more capability for reporting and updates.

The deployment. OpCon has a deploy concept which is a methodology to implement change management to schedules.

We cutover to OpCon from a previous solution approximately six weeks ago so we are still in the early stages of our implementation. That said it is difficult to ascertain what improvements could be made at this early stage.

If I had to select something I'd say that the web based interface, Solution Manager, should have more functionality. Enterprise Manager, the desktop interface is extremely powerful but SMA's strategic direction is Solution Manager. We have found it difficult to have people rely solely on Solution Manager.

We recently migrated to OpCon from another vendor's scheduling system and have now been running our shop's tasks for approximately six weeks. 

Thus far we have only had a few minor problems, all of which the vendor addressed quickly. We have not encountered any major problems. The product is very stable and reliable.

Scalability is dependent on the underlying database. Given that OpCon uses SQL Server, we are very confident in its ability to scale.

Thus far, we have only had a few minor issues but the vendor's responses were quick - as were their solutions. We have no complaints.

We switched from a different vendor's scheduling system. We implemented a project that encompassed a requirements definition, a vendor questionnaire, demos, and finally a selection of a product.

We switched from our old scheduler for multiple reasons. First, the vendor was asking far too much money for an upgrade. Also, we found this vendor's support weak at best. Finally, we wanted something that presented a modern user interface, which the old system tried to implement but it was a poor attempt.

We migrated from a mainframe-based solution using a proprietary database to a Windows-based solution using a SQL Server database. Given the enormity of this level of change, the transition and setup were remarkably smooth. I consider this to have been a straightforward setup.

As part of our migration to OpCon we contracted SMA Technologies, the OpCon vendor, to perform the migration in concert with our scheduling team.

The SMA team was excellent. Their knowledge of SQL Server, z/OS and Windows was extraordinary. I cannot say enough good things about them.

As of right now, the ROI is undetermined.

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.

We considered CA's Workload Automation but they would not return our calls. They had recently been acquired by another company so perhaps that had something to do with it.

We also considered Tidal Workload Automation but decided it was not a good fit for our environment.

We had previously attempted to migrate to IBM Workload Scheduler but could not make this work.

BMC's Control-M was given very serious consideration but we did not like the way BMC treated us. Control-M surely would have worked but the marketing team caused us concern.

I highly recommend OpCon to any organization considering either a new implementation or a migration from a previous vendor's system. In our case we migrated from a previous system and SMA Technologies did what another vendor could not. It took six months and the cutover went remarkably smooth given the level of change.

We host OpCon on a virtual server onsite. We do not replicate to a backup database. There are some other redundancies built-in, but we just have a single production server.

Working at a credit union, it does all of our back-office processing. We have a smallish IT staff and we wanted to relieve the IT staff from having to do the daily manual processes that were in place at the time.

OpCon handles all of our automated loads, uploads, and integration with our core financial application. We have expanded it to use their self-service options so that users may generate reports on the fly, or they might have manual steps along the way in their process. It allows them to check the results, review, work any exceptions and then continue the process just by clicking a button. They really like that part. It also has given us the opportunity to allow users that don't have access to the core to generate reports from the core and have it usually placed in a network share for them or emailed to them.

The biggest example in which OpCon has improved my organization is that we have to download and process files from the federal reserve several times a day. If we don't do it in a certain timeframe, we can be penalized. It's the fact that we can download these files, process them, get our accounting teams the information they need to work the exceptions that is one of the most important roles.

It's also nightly processing. When we do our overnight processing, if there is a delay to a job, we can set up alerts to let us know that a particular job is running longer and the person on-call can log in, take a look at it, and see if everything is progressing normally or if there's a problem before it becomes a big issue the next day.

Having the ability to monitor the process along the way with checks on a job when it's too long, it didn't finish on time, or a dependency is missing has been very helpful.

OpCon saves our IT time. We eliminated our backroom processing, which would be all of the IT-related functions. So most definitely it saves IT time. Conservatively, it has saved two and a half hours daily just because of some of the things that we were doing for other departments and now the other departments can do that themselves. 

