OpenText Cloud Service Automation Reviews

My organization uses the enterprise server solution, Micro Focus, on Azure. We are working on a project to migrate a mainframe code to the micro-enterprise developer on Azure, submitting our JCL jobs. We have a mainframe of COBOL programs where all of our COBOL code is compiled. Our development team is migrating that system to the cloud. To do this, we needed a platform or some form of framework, in our case we use Micro Focus.

The most valuable feature of Micro Focus Cloud Service is how user-friendly the solution is. 

Traditionally, when we use a mainframe system to submit jobs, we have to see the spool or any error we might get in the spool. It is very command-based and uses a green screen, which is not user-friendly. Micro Focus enterprise makes it easy to submit and view jobs. We just have to log into the particular portal, go to the catalog and view any files we want.

The same can be said about submitting jobs. We know what JCL we want to submit, give it the path, and then submit it with no command required. It is very user-friendly.

In the next release, I would like for the information to be more available. The developers have access to information and we are not able to see JCLs on a particular platform because they are kept somewhere secure. I would like fewer restrictions as a software tester.

I have been using Micro Focus Cloud Service Automation for a year and a half.

The solution is stable.

Micro Focus Cloud Service Automation is scalable because it is on the cloud.

The initial setup of Micro Focus Cloud Service is straightforward, it is not complex.

Micro Focus Cloud is user-friendly. I recommend that individuals or companies interested use this product. 

I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The tool's most valuable feature is life cycle management. 

OpenText Cloud Service Automation needs to incorporate easier installation. It should improve skills and quality of support. 

I have been working with the product for three to five years. 

I rate the product's stability an eight out of ten. 

OpenText Cloud Service Automation is scalable. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

I rate the product's installation a nine out of ten. It takes one week to complete. 

OpenText Cloud Service Automation's pricing is average. 

We have large customers for OpenText Cloud Service Automation. I rate it a nine out of ten. 

These products let us integrate multiple tools together. They help to automate the processes, by cutting down time/effort through the modules and reusable contents.

They have helped us to increase revenue through quicker delivery of services.

Each product has its own minor glitches that the R&D team is constantly working on.

Stability issues were encountered very rarely.

So far, there were no scalability issues.

I would give the technical support a rating of 9 on a scale of 10.

The setup was very straightforward, the wizard does the job for us.

This solution is a great deal for your money.

You can always purchase the trial version and test it for yourself.

Scalability it the most valuable feature to us. The ability to just speak to our account people and say, "We need another six servers, we need more storage." It's that scalability that allows us to run with our business. It gives you security and all that, but scalability is the key thing for us.

The way we function now, is we actually look at the business we do with our customers. We don't worry so much about the IT now. We just know that if we need another six petabytes, or whatever, we can just speak to HPE and it's there and it's delivered. We focus more on the solutions, rather than the building blocks, as it were.

I’d like to see better monitoring visibility. We have to rely on HPE Technical Services to tell us when those challenges and problems occur. As a customer we can't see ourselves where the problem is. So, a bit more on the monitoring side would help.

HPE Cloud Service Automation is very, very stable. We've never had a problem.

We've scaled it all the time. Sometimes it takes a little bit longer than you would hope because, at the end of the day, there are still physical boxes behind it. So, sometimes we have to stretch out that way, but we haven't reached any barriers yet.

We use technical support all the time. We have parent technical support people from HPE working on our account and they are very, very good.

We use to be all on-premises and it wasn’t good. Now we've gone for a hybrid approach, which is both on-premises and in the cloud.

We signed a ten-year deal with HPE. It's that longevity, knowing that if we go into something quite transformational, the vendor is going to be there in ten years' time still working with us. Not someone that's just come up with a great new solution and then goes bust in two years' time.

I was not here for the initial setup. I joined twelve months after we signed the deal. So, we were still in the implementation phase and then delivery and to run.

We also looked at IBM and CSC. But, at the end of the day, we were looking for a true technical solution and HPE came head-and-shoulders above other people.

We actually put someone that I used to work with in contact with my account people and basically says, "It's there, it works really well, but you've still got to put a lot of effort in yourselves." So, if anybody tries to sell you a solution that says, "Don't worry, we do everything." Don't believe them. It's not true.

But, Cloud Service Automation met all our needs. The only cautious thing now is, I want to see more innovation going forward, because the world is changing and we don't see that rate of change in HPE. We're worried about what's happening with HPE and CSC and the merge. Hopefully that won’t dilute the solution going forward.

