Control-M Reviews

We use Control-M for managed file transfer in the enterprise manager automating database workflows. We're using Oracle Business Intelligence with a generic database like Microsoft SQL Server. Next year, we plan to use Control-M for AWS Natural and upgrade Control-M to Helix Control-M. We need managed file transfers between our servers in Key West and Orlando. Vast amounts of data are routinely transferred between servers for backup and snapshots. 

We will deploy it on AWS and Azure next year. We will also integrate Control-M with other solutions like Salesforce and COS, which is challenging because COS is a complicated legacy IBM OS. Some of our customers require Control-M to do managed file transfer and also COS conversions between IBM jobs. Anything that involves COS or OS/400 is complicated but doable.

With Managed File Transfer, we gain speed and reliability because a managed transfer continuously checks the CRC of the data packages. That's a God send for those data transfers. Though we are migrating to the cloud, we still use some physical servers for sensitive data from our customers protected with NDAs.

We use Control-M for the maintenance of our Oracle and SQL Server databases. It automates maintenance in packages, including standard procedures on the databases themselves, snapshots, checking integrity, verifying the RDBMS of the databases, etc. It ensures that they aren't clogged, that they run smoothly, and that there aren't any jobs stuck, eating up the performance of the server or any of the CPU cores.

In the past, we had some troubles, and we needed a database admin to keep an eye on it almost 24/7 using the OES. It's essential to ensure everything inside the OES runs smoothly, and there are no stuck jobs or queries eating up table spaces. An admin is still required, but most jobs are now automated. It has had a significant impact on staffing. In the past, we had a couple of DBAs exclusively assigned to Oracle that we were able to reassign to other jobs. 

We reassigned them to other tests and outsourced one to work with our customers. Once we delegated DBA tasks to Control-M for our Oracle databases, we could reassign that DBA as a resource to our client in Puerto Rico. He became a source of income for the company. Also, with time saved by automating all the critical internal business processes, we could dedicate more time and resources to other projects that require human attention. We could devote more resources to projects that advance the company's strategic vision instead of monitoring an Oracle RDBMS 24/7.

If I had to rate how critical Control-M is to our business, I would say it is an eight out of ten. I won't give it a nine because we still rely on older applications, such as Oracle databases, but an orchestrator will always get at least an eight on our book. For speed of process execution, I would say it is a nine out of ten. Previously, it was a four, and now it's a nine.

Control-M is intuitive, and BMC has tutorials for every application to help you with the basics. Once you know what you're doing, everything falls into place. The graphical interface is drag and drop. There are plenty of objects to drag and drop inside. You need to study them, but once you know how it works, it's just dragging and dropping like you are playing with a Lego set. 

You drag two actions to the workspace and connect them to establish a relationship, schedules, and subtasks inside each one of them. It seems complex initially, but it becomes intuitive the longer you use it.

You can almost reach out intuitively into every nook and cranny of the entire UI. It's user-friendly for the initiate, but you could be lost if you've never used an orchestrator or an enterprise-grade software like Control-M. However, Control-M has built-in tutorials that help you with the first steps. The tutorial isn't comprehensive, but at least you will learn the first steps, so you can advance and learn more.

The performance could be better. Control-M Enterprise Manager tends to slow the system down even on a server with a six-core processor and 32 gigabytes of RAM. The console is Java-based, so maybe OpenJDK 16 or 17 would be a performance improvement.

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

The scalability is quite good. The framework lets you start with Control-M Enterprise Manager and add other products as you see fit. We added MFT, then Control-M for databases, and Oracle Business Intelligence. One of our customers added Control-M, including the agent for IBMI and another for Azure.

I rate BMC support a solid nine out of ten. I say nine because I never give a ten to anyone. 

Before Control-M, we had a traditional solution using an FTP server. Even with a T1 line that provided almost gigabyte speed, we still had artifacts during the transfer that corrupted the data. It caused serious problems when transferring 30 gigabytes of a necessary backup overnight that failed on gigabyte 28 because it was corrupted. Still, the mirror server rejected the mage because of corruption when we tried to restore it. 