Since we implemented it in 2016, a lot of other tasks have been incorporated into it. So if those other areas would have wanted us to do those tasks, it would have added to our burden. If we have free time, they're going to find a way to fill it. It does free our time to do other things, to concentrate on things that require brain power rather than just entry.

Our overall productivity has also increased.

At its core, OpCon is a scheduler, but it can do so much more than that. The fact that it integrates with the core was the primary motivator in choosing this product. I was recruited for the position I'm at because of my experience with OpCon and my current company wanted to implement it.

Its flexibility would be the greatest benefit to it. You can really come up with some creative scheduling solutions. You're only limited by your imagination with some of the stuff. There are some limitations to it, of course, but I would say the biggest plus is the flexibility that it offers and its integration to the core. 

We use the self-service feature. We use it in our IT department, our mortgage department uses it, and our accounting department uses it. We're slowly introducing the features to other areas. As more users see it, I'm hoping more users will embrace it so that we can expand it even further.

Our mortgage servicing users use it to run their daily processes. We have an integration with FICS, which is the product we use for our mortgage servicing. So they're able to utilize it to generate reports and do their daily postings.

Our accounting department uses it for ACH and even to set the prompts to close the general monthly general ledger. Our lending department also uses it for some of their jobs to process uploads that go to other vendors.

It's very helpful for reducing the complexity of the technical aspects of workload automation. It can be used as a simple checklist where you click the button. There are some things about it that might be improved upon as far as adding some features. That would be some nice things. SMA has always been very responsive to those types of input.

The self-service feature increases users' productivity because some of the tasks that they still have to do manually are automated, but those manual checks give them a place to stop the process rather than having to do each step along the way annually. They still have those manual interventions that they have to do, but the self-service button allows them to put that check-in there so that they can do what they need to do and then begin a certain process rather than having to do the whole thing.

It has also reduced calls to our IT department with the way we're using it. Previously a process might require the user to email IT staff to have us do the next step, to upload a file, something like that. Now we're removed from that situation and they just do it themselves.

The same goes for the closing of the general ledger. It used to require notifying IT and then we'd have to set the job accordingly. Now IT is taken out of the mix. So the end-user department has control over that process.

The automation of manual tasks has without a doubt reduced human error. Whenever you can automate something, as long as you have it set up correctly, to begin with, you totally reduce the chances of transposing a number or something like that.

At my previous employment, once we implemented OpCon we pretty much eliminated one FTE position. The person didn't lose their job, but he had other tasks that he took on. They reduced the amount of workload by one person. That was a much larger credit union.

If we had to do all of this manually, it would add up because we've added more tasks than what we originally had.

I have been using OpCon at my current employer for about five years and at my previous company for another four or five years as well.

We're on version 18.3 and we're looking to upgrade to the 20.0 version in the next month or so.

In the time that I've worked on it, I've had one problem where the transaction log locked up. That was seven years ago. It was a while ago. It's solid. You have to do your due diligence with your typical maintenance and paying attention to things, but it's a solid product.

It seems to scale well, but then again we're limited. We only have one server.

We have people in our indirect lending who use OpCon. They deal with our auto loans. We have our mortgage department servicing mortgages. We have our accounting people that manage the ACH and they rely on it also for downloading reports from various vendors that we use. Our contact center uses it to run reports and retrieve reports from the core.

IT, of course, uses it. We manage everything for it. I use it for a variety of things from downloading reports to emailing to notifications. Most of our stuff is centered around the core. Most of our usage is centered on the core, but we're slowly branching out.

We have plans to deploy a failover server, and we also anticipate doing more with our order servicing software, automating more processes for that.

Technical support has been great. They've come up with solutions and they're very timely. They seem to be good people too.

The initial setup is very complex, but that's not necessarily something that needs to be improved. I'm told that in the next version they're improving the upgrade process. So that's in the works already. 

It integrates fairly well with things like basic scripting programs which is good. 

OpCon is very powerful. That means it tends to be very complex. It doesn't always translate to usability. You can do anything in any way if you have the time and the knowledge, but it can be tricky figuring out how it's done. I haven't used much of the APIs other than some of the connectors, but I hear they've got some good support that way. I don't have any one thing that I'd say would be an improvement upon it except for perhaps making the calendar, the scheduling functionality a bit more intuitive. Some of the ways that they implement the calendar functions aren't as intuitive as they could be.

