Control-M Reviews

I've been with the same company for 22 years. The use case started out truly as a batch processing solution. That was what we originally got it for back in the day to help us automate what was being done manually or being done through homegrown tools or scripts, et cetera. The use cases evolved through the years. Now, we use it to orchestrate workflows that are touching traditional data centers and that are going out to the cloud and bringing it back.

From one spot, we have a single pane of glass. Like many companies, our systems are getting more complex and more diverse, with cloud and edge computing, containerization, et cetera. However, we have one place where we can go and look and see what's going on. If something happens, we can check what happened and where it happened. Today, we're dependent upon a lot of services and cloud technology that sometimes we don't know the ins and outs of.

A big challenge is to make sure that we have certain things run daily or on a periodic basis. That really was the driving use case. We had a lot of manual tasks going on and if someone, for example, left on vacation, something may not get done for two or three days, a week or two weeks. This solution takes all that away.

The main use case was to get away from having to stare at a system or a screen, and just let things run, let the workflows flow, and only be notified if there's something wrong. That was really a big driving use case.

It freed up people to work on exciting work instead of mundane work. No one has to sit around and stare at that screen all day long. No one has to reinvent the wheel for the 50th or 500th time to do tasks like maybe put a file out into an S3 bucket or out into an HDFS Hadoop file store since it's already there. It's already done for them. They just drag, drop, click and they're done. It's freed people up and they can do the exciting work that is really what we should be doing anyway. No one wants to be doing boring work.

I am a big proponent of an automation API and Jobs-as-Code. That is Control-M in the DevOps world. It opens up the tool to a traditional operations tool. Developers can jump right in there now, giving them that ownership, and integrating the existing DevOps tools that they have. That is a huge feature that I just love. 

There's an application integrator. It doesn't matter if you're trying to integrate with on-premises, off-premises, API, container, or serverless functions, it's easy for you to design. You just design that integration and then it's available instantly, and that's a huge time saver. 

It's rather easy to create, integrate and automate data pipelines with Control-M. I can give a broad answer. It can be as easy as drag and drop, or it can be as complex as designing the integrations. If you use customization, you can access a data lake that your organization developed. For the typical user out there, the difference is on a scale of one to five, with one being easy and five being hard, you're probably looking at a two and a half. For most people, it's very easy. It's getting easier as it's all web-based nowadays. Alternatively, it can be all code-based.

I have not explored Python Client too much. I've tinkered with it and that's been the limit of my exploration. Now, with the integrations like AWS, we've made extensive use of it, and it is very easy for anybody to do. Python Client has a lot of great possibilities, especially in the data science arena, however, sadly we have not had an opportunity as of yet to play with it.

The Control-M interface for creating, monitoring, and ensuring delivery of files as parts of your data pipeline has gotten better. It is not perfect. That said, it’s come a long way over the years. Nowadays, most of it is web-driven. A lot of it can be API driven if you so wish. There's still probably some future work to be done there, however, for the average user that's coming in, starting to use it for the first time, they're going to need a little training and handholding at the beginning for maybe the first week or so. Then you can start setting them free to go out and use it on their own.

The orchestration of our data pipelines and workflows has been able to give a single point of view too. Management doesn’t care about the bits and pieces. A workflow or a data pipeline could have 100 or 1,000 components behind it, and management does not care about that. Management cares whether the SLA has been met or not. They want that easy-to-see red light or green light. We can provide them with that. The solution drives self-service and it helps. A manager doesn't have to call somebody in IT and wait around for an answer.

They can immediately get that information for themselves, consume it and be able to understand that, "Hey, you know what, this data pipeline over here, we're going to be 15 minutes off our SLA for today." Then, they can start asking why. I like parts of Control-M like Batch SLA Impact, is they can start doing some of that analysis themselves, for example, “this late due to the fact that maybe the system was down for maintenance for two hours last night." That's really beneficial in today's business world.

The automation of Control-M has sped up everything. We can integrate directly into existing pipelines and the DevOps teams can get anything integrated with their Jenkins deployments. They don't have to wait for traditional operation functions. This is all built-in. It validates and checks. In some cases, it automatically deploys the agents and deploys the configurations. That's something that years ago you'd have to wait for. The speed of delivery has vastly improved.

Nowadays, auditing is as simple as running a report. If this falls under an auditable category, we can just hit a button and the report is done. Control-M audits everything, even if it is not under the regulatory or audit spotlight. Every process, every movement, and every change is logged by the system. If there's ever a question, you’ll be able to find a why and a when. There’s an audit trail.

It certainly helped speed processes up. I can eliminate what I call the manual gaps between certain features. I don't have to send an email to somebody to say, "Hey, guess what? That file's ready. Now you can run process X, Y, Z." The system just says "Hey, the file is there, let's go." It's eliminated those gaps between parts of the workflow. It also helped optimize the infrastructure needed as it's like a Tetris Puzzle. I have these ten different workflows that I'm trying to run and before I may have had ten dedicated systems for them. Now I know that I don't need that.

We use this model all the time. We can run those ten processes on three systems and be just fine. That saves money. The solution is not only speedy, but it also saves money.

They are doing a great job with continuing to drive the open-source model of it. Five years ago, if you looked for Control-M anywhere, you would not have found it. Today, that model has changed. They're actively publishing on GitHub.

You can download for free an entire container and run Control-M at home if you want to tinker with it. That was unheard of a few years ago. You can type a query in Google and start to see all sorts of documentation that is now available to the public. The major strides that they have made there are pretty darn good.

If you want to take it and ramp it up to doing some very heavy-duty integrations, you can find yourself at first dealing with a difficult integration. However, once you get that integration going for maybe a month or so, the next person after you will have less difficulty. That's the power. 

They can improve their interface. They're going through huge modernization efforts and they're getting there. They're probably 75% there, however, there's still another 25% to go.

I've been using the solution for 22 years.

Since it supports business, it has to be stable. It's very stable. We have not had major outages or anything. That's always a good thing, however, like with any solution, its stability is going to depend on how you deploy it and what safeguards you put in place, including high availability and disaster recovery, et cetera. All the hooks for that are in the product, however, it's up to you to decide how you're going to use those hooks.