The ability to “tie the pieces together”. The product supports multiple ‘providers’ which can be both HPE or non-HPE products. This is crucial in a heterogeneous environment composed of many different pieces, commercial and in-house developed. CSA has flexibility in supporting multiple catalogs to limit the scope of offerings between different user groups. This allows for simple restricted offerings to end users while providing more complex offerings to system engineers.

It gives us the ability to accelerate computing environment provisioning while improving consistency across environments.

More flexibility on the subscriber options, such as:
1) The ability to access properties outside of an option set
2) Being able to validate a simple string input field with a JSP, rather than the limited patterns or regular expression options provided today
3) In my case, I have options that depend upon other properties using a cascaded design, pulling values from a JSP that queries a backend database, so more functionality in the dynamics of this would be helpful. There may very well be better ways to do this, but I’m not aware of any.

It would also be good if there was an option to allow the end subscriber to see where their order is in the lifecycle. Similar to how you can track a package being sent to you.

I have been working on the development of this for about a year now. I’m not dedicated to it full-time, so at times it has been difficult to focus my efforts.

Deployment has been extremely painful for the production environment. This was mostly due to the decision to use our internal Microsoft-based Certificate Authority (CA). While the HP-CSA install/configuration guide details how to do this, there are some pieces that are missing or incorrect.

Technical support is not as good as with other HPE products. Support for the HP-OO side is great. For HP-CSA, it depends. If the problem is fairly simple, support is good, but when it comes to more complicated issues, it seems to take weeks to get someone with the necessary skillset engaged.

We did some research into competing products, but have only used CSA.

It is straightforward once you understand how things work. There is a definite learning curve to this product and how it integrates with HP-OO. Some of the out-of-the-box content is a good starting point, but the flexibility and customization necessary to adapt it to our environment led me to create a lot of my own content. It’s also much easier to launch something like this into a ‘greenfield’ environment, but if you are trying to adapt it to work in your existing legacy environment, that is a bit more of a challenge.

We used a consultant to do the original POC, but a long-term engagement was beyond our budget. Having dedicated resources for an internal team is also difficult. To date, the only ‘team’ has been me. That being said, I still relied heavily on knowledge from others about how to integrate with the various providers (IPAM solution, Active Directory, VMware, etc). Understanding all of the various APIs and then trying to figure out if any of the HPE-supplied content packs will do what you need can be complicated.

Since I am just now launching into the production environment, I don’t have a good answer for this yet. Maybe in about six months.

You need to understand the current process and then figure out how to automate it. Some processes may have to change, but it is better to build on what you have if you want the result to gain acceptance. Not all of the supplied content will work the way you want/need it to. It will take longer to implement than you think. People will fear you are trying to eliminate their job, when in reality you are just trying to automate the mundane tasks they perform so that they can focus on more complex issues. To overcome some of this, you will need an executive sponsor.

We've just started to offer our customers infrastructure as a service. So beginning this year we purchased from HPE the Cloud Service Automation solution. We're creating a pool of resources that we're starting to configure. Our engineers are training in the second quarter of the year in the configuration and management of the Cloud Service Automation software tool in order to be able to offer infrastructure as a service in a dynamic, fluid, very simple way to our customers. We really look as infrastructure as a service as the major trend in IT, at least for a service provider like us, for the next 3 to 4 years, so we really want to have a precise, clearly defined, but very dynamic and flexible private cloud where we can easily deploy, provision and deploy infrastructure as a service to our end customers. So we chose Cloud Service Automation as the tool to do that and manage that infrastructure.

As one end customer told me a few days ago, infrastructure as a service has been a dream for many customers, they don't have to take into account or care about about infrastructure or buying servers or purchasing things that in 6 or 7 months or a year might be obsolete or so. What they want is somebody to come with an infrastructure as a service model and we own the servers, we own the storage, we own everything that's there. They just use a tool to provision and deploy the servers or whatever platform they need in within that infrastructure, I call it a platform.

So I would say that for us, it's going to be the key management engine, the key management tool to be able to offer the complete portfolio of infrastructure as a service. Let's call it services to different end customers that we have. We have 90 SAP customers running in a hosting model, so all of them are also requesting more infrastructure. So we're going to use this installed based to go with the infrastructure service portfolio. So I think there's a lot of things to do with it and that's going to drive a lot of our customers with very easy way of provisioning infrastructure for different applications and different needs.

I'm just learning the platform. It's too soon for me to wish for something. We're just learning. We're in the training stage, so I'm not prepared to say what I like or don't, I'm just studying right now with my engineers and our company is just getting to know the tool.

It's stable.

We're able to scale it.

We're just working on the tool configuration.

I haven't found very user friendly things, some are a little tricky. So when I know it better it might be easier. Right now I would give it a 9. But, as I said, we've just been working with it for 3 months.