Product Update: What's New in UAC 7.8

See the new Universal Portal for self-service automation! UAC 7.8 enhancements also include expanded container and SAP support, code-driven orchestration, real-time job visibility, and new integrations.

Universal Automation Center 7.8 carries the theme automation for all, and the Universal Portal is what makes that more than a slogan.

The portal is a new self-service interface built for citizen automators. UAC was designed for power users who live in it daily. The portal targets everyone else: business stakeholders, help desk and admins, developers and engineers, and data scientists. These are capable people who have other jobs to do and no reason to learn an automation platform in depth when what they need is to launch a workload and see where it stands. Central IT gets automation as a service, wider adoption, and fewer interruptions. The main UAC interface remains the primary tool for power users.

In the demo, single sign-on leads to a task board of live processes, with calendaring, my tasks, and my triggers down the side. UAC's eleven or so task states compress into four groups: problems, waiting, running, and done. Tag more than one to watch several at once. Time horizon spans four hours to the past seven days. Filter by task name, business service, or type, choose which columns display, and issue commands directly from the list or from inside a task. Drill into a Linux task, retrieve and copy the output, rerun it, then scroll between attempts and refresh live. Version one ships English and German with more European languages planned, plus a calm mode that reduces color saturation and a genuinely responsive layout that drops columns and regroups information as the screen shrinks, working on both iPhone and Android. The portal is available now, on premises and SaaS, though it currently connects one-to-one with a single controller.

A new UAC CLI ships with its own installer, separate from the agent that bundled the previous one. It's modeled on the Swagger documentation for the REST API and built on a new Python SDK, so you get both a command line and a library for deeper integration. Coverage mirrors the REST APIs: query agent status, run bundles and promotions, generate reports, create and update tasks, launch them synchronously or asynchronously, and retrieve output. Releases stay in lockstep with the Universal Controller. The existing CLI remains available for now.

Containers get attention from both directions. For running UAC in containers, 7.8 begins publishing prescriptive deployment guidance, starting with Red Hat OpenShift and expanding to vanilla Kubernetes and major cloud providers. Both the controller and the agents have been container-capable for a while, with logging already adapted. What's new is the blueprint: controller in one pod, database in another, OMS in a third, with agents still on VMs, physical servers, or z/OS as needed. For automating containerized workloads, the OpenShift task can pull its job resource definition file from GitHub at runtime, which keeps developers in a jobs-as-code workflow while the orchestration stays structured and auditable. A Google GKE example does the same from the controller's own versioned script library. File transfer works to and from containers over UDM, SFTP, or the inter-cloud extension, using the agent's existing port rather than exposing new ones, with the agent running as a sidecar in the pod.

PostgreSQL joins the supported databases for the Universal Controller, alongside MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server. It arrived on direct customer request, and the reasoning is straightforward: PostgreSQL is the most popular open source database for new projects, and teams moving applications to cloud and containers often reevaluate whether a commercial database still earns its place.

SAP recertification covers XBP 3.0 plus SAP R/3, S/4HANA, and RISE with SAP. Stonebranch recertifies every three years, and it matters now because R/3 customers have a finite window to move to S/4HANA, RISE, or GROW.

Integration work since 7.7 leans heavily on SAP, including task types built on the SAP BTP APIs for S/4HANA and IBP jobs. OpenShift tasks reach v2, with AKS coming. Inter-cloud file transfer keeps advancing, SharePoint handling is more intuitive, and object store coverage expands toward Google Drive and Dropbox. On observability, metrics now publish from Linux and Windows hosts, with prototype dashboards developed alongside customers in Dynatrace and Grafana.

Two upgrade notes: 7.8 raises the bundled Tomcat and Java versions, and Universal Agent 7.8 is the final HP-UX release, reaching end of life in spring 2027.

Key Takeaways:

  • The Universal Portal gives citizen automators a simplified, mobile-responsive view using their existing UAC login and permissions
  • A new UAC CLI with its own installer, built on a Python SDK modeled on the Swagger REST documentation
  • PostgreSQL is now supported as the Universal Controller database
  • Prescriptive guidance for deploying UAC components in containers, starting with Red Hat OpenShift
  • Pull container job definitions from GitHub or the controller's script library at runtime, and transfer files to and from containers without opening new ports