It's highly scalable. You can run five things in it today and easily scale up to run 1,005 things tomorrow. In terms of scalability, there are no issues there.

Technical support tends to be very helpful.

I used to work for an insurance company and I used Computer Associates. It was called CA-7 and CA-11, which are similar tools.

We tried to use Computer Associates before this, but it didn't support the systems we needed and the integration was next to impossible.

I was involved in the deployment and initial setup of the solution right from the beginning.

We had jobs and workflows running within the first day. That was pretty good. We don't use the Helix model, however, there is a Helix model you can purchase, in which everything's hosted by BMC. You can be up and running literally in hours which is reasonable. There's a learning curve, however, if you do not get some value out of it within two days, you're probably doing something wrong.

At the time, there were only two of us deploying the solution. Today there are only three of us.

It's business-wide. Everything from data to marketing, to finance, even though it probably wouldn't make sense to anybody else, it touches everything. It's deployed across Windows, Linux, containers, VM, cloud, et cetera.

If anybody has a use case or wants to learn more about it, we'll show them. Anybody in our organization can get basic access and can tinker around in an alpha test environment. This includes non-technical people. We have non-IT people that use it.

If they can self-service and maybe design some parts themselves, that's a huge win right there. We have a very open model of deployment.

There are occasional patching and vulnerabilities that come out. Most of the patching nowadays can be automated if you're using the Helix-based solution. A lot of that is handled by BMC.

We did not use an integrator, reseller, or consultant for the deployment.

I can't speak to the exact licensing costs. 

Every few years we go through a reevaluation. We'll go through and look at what's on the market and what companies have come up with or released new versions. We'll go through and we'll say, "Okay, let's compare these, what do we need and what are all the tools offered out there?" We do that roughly every five years and it keeps us on our toes.

The biggest difference as of late is the API and Jobs-as-code. Control-M is light years ahead of others. It is light years ahead of the competitors and what they're offering. Other competitors are starting to get APIs, however, only BMC is working with Job-as-code and is in the lead. To my knowledge, they're really one of the only ones who can define your entire workflow as code.

Control-M is pretty critical to our business as it runs many different business processes every day, and if it wasn't there, we would probably hire many more people, be a lot slower, and be more prone to error.

We use a hybrid deployment. We have parts in the traditional data center. We have parts in the cloud. We sometimes have parts that live on containers. They only exist for two minutes. It is very much a hybrid mix of goodies with our deployment.

I'd advise potential new users to examine it today and not think about what it did ten years ago. Control-M is an old product. It has been around since we all used mainframes, however, just because something's been around for a long time, doesn't mean it's a piece of junk or doesn't work with modern technologies. It has adapted and grown with the times. Control-M did cloud-based work before many of us were even talking about the cloud. It's hard to get rid of negative perceptions sometimes, however, the best thing for people to do is to head out to the internet, look it up, and go out to GitHub.

If you have a technical team, send them out to GitHub. You can download everything in an image or in a container and try it yourself. It doesn't cost you a nickel. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

The biggest advice I can give is to try it out. Don't only believe what the PowerPoints tell you. There's no excuse that you can't have a deployment running clearly within hours. Be willing to think about how it can solve problems in new ways. Sometimes we try to find a new tool as we have a square problem and we get upset as all the tools we're looking at only have round solutions. Sometimes the reason that it only has round solutions is due to the fact that that's the proper way to solve the problem. You have got to be willing to break down whatever you're trying to do, whatever workflow you're trying to automate or integrate, and take it in pieces.

If all you want to do is save yourself a lot of money, use Cron, and use Windows Task Scheduler. However, if you want to take your business to the next level and start to get to the point where you can automate to remediate and audit, that's where tools like Control-M come into play.

We use the solution in Western Mutual Insurance Group's environment for the daily scheduling of around 11,000 jobs. Our number of end-users is in the hundreds, across 18 to 20 teams. We have three different physical locations as a company. Since COVID, we are a partially remote workforce as well, so we have multiple locations.

It's essential that the solution orchestrates our workflows. Regarding processes like file transfers and data workflows, we want one source for that. We want one area where we can check and see how things are progressing, and Control-M is invaluable. Everyone has access in our environment to Control-M, and we all use it heavily. We utilize a ton of plugins in our environment. We started the transition into servers and are seeing what our license allows in that area. We try to take advantage of everything we can.

We use Control-M to replace a lot of our manual logging of job data. It's been very valuable in terms of logs that can output alerts.

I just did an audit earlier this year, and it was a swift process using the product. It took me less than a few hours, and without the solution, it would potentially take a couple of days to a week.

We essentially have a nightly batch cycle. We process data overnight, so it's available for end-users during the day. Using manual execution, instead of Control-M, this nightly batch cycle would transition into a weekly or monthly batch cycle instead.

I recently took over as admin of Control-M about a year ago. Since then, the question has been how we can further utilize Control-M in our environment. We haven't yet found the limits of what Control-M can do. We're finding better ways to apply it every day. From the old days when we manually scheduled jobs to the current paradigm of using an automation tool. This made the process much more manageable.

We define Control-M internally as a "critical business application." I would say that if Control-M were not available, the impact would be catastrophic to our business.

The reporting is top-notch. I haven't found any other applications on the market that can replicate what Control-M offers. The alerting is very good, and I think their service monitoring is the best in the industry. 

The solution is a key part of our system and I have not seen any significant limitations with it. It's very reliable and performs as advertised.

We're just starting our data pipeline journey. Compared to other products in the market, I believe Control-M's is the easiest to use. Theirs came out ahead in terms of ease of use every time. I rate them very highly in that area. We're primarily an Azure corporation. We found that the solution's built-in integrations with Azure are straightforward to use.

We actively build out methods of alerting, for instance, when workflows in Control-M don't complete, as this impacts our end-users and our managers that support the teams attempting to provide data for the end-users. I think Control-M has a ton of built-in integrations that make alerting when that data is unavailable more visible to end-users. I think that's been very useful in our environment.