We had to rely on traditional monitoring tools like SolarWinds and IBM solutions, which are pretty expensive. These tools only monitor, so they're typically not reactive or able to orchestrate the steps of a workflow. They don't follow up on each step inside the workflow, notify you when a step completes, or send alerts when something gets stuck and requires action.

I'm the senior services manager, and overseeing the deployment of Control-M is part of my job. I did not install it, but I supervised the team. It was straightforward because we all got our BMC certification before the deployment. Our team included me and two technicians. We also had a DBA around to integrate the database.

We did everything ourselves with some occasional help from BMC support. We emailed them a couple of times to check something, but so far, everything has gone smoothly. 

We recovered our initial investment in six months and were ready to commit more, so we could recover more. We saw an ROI with Control-M in the first two years because we could take a DBA off monitoring databases and loan them out to another company while saving time by speeding up these processes. 

Control-M gives us a lot of flexibility to automate our time-sensitive and data-critical processes. This is essential for enterprises, but Control-M isn't for everyone. Small and medium-sized businesses can use Control-M, but its power can only be leveraged by large enterprises because of the complexity of their business processes and the sheer size of data they handle. I think enterprise companies are the only ones that see an effective ROI from purchasing a tool like BMC Control-M for automating their business processes.

Small companies that purchase Control-M often cancel the contract after six months because it's too expensive, and they can get the job done using traditional methods. That's okay. It's about the business processes' complexity, depth, and maturity. 

The price is right because of the licensing schema, which is based on nodes and processes. You purchase what you use, no more and no less, and you can grow with time. 

There are few options like Control-M in the market, and the closest competitors are far more expensive.

I rate Control-M a nine out of ten. Control-M is flexible. You can use it in Azure, and they have a generic option for the cloud. You can deploy it in your own private cloud or on other cloud solutions like Kubernetes. You can use Control-M for big data applications like IBM InfoSphere. There's a Control-M solution for almost any situation.

There is so much to learn on the backend of the business processes. Typically when you see a business process, you only see a workflow, like a flow chart, arrows, boxes, etc. However, there's a whole new world under the hood. It's crucial to dig deeper and learn how to improve the processes. It's like you become the mechanic of your own car. The more you understand the engine, the more you can tweak it to get more speed, gas mileage, performance, strength, horsepower, etc. Control-M almost compels you to learn about that.

It's user-friendly, but you need some training. We have a certification from BMC. You need some prior training specifically in Control-M Enterprise Manager to know what you're doing because it's delicate. There are so many ways to customize job creation, automation, monitoring, etc. that you need at least a crash course on creating a job, monitoring, setting up alarms, and building workflows. 

It should take you no more than a week to get the hang of it, and there's BMC University, where you can get free training to use Control-M. Once you know the basics, Control-M practically handles itself. It's intuitive once you figure it out. 

We use it for workload automation and it's the primary application tool that we use. We use the Monitoring domain and the Planning domain daily, as well as tools and Configuration Manager as needed.

Our product support team installs it in our Citrix servers so that people can log in to Citrix, choose the application, and use it. But I, and the team that does the batch scheduling, also have our own local clients installed on our machines.

You can do the same thing in many different ways, but Control-M allows you to identify and improve any gaps in batch processing. It makes people aware of things through notifications and alerts. You want to be on top of things if jobs are not running correctly, are running long, are not executing, or end "not okay." There are various ways to set up having that information sent to the operator or the individual support teams.

Also, the Self Service feature allows end-users to do their own scheduling. That frees up resources like me, and is a huge benefit of Control-M. There are huge possibilities with Control-M for helping to give business users visibility and control over their jobs while freeing up IT personnel. Some companies that I've worked for have used the Self Service a lot more than others, and some places haven't used it at all, which is something I don't quite understand. There's an opportunity to free up your IT resources if you can get your users used to scheduling their own jobs.

Monitoring and planning are critical to my day-to-day work. Monitoring is for the active schedule and Planning is where you make scheduling changes on a more permanent basis. My roles have spanned multiple functions. I've been an operator, where you have to watch the active schedule in the Monitoring domain. I've been a scheduler, where you use Planning and do your work based on scheduling requests. And I've been an admin, where you use Configuration Manager and make sure that the product is installed and behaving properly. All three are equally important.