For some jobs, the setup is very straightforward. For others, they required more complexity. I have some that when we first set it up, the complex ones were downloading our federal reserve files and processing those, but the technical account manager that assisted was great with working with us on that. 

Having them there with implementing it certainly is required. But beyond that, the people that I've encountered, even when I was at a previous employer, were always very good at helping us get through what we needed to do.

There have been times that I've sent in a question to their support and I'll get a couple of different people emailing me back saying, "Oh yeah, I heard about this. Have you tried this?" Everyone's very active in trying to assist clients if they have some expertise there.

We worked with both our SMA technical account managers and then we were assigned someone through Jack Henry Symitar Episys, through their automation group. 

Once we got everything implemented, I had time with my technical account manager to set things up, but prior, I had time with our core provider and their implementation specialist to go through our nightly processing the critical stuff and making sure we had everything set up. That was the baseline process to get us started. After that, it was up to us what we wanted it to automate.

They took care of our nightly processing and then our account manager helped me do some of the daily processes. Since I already had previous experience, there were a lot of things I felt that I could do. He'd come up with solutions for the things I didn't feel that way for.

The deployment took a week.

It was through our core provider that we got the product. Since we went through them, that was the primary thing to get automated and they provided it in collaboration with SMA.

The people at SMA have been great as far as working with them. They're responsive. When I've interacted with them, they've always been great. The company has been very good.

ROI has been great. It does keep me busy because I'm the one who manages it, but it eliminates work for a lot of others. And my goal is to automate a lot of stuff so people can spend their time thinking about how to fix the complex stuff, not remembering that they have to do the little stuff.

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.

Advice that I would give to people considering OpCon would be to really understand what your needs are, understand how OpCon can fit into your environment, and realize that it can be very complex and can become very cumbersome if you're not careful. You can automate a lot of things and have a lot of different processes automated, but you still need to document and have a clear goal as to what you're doing and why you're doing it.

Take the free training that they have. Go to the biannual conference they have. You can pick up a lot of information that way. Immerse yourself in the product, in the documentation, and understand what's going on with it.

Have a clear plan before you start doing anything on how you want to handle it if a job fails. Do you want to have it restarted? Do you want to have it notify someone? You have to have a clear plan on what you hope to accomplish with an automated task before you put it into production.

The biggest lesson I have learned is that error checking is important. When you have a failure, you need to know. You should have a plan on how to handle job failures so that, if the primary person is available, the backup can either take care of it or the process will automatically self-recover.

I would rate OpCon a nine out of ten. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good.

Our use cases for OpCon are expanding. We initially went with it because we're a Unisys mainframe company and they were the only scheduler that did what we wanted it to, and that also supports Unisys. But we have branched out into running Windows SQL jobs, and we will soon be starting up API interaction. Hopefully at some point, because we are going cloud and the mainframe is going away, we'll start interacting with that also. We'll start doing that change within the next three to six months.

I've been here from day one, and it has gone from us manually writing out schedules, and operators having to remember pre's and posts, etc.—all done manually—to getting that automated. Once that was all automated, it was a huge improvement for us because there were considerably fewer errors. The errors are very minimal now. When someone implements a job, if they have a typo or copied a similar job and forgot to change something, those would be about the only errors that we have now. We're down to hardly any. We now have less than one a week.

The improvement with the Solution Manager, so that the programmers can become more aware of what's going on within the scheduler, has really helped us.

OpCon has also saved our IT department time. There is a lot less interaction with the developers. Developers are aware of the information they need to give us to place something into the scheduler. We've set up a template, they send in that information, we get it implemented for them, and they're up and running. We used to ask them to give us two workday weeks to get something implemented for them and, depending on the complexity, that's down to a day or less, at times.

With IT time freed up, we've been able to move forward with other business needs, especially now because of the switchover and the mainframe going away. It has enabled my staff to start studying other aspects of our IT areas.