The stability could be improved. I ran into an issue with a recent Control-M patch. The environment would become unstable if security ports were scanned. This is an area they need to improve on, but ultimately it's a relatively small improvement.

We have been using the solution for around seven years. 

One patch had some issues, but the fix pack was very helpful. Other than that, we haven't had any stability issues with this product. So I'd rate it very highly.

The scalability is excellent, we're looking into options in Azure for scaling up and down in our environment, and Control-M has been essential in accommodating that.

Technical support would be a 10. They're always available. They've been very helpful with any questions I have. There are multiple means of contacting them, and they've always been responsive. The technical account partner, Jake, has been very helpful. The account rep, Chris, has also been very responsive.

Positive

Control-M in our environment predates my time. I believe the company first implemented the solution around 15 years ago.

The initial setup was before my time. We started off as a mainframe exclusive influence of Control-M, and then we transitioned to distributed servers from there. I am a team of one.

The solution's automation has improved our business service delivery speed. Our big push this year has been toil reduction and automation of manual tasks that ultimately take time away from our engineers. Control-M is factored into probably north of 80% of those reductions with its ability to automate tasks. So far this year, we're at about 4,000 hours of toil reduced. I would say Control-M has played a factor in 3000 of those hours.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. Control-M is critical to our business.

There are other solutions like Control-M out on the market, but in every recent market evaluation, Control-M has always come out on top. I think they are becoming more cloud-native as they progress with their Control-M Web Services. They're more reliable than the others on the market right now. 

I would advise anyone to start with a trial version of this product. I think they'll be very impressed with it. 

We don't use Python to a significant degree at all in our environment. We have been looking into that, but nothing solid yet. We don't use AWS but are looking to get into it in 2024.

Our organization has multiple projects that use Control-M, and I support the banking domain. In the past, I have worked on projects for retail organizations and medical companies.

We have approximately 150 applications in our current project. These include Loanpower, erwin, and OpenLink.

With the use of Control-M, our SLAs are met more often. If there is an issue, we identify it in advance, before the problem occurs.

Control-M helps us in terms of automation because it has various scripts in different formats. We can run a Python program or a shell script, and these allow us to automate almost everything.

This product helps to secure our business because we can restrict users.

We have automated several critical processes with Control-M. One is used during patching, where we log in and type one command that will stop and start the services on all of the servers that we have. We have approximately 10 servers in production and five in non-production, so it's a lot of work to restart all of the servers. We also have automation that performs a health check. It runs every day at a scheduled time and will delete all jobs in production that are older than five days. Similarly, we have jobs that check to ensure certain conditions are being met and will check the various alerts that can occur.

Automating these processes has improved our business because every morning, we have to send a status update to show that the components are working. This is something that we used to do manually. We would log into CCM and check everything. Now, we have automated that using a script, wherein it sends the status email automatically to whichever business users request it. It has helped to reduce a lot of manual activity.

Control-M has definitely helped us to resolve issues faster. I estimate that the improvement is between 60% and 70%.

Our service-level operations performance has improved by 80% with the use of Control-M.

The GUI is very user-friendly. It provides us with a single view and we have everything in the same UI. This is very important because we don't spend a lot of time switching tabs or opening Control-M for different purposes. We have a single GUI open and it saves a lot of time.

Two really helpful features are Forecast and Business Impact Manager (BIM).

BIM is helpful because we do not miss any SLAs, as we get to know the issue well in advance. It is the topmost service that has helped us provide better solutions for the business.

Forecast is useful in terms of patching, etc, because whenever we are looking for downtime or any team is looking for downtime, it's easy for us to use Forecast to find it.

Self-service is helpful and our business users appreciate it because they don't have to have Control-M installed on their machine. They can log in using the web portal.

The reporting functionality needs a lot of work. We have faced problems with different versions where we run the right report, but it gives us blank entries. Then, when we run the same report again, it gives the correct data. We have spoken with Customer Care and some of the issues are fixed in the latest version, 9.20.

I have been using Control-M for 11 years and my company has been using it for longer than that.

This is a pretty stable solution. We have not had any downtime.

A couple of times, the agent has gone down unexpectedly. However, in terms of the EM and server, it's pretty stable.

Our organization is pretty big, with approximately 250,000 employees, and we have multiple projects that use Control-M. We have approximately 150 applications in our current project, and there are about 175 employees that are actively using Control-M. That is across three different countries.

It is easy to scale. It can handle a lot of job flows and it's easy to create multiple jobs to run at the same time. We are expanding in terms of jobs for the same application because they have a lot of upgrades going on at the application level. 

We are not planning to expand the number of applications in our project as of now. We do have requests, but it's a slow process. We can add perhaps five or six applications a year.

Overall, we have no problems in terms of scalability. 

When we can't find a solution to an issue, we reach out to BMC customer support and they respond almost immediately. Overall, the technical support team is very good and I would rate them a nine or ten out of ten.

We did not migrate to Control-M from a competing solution. Some of our clients, although not my current project, migrated to Control-M from different products. The reasons for changing products are the additional features available in Control-M, as well as the ease of use. Also, some people are more confident in the security that Control-M provides, compared to other tools on the market.

Personally, I started my career with Control-M and have been using it ever since.

In the company, we have a couple of clients who use IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler (TWS), AutoSys, and Stonebranch. However, the majority of our clients use Control-M. The choice of solution stems from requirements and input from the client.

One of the reasons that some clients are not using Control-M is because of the cost. For a client with 5,000 or more jobs, they definitely implement Control-M. However, if they are running only 200 or 300 jobs in a small environment, there are other native tools available.

I was not part of the implementation at my company but I have implemented several Control-M projects. The initial setup is straightforward.

First, we download the files from the BMC site and then start the installation. This involves running the setup files and if there is any error, you have knowledge base articles and you also have AMIGO support if you enroll in it.

The deployment can be completed in a day or two, including the Enterprise Manager (EM), servers, and agents. There are also conversion tools that are available to assist with creating jobs.

Our implementation strategy began with installing the Enterprise Manager first, and then the server, and then the agents. We would raise a support ticket so that whenever we had any issues, we could reach out to them.

