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Key Takeaways
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We interviewed the senior vice president of production operations and the vice president for production operations of a large regional bank, inquiring about how they are using Automic Automation and the benefits they have gained from it.
Q: How long has your organization used Automic?
SVP of production operations: When we chose Automic, we looked at the variety of scheduling tools and made the decision to go with Automic. The proof of concept went really well. We love Automic—the product, support, everything—and have just started with a dedicated support engineer.
Q: How has your organization’s usage of Automic evolved over the years?
VP of production operations: The growth is pretty impressive. Four and a half years ago, we were managing 30 applications with Automic. Now that number is 152. These applications run everything from financial processing to reporting and anti-money laundering.
In 2020, we had 600 agents, and now we have close to 2,000. The mainframe is the center of account processing, and Automic is integrated with Snowflake and manages a lot of reporting, whether it is ETL or in Snowflake.
Our teams are always looking at the latest and greatest products. We wouldn’t have grown from 30 to 150 applications if they weren't happy with the solution. The Broadcom support organization is very good. We have bi-weekly calls to review incidents, a dedicated Broadcom engineer, and a great working relationship with the team.
SVP of production operations: This is all organic growth. We are not requiring applications to switch over to Automic. People seek out our team and Automic.
Q: Which Automic cloud integrations do you have deployed?
VP of production operations: We have been working on that for about a year. There is a management directive on a cloud initiative for Azure and a colocation data center project. We have been working to prepare for supporting applications that will be moved to the cloud. We are utilizing Azure cloud integrations for Automic, including Blob Storage, Event Grid, Synapse, Logic Apps, and Data Factory.
Q: What is your role in evangelizing the use of Automic and automation across the enterprise?
VP of production operations: We conduct lunch and learn tech sessions weekly, and my team has led two of these around Automic. We offer Broadcom Academy training, weekly office hours, and individual meetings with the application teams.
Q: What benefits have you seen for the applications you’ve moved to Automic in the past three to five years? What success metrics do you track?
VP of production operations: Automic enables us to support multiple use cases with diverse functionality, including routine program executions for the financial industry, database support processes, and API calls for applications. Our primary success metric is the growth of applications using the product—with over 150 to date.
Q: What key success factors would you like to highlight for Automic users?
VP of production operations: We trained all the application developers on the use of Automic. My team simply administers the platform. At a high level, we would like to highlight the fact that we maintain a rigorous testing environment. We do a structured and controlled roll-out with Automic and enforce naming standards within the environment. We conduct full disaster recovery testing annually.
Q: What are your plans with Automation Analytics & Intelligence (AAI)?
VP of production operations: In a previous company, I was the AutoSys manager and used Jaws, the precursor to AAI. I’ve been wanting to roll out AAI here, but at our large regional bank, there’s more work to be done than people to do it. We finally got the bandwidth to do it this year.
We are working to identify the pilot application groups for AAI, with the goal of fully implementing it for Automic by the end of the year. If time permits, we will also add CA7 visibility this year.
Q: What AAI benefits are most important to the bank?
VP of production operations: Automic runs thousands of objects daily. We have a lot of process-intensive apps, and we want to identify slack times in the schedules to make processing times more efficient. We also want to better manage SLAs, ensuring that if we experience failures, we are alerted to their location on the critical path so that they can be resolved quickly.
Q: What have you learned over the last five years about Automic that you would share with someone new to the product?
VP of production operations: Automic is a best-in-class enterprise workflow orchestration system. There is so much functionality in the product. It’s a mature product, but it's also a current product. If you are trying to configure something, you are using object-oriented programming, not cryptic language. It offers easy adoption and efficiency for developers. With Automic, our users are self-sufficient and do not require ongoing support.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers?
VP of production operations: The product works great. The support organization that we have with Broadcom is the best I’ve ever seen. And I’ve done this in a lot of organizations. The account managers are genuinely concerned about our success. We always get the same person. It’s efficient, and things get done. Engineering resources are applied when needed.
SVP of production operations: That’s exactly what I was going to state. Growth over the last years indicates how well the product works, and everyone is extremely satisfied.