Tidal Acquisition: Sunset Your Scheduler?

The Bobfather

Does the Tidal Acquisition Make You Want to Sunset the Scheduler, Too?

April 20, 2024

Reach out to RMT here for help.

Product acquisitions. They can improve your experience, be a non-issue, or cause problems.

According to internal reports and those we hear from places like Trust Radius, Tidal by Redwood appears to have problems.

Redwood Software announced its acquisition of Tidal on January 5, 2023.

“The Turn/River team is thrilled to partner with Tidal and Redwood,” said Chase Sorgel, a Turn/River operating partner and member of the Redwood Board of Directors.

Turn/River specializes in buyouts, spin-outs, and recapitalization of technology, allowing companies to double and triple growth, says the press release.

By December 13, 2023, one verified Tidal user in a Financial Services Company had felt the impact:

“Redwood is purposefully killing the Tidal product by price gouging customers on renewals,” said the user, describing 3-4x previous costs and serious support complaints. “Support seems to have no history with the product . . . resolution times take weeks, months, if at all. Before Redwood acquired it, resolution times took hours or days.” [read more]

The Tidal by Redwood problems are striking. Companies typically set-and-forget job schedulers. They don’t want to mess with something when it’s working, especially if it could bring down every business-critical application they own. People even get nervous about upgrades in this business.

So you know there’s something wrong when a vendor gets the stank eye.

Let’s talk about more signs of stank-eye.

Have you caught automation stank-eye?

Automation stank-eye is the direct result of your service provider’s dismissive neglect. Has any of this happened to you?

1. Your service tickets are ignored.
(Of course, your ticket is very important, and they’re very, very sorry they don’t care.)

2. New features have disappeared.
(Of course, they want to give you new features, but oopsies, they accidentally laid off the product team, and there’s nobody left who knows the tool as well as you.)

3. Connector fees are not feasible.
(This makes you want to march for justice! form a union! put on some overalls and sing John Lennon! “say you want a revolution! we better get on right away! well you get on your feet! out on the street!”)

4. Substantial uplifts on renewals occur with no value added.
(Your music starts to sound more like Alice Cooper. “I’M SO ANGRY I’M SO ANGRY EVERYTHING YOU DO MAKES ME FURIOUS WITH YOU”)

5. Reporting capabilities are sub-standard.
(This burns. You wouldn’t even win in court. There’s no evidence to confirm nor deny the apparent lack of value.)

6. There’s no secure variable option for jobs.
(And here we hit a landmine. Select the wrong key, bring the company to its knees.

If you can relate, I'm sorry

"Must-Haves" For Workload Automation

Most of our clients want Workload Automation that can grow with their company and power their ecosystem, and yes. . . . They want to be able to set-and-forget their scheduler, at some point.

Doing that requires some “must-haves.”

Sure, aspirations and requirements vary, but there’s some pretty basic asks that are easy to deliver:

• role-based security

• scheduling variability for reduced job counts

• advanced calendaring

• object-oriented scheduling

• API and job events

• notifications and self-healing

• automation to reduce job failure

• SaaS capabilities

• cloud application integrations

• unlimited connectors, adaptors, and agent protocols

• back massages

Joking about the last one, but if you’re NOT getting this functionality now, take note. Because you should be. If you’re not, that means it’s about money, and we’ll save you that, too.

Where can you find such a tool?

I can give you several, and I’ll start with one.