I did not look at the interactive guides or videos that Control-M provides for reducing time to full productivity. I had all of the documentation handy but I did not refer to any of the videos.

Our in-house team is responsible for deployment.

Control-M is priced accordingly for larger environments. It is expensive for smaller environments with only a few hundred jobs running.

There are two different types of licenses available. The first is based on the number of jobs that we run per day, and the other is based on the number of agents that we install. My current project has a contract for five years. During the first two years, we are allowed to run any number of jobs using any number of agents. However, in the last three years, we have to stick to whatever is defined in the contract.

In past versions, BIM and Forecast were separate components that were available at an additional cost. Since version 9, however, everything is included and there are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

For my current project, the client has always used Control-M.

The latest version of Control-M is 9.20 but we are working with 9.18 because our client has certain servers where the OS is not compatible with 9.20. It is running on Linux machines and at this point, our client hasn't given us approval for the OS upgrade.

Our business users don't typically use Control-M. They have access to it but only use it when a critical chain is stuck and they want to check it themselves. They can use self-service for this, although most of the time, they don't.

An example of why they would use self-service is when a critical batch has failed and is stuck for a long time, and they want to see the approximate time that it will be completed. Also, during an audit, they can use self-service to see which users have certain access, such as production access or write permissions.

The Control-M users in our company have different roles. We have administrators, and we have people who specialize in migration. We also have people who look into scheduling and we have a team that just takes care of monitoring.

The number of people that we require for the day-to-day administration depends on the size of the project. In my current project, we have approximately 8,000 jobs actively running. We have approximately 17,000 configured. In our L1 team, we have eleven people, and we have eight members for each of our L2 and L3 teams.

We do not use the Control-M integrated file transfer capability in our workflows, although we do use the File Watcher feature. We have a tool from Axway called SecureTransport, where they handle the file transfer, but we can define this as part of a Control-M job.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Control-M is that anything can be automated. You can control various applications and it is simple to schedule jobs for products like SAP and databases.

My advice for anybody who is considering Control-M is that it has a wide variety of features compared to other tools. It is flexible, easy to use, and the web portal makes it simple for business users or application teams to access it without having to install it on a Windows server or a Citrix platform. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I work for the second largest chain of supermarkets in the UK. We are running about 90% of our jobs through Control-M. This applies for jobs and scripts on-premises and in the cloud.

When we used Control-M version 7, we were just doing scheduling. When we moved to Control-M version 9 six months ago, we started using the cloud plugins, like AWS.

Control-M is business-critical for our operations. It does all our monitoring and tracking.

Our command center people watch the Control-M job status and alerts. Since the pandemic started, and we are working from home, we have been providing them with Self Service. We started this two or three months back. Now, they can watch the jobs and alerts through their mobile and iPads instead of logging into their laptops.

We set up a file transfer mechanism because this will be easier for Control-M to track end-to-end.

We use Control-M as part of our DevOps automation toolchains. We have a four-person team for Control-M. We help the DevOps team create new jobs. We assign a dedicated resource to understand their requirements and how they can be integrated with other jobs. Because Control-M works end-to-end, it is critical for our DevOps daily jobs.

We use Control-M to streamline our data and analytics projects. Control-M has helped improve our data transfers. If there are no security concerns, the data can directly link to downstream systems. We use Control-M to watch all the transfers of files to their targets.

All our Control-M alerts go to our internal automation.

It has two-way integration. We now have a ServiceNow integration. 

Control-M reporting isn't that good. It is very limited. We would like the ability to create our own reports as well as the ability to publish dashboards in the cloud, which would help us. Improved reporting will help us determine statuses and get the answers that we need. However, I personally think BMC is not focusing on the reporting. I have even visited the BMC office in India, and asked, "Why haven't you improved the reporting?"

There are some latency issues with jobs between on-premises and the cloud. BMC is helping a lot to check the imports and exports from version 7 to version 9, including the EM server and the mainframe.

Control-M could improve agentless connectivity a little more. We are using it almost 100% with agents, but when we start using agentless, Sainsbury's Bank has different security mechanisms and we cannot install Control-M. For example, the agentless connection fluctuates a lot, which triggers alerts.

I have worked with Control-M for almost 10 years, since 2010.

The stability is very good. 

The scalability of the latest version is a drastic improvement compared to version 7.

We are getting good help from them. When I use Support Central, I can also see tickets that have been created by my colleagues.

We currently have IBM TWS as a job scheduler, but they don't automate their ticketing. Whereas, Control-M has automatic ticketing. 

We are using TWS for mainframe data. We are looking to start moving all our TWS jobs to Control-M now that Control-M is in the cloud. We are looking at moving these jobs around September or October, then we will have 200,000 jobs daily in Control-M.

We are trying to import from Control-M version 7 to Control-M version 9, but have experienced a major problem with its new features (database-related stuff). We are slowly fixing this as we go, with the help of BMC. Right now, we are doing this process step-by-step, but we can't upgrade everything to the latest version. We can only move everything to Control-M version 9.5.

Initially, we were first-timers doing the cloud. We had so many trials and errors. For importing, we created virtual machines in AWS and set up a lot of automation. However, we needed a static IP address for Control-M. So, we had to start from scratch to create new virtual machines with static IP addresses.

We are currently importing step-by-step. We still have two mainframe servers that we need to do and should be done by the end of August.

We have 70,000 jobs running daily. Control-M has reduced the number of jobs that we are running daily. We used to have more than 500,000 jobs running daily. This is very important to us.

Control-M has helped us resolve issues 70% to 80% faster. It provides us with alerts instead of having someone go to that particular server and check the logs to determine where the issue is. We can simply click on the alert information, then everything is in front of us. This provides us with time savings, human effort savings, and process savings.

You can't compare other tools to Control-M, because Control-M is further ahead of any other tool.

Once a year, as part of our disaster recovery, we restart Control-M and see what happens. Next, we will run those jobs through Control-M. Then, we will show management, "This is what happens if you use Control-M and if you don't use Control-M."

There are some areas of our business where we don't have Control-M. When we start doing those areas through Control-M, it will be an end-to-end solution.