With the Self Service feature, person-hours have decreased. We still don't use it to its full potential, but it's helped on the development side for testing. It has definitely sped up the developers' testing processes, and it enables them to get things to production a lot quicker. They're happy with that. The Self Service has also reduced calls to our IT department when it comes to testing, for sure. As a result, my staff has a little more time to work on other things, rather than fielding calls left and right from the programmers. That helps a lot.

Now that we can get into the API and we're starting to learn that, it's really nice. 

We're also starting to use its Self Service and Solution Manager. My team in the data center and some of the development team use the Self Service. Developers are using the Self Service for upon-request jobs for their testing. They used to have to go through us to schedule testing and now they can just go on and kick it off all they want. They have also really appreciated that they have access to view and/or submit jobs.

Working with the various APIs has actually allowed us to keep the scheduler, because there were those in our company who were thinking about looking for something else, given that they were considering it to only be a mainframe scheduler. As new options and agents and connectors have come along, that's opened their eyes a little bit more.

It's been a while since we've asked for tweaks. Because we're a little bit of a slower company, they have something out by the time we start checking into, "Hey, can you give us an idea on how this works?" or "This is how we want to use it."

An example is the API. Of course they have a RESTful API within OpCon, but they have that new web services agent that we installed because we have some SOAP APIs and we had to interact with SMA to get things running. Our developers did do some tweaks, but we have now been able to get some test jobs running, and understand how the workflow goes back and forth. 

When they initially set up SQL agents, they helped us set up that too.

I have been using the OpCon for 16 to 18 years.

The stability has been very good.

We haven't had any issues with scalability. I've been to a few of their conferences where there are banks that are OpCon customers and they have thousands of jobs that they run, or even hundreds of thousands of jobs. We've got plenty of room to expand.

I'm hoping, with our moving off the mainframe, that we will have a chance to really branch out. Initially, the company just looked at it as the mainframe scheduler, so we weren't really able to ask for additional instances. Hopefully, as we go along, we may be able to grab some of the other options.

We're running on the order of thousands of jobs monthly. Our future usage depends on how well we can get everybody to jump on the bandwagon, but I see it staying at that amount, if not increasing, as we move towards the cloud and other options.

From our dealings with them, I think they've done an excellent job when we're in a crunch. They get more than one person on the phone and we haven't ever had any bad experiences with them. When new levels come out they've helped us. And the marketing guy, Christian, he checks in all the time.

Deployment would not take very long now, with the way they have the install set up.

We usually do a test server to start with, just to make sure everything went well before we do production. This last one took about an hour or two on the test side. We ran into something with updating the database. It was something on our side that the database administrators had locked down, so it wasn't working quite right between when we installed in test and installed in production; they had tightened the permissions down. Other than that, it takes us about an hour to get through what we need done.

My implementation strategy for deploying it for the first time would be to put it to test in our test database, and then grab a few jobs from each type of job we run and see how it works with the test database. I would then check with the developers that everything looks like it ran okay and then we would take a weekend and deploy it to production. Of course, we would do testing there as well. Since it's VM, we just have the VM guys ramp up a new server, so it's always a new install and, if it doesn't work, we can always fall back to the old version and the old server.

For deployment, we usually bring two of us in, and that's it. For maintenance of OpCon, we only have one or two people, as backup. We have operators per shift who actually run it, but for maintenance there are only a couple of people. One of them is me, in my role as a data center manager, and the second individual is part of my staff.

In terms of the number of users of OpCon, the numbers have dropped now that we're moving off of mainframe, but we'll be picking back up. Currently there are about 100 programmers that could possibly have access. We don't have that many yet in Self Service. And there are 12 on our staff that use it, including a couple of admins, a couple of implementation people, and the rest are operators.

When we first had it installed, there was a really great guy who came in, who doesn't work with them anymore. We had some training onsite while he was here. We weren't really involved at that point in time in installing it ourselves. It was always an OpCon representative showing up. Now, it's more the case that we install and get a hold of them if we have any issues.

We've always been on our own with this scheduler, so it's helped out our department and I feel it's helped out the programmers quite a bit. It has automated a lot of things, which should help our IT as a whole, because we haven't had to have the largest staff.

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.

