ActiveBatch Workload Automation vs Broadcom Automic Automation Formerly CA Automic Automation Platform

I can only speak for our environment, but it has allowed us to get away from the unfriendly Informatica PowerCenter workflow schedule. And coordination of Informatica/Tableau/ICEDQ has been a BIG help to us. We have not tried to drill down to the Informatica session-level of detail, just stayed with running workflows. The session-level logic seemed complicated.

This product has huge capacity to run millions of jobs per month, can serve to enterprise level of business. If client is looking for platform base solution which can be deployed on-prem or cloud base technologies then this solution works well. It has very good licensing mechanism which is based on number of agents, and there is no limitation of number of jobs run. So client has not to worry on limitation of jobs and can scale of the automation in the environment. This reduced the total cost of ownership of product. Self service automation feature can reduce the client automation cost significantly. it has good batch job coverages from Mainframe to Microservices.

• File management - moving, archiving, and folder cleanup are a drag-and-drop breeze. The visual representation of file management steps includes date/time filtering, file/folder/both specification, and recursion all in an easy and intuitive unit.
• FTP/SFTP/FTPS - while one must still write the FTP scripts, the interface simplifies much of the infrastructure, allowing the developer to encapsulate the script text in a graphical package that is easy and intuitive.
• PowerShell integration - for anything that isn't easy in ActiveBatch's GUI, simply drop in a PowerShell step and write the task in PoSh - anything returned from PoSh can then be used by the following steps.

• Infrastructure Management.
• Automation as code.
• Zero time upgrades.
• Integration with Kubernetes.

• While I like being able to reuse scheduling objects and the like, more work needs to be done to help one not reinvent the same scheduling object without realizing it and to then find scheduling objects that have similar schedules even if they are worded slightly differently than what I'm expecting. It needs to be "smarter". It was easy to accumulate a pool of scheduling objects that while named differently, had exactly the same schedule. It was also hard to sift through to find the little differences between similarly named scheduling objects.
• The logger had a clean enough interface but it could be more legible and offer contextual help to describe the messages one is reading. I remember trying to read black text on a medium gray background with Courier size 10-11 font. Not so easy to read quickly and to parse through the relevant parts. I think some selective color coding would be good and links to message definitions or any form of further information would be nice. Maybe the ability to export the log file to various formats would also be helpful.
• I don't remember a dashboard that at a glance on the top level would highlight what jobs failed completely and which jobs might have warnings or non-critical errors. I got emails because I defined to get them. Maybe again if there was a way to color-code the type of error would be good nice-to-have.

• Support. Many companies, at least in Europe, now get support from resellers.
• The user interface is actually not well suited for non-technical users.

Automic is a very strong Automation Platform which enable us to implement user requirements quickly.

ActiveBatch's usability is where it shines. It is pretty straight-forward to learn and administer. Our engineers like it because you can use a GUI to manage it or leverage the command line & api's. You can also create templates or clone existing "jobs" so you don't have to recreate the wheel. It is easy to chain jobs together to make them run in a specific sequence as well.

We have been pretty happy with ActiveBatch support so far. Luckily, we have not had any major issues with it - so we haven't logged a lot of support tickets. The response time to tickets is about average and the level of expertise of the support engineers seems about average as well. Our sales team has been helpful in getting faster responses when necessary as well.

The Automic One Automation Platform (formerly CA Automic Automation Platform) is used to perform Information Technology Process Automation (ITPA). This tool offers enormous functionalities that can be used to automate applications which allow remote function calls and APIs. It works well with mail objects. This tool is primarily used to automate SAP application which is an enterprise resource planning tool.

We looked at several other workload automation solutions and hands down we all looked at each other after seeing the demo and we all understood the genius of the application. To be honest we were all stunned and talked about it for weeks afterward. It didn't even compare to the other platforms we had demos of. We knew instinctively that this was the one.

1. Cost was the major factor without compromising the automation service which this product delivered. Other products are expensive and deliver the same outcome. 2. Limitation of job run, Broadcom Automic Automation allows to run unlimited jobs and helps to increase automation capability. 3. Number of automation packs available with no extra license cost. 4. Depth of coverage of technologies for batch job automation. 5. Required less number of hardware to achieve high availability.

• ActiveBatch [Workload Automation] has increased our nightly processing stability exponentially. Our prior automation software was unreliable and often failed without explanation. Since moving to ActiveBatch [Workload Automation] we have had incredible stability, and any nightly processing errors that happen now are attributed to a cause other than automation. It's the most reliable software we currently use at our company.

• Hours of server operations given over to end-users.
• Single pipelines for job plan execution reduced the operational overhead.