We don't use Control-M for file transfers. We have proposed using Control-M for file transfer with version 9, which is in the cloud.

In the future, we will give control to the DevOps team through BMC AMI Change Manager. They will create the jobs, then send them to our BMC Control-M team for review, testing, and promotion to production. However, adopting this will take some time.

I would rate Control-M as a nine out of 10.

It provides enterprise scheduling for a lot of things, e.g., supply chain, payroll, reporting, sales and marketing, and web services, which is our online store and ordering.

We are currently running jobs on Control-M for databases, web apps, proprietary applications, Workday, Oracle, WebSphere, Kafka, and Informatica stuff on Unix and Linux. It is flexible. I haven't had any problems with compatibility.

It used to be on-prem, but now it is in a different data center in a different city. So, it is a VM.

We use the GUI, but there is a web interface that some users are using on the business side. Those users can easily check on their job flows on the web interface, so they can see whether their job has completed or it is waiting for something. It can check the status and  history of what happened, for example, the previous day.

The scheduling is quite easy to use and pretty robust.

Control-M provides us with a unified view, where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all our application workflows and data pipelines. It also provides the ability to filter. So, if I don't want to see everything, I can also narrow it down or open ViewPoint. This is very important since we have thousands of jobs to monitor. If we did not have this ability, it would be very difficult to see what is going on.

It is easy to use, and you can set things up very quickly. We can copy jobs, making copies of the existing configurations and setup. 

Control-M reporting is a bit of a pain point right now. Control-M doesn't have robust reporting. I would like to see better reporting options. I would like to be able to pull charts or statistics that look nicer. Right now, we can pull some data, but it is kind of choppy. It would be nicer to have enterprise-level reporting that you can present to managers.

I have been using Control-M for at least 12 years.

I haven't seen any significant issues with Control-M in several years, e.g., we haven't had to call support. So, it has been very stable.

It runs all the time. We are running thousands of jobs with little issue, especially when I compare it to some of the other systems that we use for other things. It has been very stable.

One to two people are needed for day-to-day administration. I usually do it myself.

I haven't seen any problems with scalability in terms of performance or stability. 

There are at least 50 people using Control-M. Some of them would be architects, senior programmer analysts, database administrators, Unix administrators, software engineers, and team leads.

I had an issue one time at my previous company. There was some issue with the database. We worked with Level 2 support to fix it. Other than that, there is not too much to talk about really in terms of problems. 

The integrated guides and how-to videos are very good in the solution’s web interface for reducing the time to full productivity with Control-M. BMC puts out a lot of webinars and videos on their YouTube channel. Sometimes I do use those. I go in and watch the video or webinar to see what is new or how to do things, which is very valuable.

We migrated from CA Unicenter, which was out of service and quite clunky. That system didn't have a graphical user interface; it was command line-based. It had a console, so it was very difficult to see what was going on. It was also difficult to troubleshoot. It took a long time to find information or set things up. Therefore, management decided to move to Control-M, especially since I had experience with it. It has been much easier to use and work with than CA Unicenter.

CA didn't have File Watchers. It had another way of achieving that outcome, but it was very cumbersome and not always reliable. It was also difficult to troubleshoot. 

There is a lot of logic in Control-M that you can do. For example, after a job completes, there are actions you can do. There are actions before the job completes or before it starts. There are actions you can do afterwards. There was some logic that you can add to the job, and we just didn't have it with CA.

The calendars are also a lot easier to work with using Control-M. The CA calendars were just terrible. In Control-M, we have a lot less calendars, about 20 calendars, compared to 80 or 100 in CA.

It is faster to implement things like new jobs or projects with Control-M. Whereas, in the past, certain things would be executed manually, like scripts and workflows. It is very easy to use. I can set up jobs and workflows quickly, which helps developers to test.

It is very easy to set up a PoC. If someone just wants to do a quick test, it is very easy to do. Assuming that everything is in place, it is quite easy to test or set up cyclic jobs.

We did the setup twice. The first time was a migration from another system, which was not BMC. That took three months, which was still pretty fast, and it was very successful. The second time was an upgrade to version 19, and that took about two months, and it was also quite successful. From my perspective, the solution was very good as far as upgrades go. We didn't have any major issues, before or after the upgrade.

We had a vendor help us out, but overall it was very smooth and a success. We used Control-M’s Conversion Tool when migrating from CA Unicenter to Control-M and the vendor helped us. Using the Conversion Tool was very important because it speeded up the process. It took all the information from one system and transferred it over, which saved us a lot of time. So, we spent more time on the verification. We spent less time on the setup and spent more time just verifying the setup to make sure everything was correct. It was a time saver for us.

My experience with BMC during our initial deployments and upgrades was very good. I got quick responses with good information. The people that I dealt with were knowledgeable and helped to resolve the problems. So, my experience was very positive. I would rate them as 10 out of 10. I never had any issues.

Control-M has helped us achieve three times faster issue resolution. We have it integrated with ServiceNow, so it tickets automatically. Whereas, in the past, we used to do it manually. We had operators opening tickets, so it speeds up ticket resolution for opening and assigning a ticket. Also, Control-M captures some errors. Sometimes, this helps to troubleshoot any problems. You can set up alerts for jobs that run too long, etc. So, it has a lot of features that we use.

Control-M helped us double or triple our Service Level Operations performance.

CA sent us a proposal and IBM also sent one for Tivoli Workload Scheduler. We saw their presentations and packages, then did some research. We thought Control-M was the best solution based on experience and feedback from others. I had experience on Control-M already. I had been working on it for several years and had a positive experience. The other thing was just ease of use. Tivoli and Unicenter just do not seem as polished. They didn't look as easy to use, especially Tivoli. I think we heard that Tivoli was very clunky and not easy to use.

It was mostly my experience with it. Control-M was easy to use, very stable with no issues, and easy to configure and maintain. Whereas, CA was not as easy to use nor polished. CA also always keeps on buying other companies and incorporating things, so the experience is not as smooth. With Tivoli, we just heard that it was terrible to use and lacked a good interface. We had another Tivoli product from IBM for backups, and it was just terrible.