It's awesome to have the automation and to let it do things for you, but you need to stick with it and really figure out how to optimize it.

I'm still working on trying to explain to others in our organization that when it comes to server reboots and things like that, OpCon can do that for them too. They may not be interested in that as they have their own third-party software. I haven't gotten a lot of them to hop on the bandwagon yet. Our VMware guys are still stuck to their guns. We'll have to find out how much we do go into the cloud or on-prem to see if we can't help them out in those areas.

We don't use OpCon's Vision feature yet. Our company is very conservative, so it's a slow process. Unless you can get a lot of people onboard, it's hard to get things pushed through. I'm hoping others will see how well it interacts with the various types of systems and how it processes the jobs back and forth, through the various versions, and that they'll see a little more use for it. Another aspect is budget, because right now we're trying to move to the cloud and a lot of people are being trained at the moment and having to run legacy, side-by-side, versus new. So there's a money-crunch thing.

It's a good product. They can run almost anything you need to run, as far as I am aware. And the staff is really great to work with. It's a plus on all sides, in my opinion.

We use it a lot for file transfers from SFTP sites down to our network folders, and we also use it for other kicking off processes in our core platforms. We also run some PowerShell scripting through it. It does quite a bit.

We're looking at eventually using it for some Active Directory pieces, but we haven't gotten there yet. 

The automation of processes has taken tasks that would have been done manually by somebody and moved them to a platform without us having to think about them. The time savings in not having to manually do those types of processes on a daily basis means we're much more productive and able to provide front-end staff with better solutions than we were able to before.

It has also reduced human error, and that helps save time for our IT team because there is less time spent having to figure out what somebody might have potentially done wrong. It saves us about a full-time employee's worth of time per week.

And with IT time freed up, our company has been able to move forward with other business needs. It used to mainly be a programmer who was in charge of figuring out the human errors. Having reduced the time needed for that, we've been able to move a full-time programmer into just doing programming, and that has been helpful.

For us, the most valuable feature of the solution is the file transfer piece and being able to automate the moving of files around between our various vendors. It reduces the time involved versus somebody having to individually move the files around. It has reduced what we would have done manually at one point by 98 percent. 

There are some limitations in the actual jobs that are created and how you're able to rename files. Suppose you're bringing in, say, 10, 15, or 20 reports from a core system, and you're using an "asterisk character" to identify files. For example, if you're grabbing files that start with this, end with this, but the characters in between could be different, it has to retain that same name in the destination. It won't allow you to rename them with a date stamp or the like.

We've gotten around that by writing PowerShell scripts that run after the files have been transferred, but it would be very nice if it had just the raw, built-in ability to rename multiple files with a date stamp added to them.

I've been pretty much been able to accomplish everything else with what it provides out-of-the-box.

I've been using OpCon for about two years.

It's very scalable. What we use it for, overall, is probably significantly smaller than some other larger corporate clients do. But in terms of the cost and what we get out of it and the knowledge that if we ever do need to increase the number of jobs that can be run, there is a wide range in what it can handle.

There is definitely room to grow. We currently have about 400 jobs that run per day. When we get closer to month's end, it probably jumps up closer to 600 or 650 jobs that run in a day.

I have used SMA's technical support on occasion, both for issues that have arisen and for general support to help to finish off the creation of complex jobs with their Professional Services team. I've never had an issue with getting a hold of somebody or getting any issues resolved in a very timely manner.

We have definitely seen return on our investment in time and efficiency and freeing up staff to provide better support to our employees and the membership that we serve.

The pricing is very reasonable.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using OpCon is just the sheer flexibility that these types of systems make possible. They've built a system that gives you a lot of capabilities out-of-the-box, but that also gives you some of those extra pieces where you can bring in outside tools to make it even better.

It provides a lot of power. Even though there is that limitation I mentioned in terms of being able to rename files on multiple downloads at the same time, there is the built-in ability to run scripting as well, whether they are Visual Basic, PowerShell, or Python scripts. It gives you a lot of tools. You can have it do an initial process and then launch one of those scripts to do something that is not inherently built-in.

There are about six of us who utilize it on a daily basis. Most are programmers, but we also have a couple of our service desk guys who work in it too.