ActiveBatch Workload Automation vs. Redwood Workload Automation

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.

Can't find any less appropriate areas [seen] from my end. But the ability to automate the entire [batch flow] - both the simple executions, but also the highly complex chains with several dependencies, be it dates, times, other jobs[,] etc. - in a very simplistic way, what is not to like.

• 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.

• SAP Batch Scheduling - This is THE BEST tool for triggering SAP jobs, bar none.
• User management- Other scheduling tools make it much more difficult to manage user access. Redwood user access management is a breeze and take less than half the time it take in other products.
• Scheduling Flexibility- The ease with which you can make custom time windows with Redwood is one of my favorite pluses. You can build as simple or as complex of a time window as you need to with Redwood.
• Support- The support that you get from Redwood is in my opinion the best in the world. I have dealt with all the big name players in IT and they all pale in comparison to Redwood. You will never feel like you are in it alone with the best support in the world right at your fingertips.

• 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.

• The documentation is lacking severely, many times even leading to a suggestion of paying for professional services to figure out processes. Also not updating documentation when a new release makes the old documentation obsolete.
• AS400/iSeries has been a constant battle since inception, once an update fixes one thing, another seems to break within the AS400/iSeries space, and sometimes the fixes don't actually fix the issue. Over time now this has gotten much beter.
• Allowing an issue to go back and forth within a ticket countless times (sometimes over 40 responses) without just getting everyone together on a meeting. Update - this has gotten much better with time.
• Communication needs a lot of improvement. I have had to reach out to support just to get release notes when a new release is made available.
• The ability to get accurate counts of historical process runs is limited currently to 35 days and since you are billed for each process run in all environments, not just Production, this limits accountability in historical billing inquiries.

Being in the cloud is a big help, with less hardware to maintain, the patches and updates are fast and easily done, we have built a good working relationship with Redwood.

Some of the scheduling elements were extremely counterintuitive at first. If I did not have examples of existing jobs, I'm not sure I could have made sense of it on my own.

Using RMJ is pretty intuitive. Depending on your company's setup you may have multiple roles involved in the scheduling and monitoring of jobs

My colleague contacted them directly, I only know hearsay on this but it was not good.

Poor documentation, outdated documentation. Slow turnaround. Lack of knowledge - not much is handled by 1-level support, inability to handle basic questions, problems have to be forwarded to 2-level support.

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.

When evaluating other products against Redwood Business Process Automation, the largest differentiation was the SaaS-based model. Other solutions were on premises, which would entail server OS licenses, backup/DR overhead, and management at the server and application levels. With Redwood Business Process Automation, the overhead and administration at the server and application levels were removed so the only responsibility is the administration of RunMyJobs.

• 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.

• We reduced our MRP cycle from around 12 hours down to approximately 3
• We were able to let end-users trigger specific month-end jobs without also having the ability to submit anything else.
• we are able to schedule jobs in much more flexible ways than SAP offers
• We've had no negative impact by using Redwood