Give Control-M a chance. If somebody is considering the solution, they should install a demo on their system and use it. It is very easy to use. It has a lot of options and features. BMC is pretty good when it comes to upgrades and implementing new features, so there is always stuff coming in. There are a lot of new options that we haven't even tried.

Of course, you should compare all your options, but Control-M is a good choice. It is probably the best.

In the future, we will probably use Control-M as part of our DevOps automation toolchains and leverage its “as-code” interfaces for developers.

I would rate it as nine out of 10. The reporting is something I would like to see improved. Other than that, there is not much I dislike about it. I work with it every day. I have been working with it for the last dozen years or so. It is an excellent product. It just needs more reporting.

We started to use Control-M in 2019 with the MFT (Managed File Transfer) module. Last year, we also started to use Control-M for SAP jobs.

Our transfer processes with MFT from Control-M, are quicker and safer now because we have implemented a lot of rules. For example, it helps balance jobs. Also, there are workflow capabilities, so that if a job succeeds it can call another job. And in case of failure, it can restart the job and warn us by email or by a Teams message. That kind of warning for the support team means we can address problems before the business complains. These are benefits we did not have before Control-M. Improvements to data transfers via Control-M are on the order of 80 percent.

Issue resolution, with Control-M in place, is about 90 percent faster, because most of the issues are resolved without intervention. It has also helped improve Service Level Operations performance by between 80 and 90 percent.

In terms of automating critical processes with Control-M, it's not only for transfer jobs but we have some applications that need to be restarted every week for performance reasons. Instead of having someone connecting on Sunday to do that, we can do it automatically with Control-M. These are OS jobs and it's very critical for us to restart them.

The kinds of things that Control-M is allowing us to do now that we couldn't do with our homemade solution are in terms of physical operations, the monitoring through the dashboard, and the reporting. With our previous solution we didn't have any reporting, but now we can export reports to PDF and share them with the business. We also have Control-M/Forecast to plan the maintenance of our system and to know which systems and jobs will be impacted during a maintenance period.

The most valuable feature of Control-M is the collaboration. We can all work together on it and have a better view of things with the dashboard, and that's true even for business users. The unified view where you can define, orchestrate, and monitor applications, workflows, and data pipelines is important because we have more than one team working on Control-M. We have a support team, a job-creation team, and a SAP team. We can all work together on it. It avoids anyone from working on his part and not using the latest modifications. In case there is an issue, we know who made the mistake, and we can also roll back the mistake. That is very good.

Our line-of-business personnel use Control-M's web interface. We have tried the mobile application, but we haven't used it enough. The web interface is very good. Previously, a business user would ask us, "What about my file?" Now that we have Control-M, they are up to date on it. The self-service portal is very helpful because it gives them a view of the latest version of the interface and they can consult it without having to ask us every morning about a given operation.

I would like to have a web version of Control-M to replace the client. Currently, our support and jobs-creation teams are using the client and that needs to be installed on a PC. It's very heavy, consuming a lot of resources compared to the web portal. I know that they're trying to improve the client with the latest version, but for me, there hasn't been enough improvement yet. I think their roadmap shows that there will not be a new version next year, due to the crisis. I think the next major version will only come out in two years.

I've been using Control-M for two years.

It's very stable. In the last year, there have only been two issues. One was our fault, due to our configuration. The other was because of the Control-M application. We had to call support to get them to solve it. But overall, it's a very stable application.

The scalability of Control-M is very good.

We plan to expand the jobs Control-M is running, including operating system jobs, and then maybe database jobs such as SQL Server and Oracle. Currently, we have more than 2,100 jobs and we are planning to have 30,000 within two years.

In terms of the number of our employees who are using Control-M, we have about 40 admin users, including on some support teams, our SAP team, and our job-creation team. On the business side, we may have about 15 users. For day-to-day administration of Control-M we need three to five people.

We started with Control-M to replace our file exchange solution, which was a homemade solution. Our needs were growing and growing and our solution was not enough to support them.

For the MFT part, the initial deployment took about four months because we had to convert all our jobs and all our scripts to Control-M. It was not easy because we had a homemade solution, so there was no conversion tool for it. That meant we had to do it manually, with some scripting on our side.

In terms of our deployment strategy, for SAP we started with one SAP system from among the many we have. We started with a complex one, which was Redwood. The version of Redwood we had was not supported by the Control-M importing tool. Again, we had to do it on our side without a conversion tool.

I was the project leader for the implementation of Control-M in our organization. We brought in an external company to help us install the solution. Our experience with that company, to be honest, was not good. We have now changed to a better one. We now work with Ogchee.

We have had a person from Ogchee working with us, full-time, for a few months. He is here to help us and to support the application. But we also worked before with BMC support, and it was okay.

We have definitely seen return on our investment with Control-M. The benefits are very good.

We did not really look at other options because we had some good information from an external partner about Control-M and that is why we went directly to Control-M.

Don't hesitate to use Control-M, because there are a lot of benefits for your everyday work, especially the collaboration, scalability, and the visibility from the tool.

I would rate Control-M a nine out of 10. The one missing point is because the client is not that mature.

The business services that Control-M supports for our organization include everything from finances, marketing, data analysis, big data, data lakes—pretty much everything.

We have it on-prem and we also use it in the cloud. We still have most of our components in the data center right now.

When it comes to data analytics, Control-M helps make sure that as we're ingesting data and running it, that the workflows are kicking off in the correct order, and that we're actually getting the data. It's also making sure we return data to the appropriate business units or partners. It definitely streamlines our data analytics. It has sped things up because we don't have to wait on humans anymore to kick things off.

Our line-of-business personnel use Control-M's web interfaces and it gives them a view, a red-light/green-light dashboard. They can see if things are behind or ahead. It helps them keep track of the stuff that's important to them without having to call other people or put in tickets.

In addition, the use of Control-M as part of our DevOps automation toolchains and leveraging of its “as-code” interfaces for developers has considerably sped up our ability to roll out new applications and application updates. It's also allowed our developers, even when they have one-off projects, to easily use the automation API and Jobs-as-Code to kick those off without having to write that kind of function by hand or find another tool. It has been a big part of our DevOps process.

