The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (acquired by Red Hat in 2015) is a foundation for building and operating automation across an organization. The platform includes tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, and can automate resource provisioning, and IT environments and configuration of systems and devices. It can be used in a CI/CD process to provision the target environment and to then deploy the application on it.
$5,000
per year
TIBCO® BPM Enterprise
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM is a business process management platform with capabilities for process automation, process documentation, human capital management, process patterns, and predictive operations analytics.
Ansible and AAP is well suited for orchestrating over many platforms. Its agentless architecture makes it ideal for infrastructure that cannot support an agent. It has a strong module library for the most common products, services, and platforms. It is by far the best language for anyone new to coding or automation to jump in and quickly get to a productive state. While AAP is capable of automating nearly anything, there are still advantages of using other platforms in its place. For example, Chef has been valuable for server automation because of the availability of existing cookbooks. For systems that can run an agent, having the individual nodes perform their own checks can scale a little better than the centralized model of AAP. But running an agent also means the potential risk of resource over utilization.
TIBCO ActiveMatrix is most useful for teams that need help mapping out their processes with other, co-dependent teams. It makes that conversation happen in a logical, structured way. The software is also helpful for professionals that need more data visualization in their business. On the opposite side, the software is not useful for really small businesses. It’s not worth the money.
Makes it easy to create and share automation in one central hub.
Ansible content collections give me the ability to reuse code, making it rapid to carry out complex IT processes.
Event-driven automation allows me to reduce manual tasks: it is rapid to know which action to take and respond automatically by receiving events from external apps automatically.
Ansible Tower is a paid service, which can be annoying at times. But that is understandable, as it requires an additional level of support from the Ansible team to develop.
There is a decently large learning curve for someone not familiar with setting up Unix environments. However, there is a very large support community with tons of documentation, so it's not a dealbreaker.
A little bit too conservative. Not really anything leading edge. [Tibco] has plenty of customers, and that means they will probably be around forever, but [product enhancements] seem to be more [abundant in competitor product offerings].
It would be great to have some pre-defined themes. Pie chart labels - it would be great to get more options for sizing and placement.
I find it hard to trust the online portal too much. I doubt the security that is offered by this software.
Out of the box, Ansible can be slow over a bad connection, as it's establishing an SSH connection to the target server for each little task. There are some adjustments you can make to the defaults that greatly improve performance. And if you run Ansible on the same network as the target (i.e. by using a jump box or Jenkins server), then it can be crazy fast. I'd give it a 10 for speed except that it does require these adjustments first.
There is a lot of good documentation that Ansible and Red Hat provide which should help get someone started with making Ansible useful. But once you get to more complicated scenarios, you will benefit from learning from others. I have not used Red Hat support for work with Ansible, but many of the online resources are helpful.
AAP doesn't truly stack up against any of the products mentioned except for Aria Automation. But, it is extensible and open and has a lower cost to entry.
For BPM we looked at some IBM products suites, BPM Online, Oracle products and Pega Systems. The decision to go with AMX BPM was based on the evaluation by the software architect team and the cost of acquiring the TIBCO suites.