ActiveBatch Workload Automation vs. Stonebranch

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.

• 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.

• 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.

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.

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

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.

• 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.