We have also automated critical processes with Control-M. The top-three are 

1. a number of financial processes
2. data ingestion
3. and what we call partner management. 

Those automations mean we get things done consistently and on time. It also lets us know if we're not going to meet our deadlines and enables us to be proactive instead of reactive.

By using Control-M 20’s Role-Based Administration feature, we have been able to decentralize teams to manage their own application workflow orchestration environments. That's important because it frees up resources. People can get things done more quickly without having to stop what they're doing. And it allows them to focus, instead of constantly being pulled in a thousand directions or having to call in different people for help. It helps eliminate tickets or requests to a Control-M administrator, and that frees up our operations personnel to focus on what's more important for the business. Instead of watching for and answering tickets, they're actually able to be proactive and look for potential bottlenecks or to help people enhance their processes.

Another benefit comes from using Control-M 20's Centralized Connection Profiles. Being able to store all connection profiles in a central database helps with efficiencies, with DevOps initiatives, and it helps with ownership.

The extended capabilities of version 20, especially the web interface, help because we don't have to deploy clients or maintain the clients. It lets pretty much anybody who wants to use it just fire up a web browser and use it. That's the biggest capability of version 20, for us.

Overall, Control-M lets us spot problems more quickly. And in terms of Service Level Operations performance, it helps because we now can be proactive instead of reactive. If we know that we're not going to meet an SLA, we can meet ahead of time instead of having to wait and see.

Among the most valuable features are

• the measuring and monitoring of the SLAs, the service level agreements—they code in recovery actions for when things go wrong
• the single pane of glass enables us to see everything, all the processes, in one place
• the ability to integrate with all sorts of different platforms and services.

It provides a unified view where you can orchestrate and monitor all your application workloads and data pipelines. That's very important because with cloud, software as a service, edge computing, traditional data center, and legacy apps, there are all these environments. If you don't have that single pane of glass or that one place to look at, you're going to invest a lot of time and resources into tracking things down when they go wrong. You really need that single pane of glass to show you what's going on across all your disparate systems, in one location.

We also have Control-M for internal and external file transfers. It's really just a part of our normal, everyday procedures. It makes sure that they happen. It makes sure that we got the files. It makes sure that data has flowed back to the appropriate departments.

They really need to work on improving the web interface, as there are still a lot of bugs. 

Also, the new Helix Control-M version doesn't seem quite ready for prime time for many of us. 

In general, they need to do a lot of work on shoring up their testing and quality assurance. A lot of bugs seem to make it into the product.

I've been using Control-M for about 21 years.

It's a highly stable product. It has to be—it runs your business. It's very mature in that arena.

It's highly scalable, so as your enterprise grows it's very easy to continue adding in agents or to expand out your management platform, with little or no downtime.

We use Control-M for financial applications across the spectrum, including marketing, data analytics, data analysis, and partner management. We continue to grow and as new things come online we're adding them in.

They do a really good job in terms of how they expand the product and keep up with the times. It's very cloud-centric, but at the same time, it can also handle legacy-type stuff. Overall, they've done a very good job on that.

What we had previously were all home-grown solutions. We switched to Control-M to get a grip on our environment, to have the single pane of glass to enable us to monitor and manage everything from one location. And the big thing that Control-M allows us to do now that we could not do previously is to orchestrate workflows across all types of disparate systems.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy to get going, easy to install, easy to create workflows consistently. There wasn't a huge learning curve. We learned as we went, but it was pretty easy to learn the product.

Our deployment took about a month.

The integrated guides and how-to videos in the solution’s web interface, for helping get to full productivity with the solution, are very helpful. People watch them. They need to be a little more in-depth and they need more of them, but what they have is a good start.

We have about 120 people in our company who are actively using Control-M. They range from developers to operations personnel, financial analysts, marketing analysts, and data scientists. We have a team of three for day-to-day administration of Control-M but they do more than just Control-M.

We worked with a partner to deploy Control-M. Our experience with them was very good.

We have definitely seen return on our investment in Control-M, many times over.

It's an expensive product, there's no doubt about it. It's one of those solutions where you're paying upfront to reap the benefits down the road. You're going to spend a lot of money upfront, but the benefits you're going to get out of it are going to quickly pay for it. That's something people don't understand sometimes.

We looked at a few others including IBM's Tivoli and Computer Associates.

The biggest difference is that Control-M is a more mature and growing product. The other ones were very stale. They just didn't seem to be keeping up with the times. Also, Control-M requires a lot less administration than the other products did, and Control-M was a lot easier to learn than the others. The others had a very high learning curve.

Look at Control-M from a high level, not only down to the details. See how it can benefit your company. Most companies have data centers, they use cloud, they use software as a service—they use a mixture. But even if you're 100 percent cloud, Control-M can still benefit you because it is going to give you that vision that you've never had before of what is going on in the company. And it's going to present it to you in a way that business owners and business management can understand. It's also going to allow you to do some amazing things with automation around the automation API and Jobs-as-Code. So instead of having all these siloed systems, it is really going to help you get many things under that one roof.

My biggest advice to anybody looking into this product, or any product like this is, is to do your due diligence and get your training. It's very important to have some sort of education on this going into it. That training could be formal training or it could be help from a Control-M partner for your implementation. You can get the easy stuff out of the product on day one, but to get to the things that are really going to save money and make you say, "Wow," that takes some knowledge.

The biggest thing I have learned from using Control-M is that you never know what you can automate until you try.

My company uses BMC Control-M to manage our applications from SAP and Informatica ETL.

I don't see any area where improvements are needed in the product since the tool has a lot of capabilities. One can opt for either a job-based license or a job execution-based license, which sometimes can be troublesome. If the job count exceeds a limit, you may need to procure additional licenses from BMC. I don't see any issue with the product's capability or functionality apart from the aforementioned issue where improvements are needed.

The price of the product is an area with certain shortcomings that stem from the expensive nature of the product and can be considered for improvement by BMC.

I have been using BMC Control-M for ten years. In my company, we use BMC Control-M Version 9.0.21. My company is a customer of BMC.

