We performed a comparison between IBM Workload Automation and OpCon based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: IBM Workload Automation and OpCon are both highly regarded for their unique strengths. IBM Workload Automation stands out for its impressive capability to initiate tasks across multiple nodes and pre-plan them. OpCon is recognized for its adaptability, seamless integration capabilities, self-service functionality, and ability to automate manual tasks.
IBM Workload Automation could benefit from enhancements in performance, navigation, job dependencies, daily schedule refreshes, stability, reporting visibility, and integration with new technologies. OpCon could be improved in terms of its web-based interface, upgrading process, logs, programming and configuration, accessibility through a mobile app, self-service functionality, failover, licensing, support, and UI features.
Service and Support: IBM Workload Automation's customer service is praised for its lab advocacy program, which provides thorough code support. However, customers may face difficulties in pinpointing the root cause of certain problems. OpCon's customer service and support have garnered positive feedback. Customers describe their technical support team as exceptional and commend their prompt responses and efficient solutions.
Ease of Deployment: The setup process for IBM Workload Automation can be difficult for those who are not familiar with IBM tools or application development. OpCon's setup can be complicated. Close collaboration with SMA and receiving training is necessary, however, once acquainted with the system, it becomes more manageable.
Pricing: IBM Workload Automation's setup cost is dependent on the customer's contract and the number of agents installed. OpCon offers a tiered pricing model that includes previously purchased add-ons. Although OpCon is recognized as an expensive and intricate solution, it offers good value for the price.
ROI: IBM Workload Automation focuses on optimizing workload scheduling processes. Users have found it beneficial for automating and streamlining tasks, resulting in time savings and improved efficiency. OpCon has also demonstrated significant advantages in terms of ROI. It excels in automating tasks, which saves time and also contributes to increased productivity.
Comparison Results: OpCon emerges as the preferred choice when compared to IBM Workload Automation. OpCon stands out for its adaptability, ability to integrate with other systems and self-service functionalities. Users appreciate the ability to automate tasks according to their own requirements, leading to a decrease in complexity and an increase in productivity.
"The whole product is valuable because it is a tool for batch automation."
"The support from Cisco is very good. I was with them as a company for 40 years"
"The DWC, when configured correctly, is a great GUI tool to provide Self-Service Scheduling capabilities to the user community."
"The most important feature is the creation of folders. It's a really great feature because you can organize the process with naming conventions."
"Jobs can be triggered in multiple nodes."
"The project we worked on involved the running of nearly 24,000 job instances in a single day, so I would say that the solution is stable."
"Technical support from IBM is very good."
"The initial setup is easy."
"MAS is by far the best feature, although not a feature of the software specifically. MAS has more knowledge than our employees, so we have been able to develop schedules that are far beyond our own skillset."
"For us, the most valuable feature of the solution is the file transfer piece and being able to automate the moving of files around between our various vendors. It reduces the time involved versus somebody having to individually move the files around."
"It has also helped to streamline our operations. We contract out our collection department so they are no longer housed on our system. They're housed on another platform. OpCon is able to not only pull in our data, but it also, on a daily basis, updates that third-party."
"The solution has streamlined operations. We have written custom jobs to do particular things, but OpCon is definitely the one that manages running them at particular times. Often times, those jobs have to run after hours. So while we still develop and spend time and man-hours writing code, once it's done, OpCon is running that in the afternoons or evenings. This is usually done during off hours when a person would normally be required to be here and do it. Instead, OpCon is available, consistent, reliable and easy to get things in and working quickly once we develop and get them working. OpCon takes care of the entire process, including notifications that we define if something were to happen so we know what to do next. Again, it's simplifies the entire process."
"The core system is the most valuable part: being able to view the processes that we've never really been able to view as a whole before. That is super-helpful, as is being alerted when issues arise."
"We particularly like the fact that it's graphical because it is Windows-based. Before, we were text-based on the mainframe. You can also produce flow charts. Because it's point-and-click, its ease of use is very nice."
"My favorite feature is the dashboard feature, which shows jobs that are running, and completed, any failures, and provides dashboard reporting."
"The ability to chain jobs together allows us to create complex interdependencies between our jobs, and the integration into our core system is important because it allows us, through an automated system, to do a huge number of things that used to be done manually."
"The schedule refreshes daily and that's a challenge for us."
"The performance of the previous versions could be better."
"It is missing some features and can improve in areas where the competition is somewhat better like linking job dependencies."
"Scalability-wise, it can be a little bit challenging."
"It would be helpful to have a mobile app that could be used to follow the job schedule."
"There should be more custom documentation, specifically around Java APIs. There should also be more training. In terms of features, we are currently using only 50% of its features. We don't use all features that are available, but there is always room for improvement in all of the tools."
"The configuration of IBM Workload Automation has some challenges. We have a difficult time customizing it, but it is similar to other solutions."
"This solution does have bugs and could be improved in this regard. However, these bugs are resolved relatively quickly."
"At first, it's a little clunky, but once you learn it, it actually is very simple. You have to get over that initial learning hump."
"The only downside to OpCon is that its features can be complicated and really must be taught. Most of our users don't have training beyond the free Basic Training that SMA provides, so for fresh eyes, it is kind of difficult to understand some of the language used."
"I would like to see OpCon being accessible using a mobile app."
"The ability to retrieve information from logs in variables to display relevant information would be helpful."
"We would like a display of the created date, created by, and last modified date, as well as modified by."
"The initial setup is very complex, but that's not necessarily something that needs to be improved. I'm told that in the next version they're improving the upgrade process. So that's in the works already."
"Stability is an area for improvement. There are FTP agents that run on the MCP and they are there so that we can transfer a file from the MCP to the Windows environment or vice versa. Sometimes, and nobody has been able to figure out why, it just goes down, and all of my jobs that need it are hanging or failing... It would be very helpful if they could figure out what in the world is happening with that FTP client that's on the MCP."
"There are some limitations in the actual jobs that are created and how you're able to rename files. Suppose you're bringing in, say, 10, 15, or 20 reports from a core system, and you're using an "asterisk character" to identify files. For example, if you're grabbing files that start with this, end with this, but the characters in between could be different, it has to retain that same name in the destination. It won't allow you to rename them with a date stamp or the like."
IBM Workload Automation is ranked 13th in Workload Automation with 28 reviews while OpCon is ranked 9th in Workload Automation with 56 reviews. IBM Workload Automation is rated 8.2, while OpCon is rated 9.2. The top reviewer of IBM Workload Automation writes "With an easy setup phase in place, agent-based installation can be done in minutes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of OpCon writes "Gives us the ability to schedule dependent jobs across different mainframes". IBM Workload Automation is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, HCL Workload Automation, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Rocket Zena, whereas OpCon is most compared with Control-M, AutoSys Workload Automation, Automic Workload Automation, UiPath and Tidal by Redwood. See our IBM Workload Automation vs. OpCon report.
See our list of best Workload Automation vendors.
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