It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

It is a highly scalable solution. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

More than 300 users, consisting of batch operators, job schedulers, analysts, and administrators, use BMC Control-M in my company.

In my company, we use the solution daily.

I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I rate the product's initial setup a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is difficult, and ten is easy.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The deployment process of BMC Control-M took less than an hour.

My company had an in-house team to take care of the product's deployment phase.

I rate the solution's price a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one is low or really affordable, and ten is high or really expensive. It is a really expensive tool.

I recommend the solution to those who plan to use it.

I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.

It is used for file transfer, both inbound and outbound, including B2B.

Dashboard and recovery are the features I found most valuable in the solution.

I think that in the latest version, they have already improved. We still have to work on the latest one since we are still installing it. So we have not completed the installation. Post that, I think we'll see what needs improvement.

We have some issues on the SAP side of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer. When I talk about non-SAP and SAP sides, I think with large volumes, one needs to install multiple agents. So that is something which should not be there. But at times, it is recommended by BMC. So, there are some stability issues when it comes to SAP side. The aforementioned details can be considered for improvement.

I have been using BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer for ten years. They released the latest version two days ago, and we are going to upgrade it to the latest version.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

It is a standard pre-requisite that if we grow, then we have to double your CPs and other stuff. So, scalability is not an issue.

Since we are using the enterprise version, there are maybe more than 100 users that are concurrently logged in to the application.

We have used BMC's technical support, and we found it to be great. BMC has very good knowledge articles and other stuff, so that is good.

The initial setup is simple. Last time, it took around one and a half or two and a half hours to get the whole installation and migration done. So, now it can be done in less than one hour. BMC provides an AMIGO plan, and we follow that for deployment.

We handle multiple customers. So, the staff needed for the deployment and maintenance really depends on the number of customers.

I would definitely recommend the solution to those planning to use it since it is good to use.

There are some stability issues when it comes to SAP side, and hence I rate the product a nine out of ten. However, considering the Non-SAP side, I rate the overall product a ten out of ten. So, an average rating of the overall solution would be nine out of ten.

We use Control-M to automate scripts that we use in banking and automotive use cases. These are our two big applications. We have a total of 18 applications running in Control-M now, and we want to move over approximately 13 more.

Control-M is running in a virtual machine.

Before Control-M, we had a lot of applications running under different operating systems, including Windows Server and Linux Server. We had a lot of scripts and a lot of programs that were running on the servers. When we implemented Control-M, we were able to automate a lot of those scripts. We have a lot of bank applications and processes and to this point, we have automated about 30% of the ones that we have to do.

We have automated some of our critical processes in core banking. Many of them are now being handled by Control-M. However, we have not yet finished all of the scripts.

Control-M gives us good visibility of our applications and processes. For example, in the morning we can see the results of all of the scripts, whereas, in the past, we could not do that. Our goal is to move the execution of the scripts from the server to Control-M. At this point, the scripts are controlled from Control-M but the execution is done on the server.

We have four domains in Control-M. We have planning, monitoring, history, and forecast. We do not perform data analytics yet.

Our clients use the web-based interface to interact with Control-M.

When a new team member or a new client wants to use Control-M, we have to install a client on their machine. After that is done, there are three options. The first is called Workload, and it is used for observing or monitoring the workload and execution of the jobs. The second one is called the configuration control manager, and it's for configuration administration. The third is reporting, which is another important one. We use the reporting module to generate our reports that concern the execution of the jobs.

We use Control-M to integrate file transfers with our workflows. It is called Advanced File Transfer (AFT) and is used by our financial team. We have another technology for file transfers but the problem with it is that it provides no transparency. There is no interface to see the transfers between applications. With Control-M, we can monitor the transfer between applications and it's great because we can see everything that happened throughout the day.

AFT allows us to configure actions. For example, if a file transfer does not complete successfully then we can send a notification to the destination about the problem.

Control-M has helped to improve our data transfers because it allows us to monitor the execution of the process. With other technologies, we cannot do that. Also, it allows us to configure the notifications, which is very important for us because it will automatically tell the other team when there is a problem with the transfer.

The most valuable feature is the monitoring, which allows me to see the execution and results of each of the scripts.

Being able to view the history is very important because if we have a problem then that is where we search for the details.

From an administrative perspective, the planning domain is very important when we want to add a new feature or a new script.

The forecast domain is what we used to ensure that the implementation is working and that the configuration is okay.

Compared to similar technologies, AFT takes a lot of time when transferring a large file from server to server.

The history module only contains a maximum of 10 days, but we would like to have access to more. For example, it would be helpful to have 30 days or two months of history available.

There should be more granular control available for monitoring applications and sub-applications. For example, when we want to monitor a job, we can specify the application, but we want to have the option to only specify sub-applications that are related to it. As it is now, all of the sub-applications are monitored.

We implemented Control-M for our clients approximately four years ago.

Control-M has been stable for us since we implemented it, four or five years ago. We have not had any problems with the database, file system, or scheduling component.

The scalability is excellent.

We have about 13 people who work regularly with Control-M. We are all engineers and IT managers, and I am the main administrator. The other administrators are in charge of their specific applications, and they need access to Control-M because they need to see the execution plans for the applications that they are in charge of.

I have worked with BMC technical support and I would rate them a nine out of ten.

They respond very quickly, according to the severity of the problem. Also, the responses that they give are really clear and assist us with finding the problem, as well as the root cause.

I have worked with Dollar Universe and AutoSys in the past, before working with Control-M. I find that overall, Control-M is the best one for several reasons.

First, with Control-M, it's easy for someone to be an administrator. All of the documentation is available online, which is important. The second point is that the interface is easy to use. The third is that the solution is really stable compared to other products, such as AutoSys or Dollar Universe. These solutions were not stable in our environment. Part of the reason was that we had trouble finding any documentation online.

This is an expensive product compared to other solutions, although I think that it is a good one. We are in a good position with licensing, as we can run 10,000 jobs. To this point, we have 3,000 jobs that are running, which gives us room to integrate the remainder of our applications. 

My advice for anybody who is looking to use Control-M is to have a lot of money. It is a good solution but it is expensive compared to others.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.