Control-M is excellent when it comes to building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring production workflows. Those workflows are of very high importance to our operations.

I've never been very successful when researching ways to utilize Batch Impact Manager. It's a tool to set up dummy jobs in your job flow and it's supposed to come back to you and say, "Okay, for this job flow, you are 50 percent complete at a certain point in time."

I've had varying levels of success with it, and it's not because Batch Impact Manager doesn't work. It's just that I don't have the knowledge to make it work. I would like things like Batch Impact Manager to be a little more user-friendly, out-of-the-box.

Also, BMC has a ticketing tool called Remedy, but very few places that I am aware of use it. They use solutions like Jira and ServiceNow. It would be nice if it were easier to use those solutions with Control-M. I don't have any firsthand experience where somebody comes in and says, "Okay, now JIRA and Control-M can communicate with each other. And if you want a failed job to automatically open a Jira ticket, this is how you do it." I don't believe that exists or, if it does, it is not simple.

Another point is that, for a while, they were pushing a Control-M mobile app, but I haven't seen anything about it for a very long time. Maybe it was scrapped. Because I wear multiple hats in my organization, I would love it. I would love to be able to go to a mobile app, log in and see a scheduler, go to a job, and see what it's waiting on. I would be interested in the ability to support things via mobile.

I've worked in IT for 30 years and I have worked with Control-M for more than 12 years. I'm not interested in learning another tool. I'm all-in for Control-M.

The stability is an eight out 10. It's good.

It seems like Control-M can handle just about anything.

Their technical support is okay. Sometimes, just to get them to look at it, you have to run a utility called data collector, and you have to give them all this information just to engage them. That can be burdensome.

Although I haven't been involved in the initial stages of a Control-M implementation, I have contacted BMC's services team. Sometimes they're very responsive and sometimes they're not. They're not terrible, but sometimes it's tough to engage the support team for more general questions. 

But if I'm doing an upgrade or something related to the product itself, they seem to be pretty responsive.

Neutral

I've never had to set up a Control-M environment. But there is a certain level of complexity when you do your upgrade, even though they market it as "upgrade in place." As long as you're on version 9, you can go from 18 to 19 to 20.

 The only question about adding plugins is, "Does it affect our support cost?" I was informed fairly recently that BMC changed its support structure. Instead of a tier, based on the number of the jobs, now they charge based on endpoints.

Before I download a new plugin, I want to make sure that it doesn't add a new endpoint and require us to pay more and not be in compliance with our current support agreement.

There are a lot of schedulers out there. I don't have firsthand experience with many of them, but I know from working in the field, production support, that BMC is at the top.

Using Control-M to manage and orchestrate workloads across our enterprise is critical.

We mostly use Control-M for the data flow and reporting. We also have the monitoring in place to make sure that the business meets the requirements, and there is on-time delivery of reporting and so on.

It helps to meet the SLA related to the information and notification to the required stores. In case there are any failures, we promptly rectify them. It has helped a lot with the business continuity processes without any delays.

We have improved a lot in terms of rectifying on time and based on the SLAs. It is, overall, pretty good. With the network overview, we can see the job flows. We also tell customers how useful the application is so that they avoid using any other job scheduling tool and have their job flows integrated with the Control-M application. We do a monthly talk with different technical teams to make them understand the features and benefits of the Control-M application so that they integrate or migrate to the standalone Control-M application and not use other job scheduling tools.

We have a complete view of the jobs, and the customers also know about the job flow. With the help of the reporting team, we provide them with reports of the job flow. There are detailed diagrams, which are very helpful to know about the job flow. It has been pretty helpful and good.

It allows us to easily ingest and process data from different platforms. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of ease of use.

It is good for creating, monitoring, and ensuring the delivery of files as part of our data pipeline. I would rate it a nine out of ten from this aspect.

It is pretty straightforward to create actionable data. It is simple and precise to know what information needs to be in and how it has to run based on the job.

The File Watcher utility, cyclic jobs, and email alert notification are valuable.

Some of the features are not available. We were about to deploy the REST API, but we had some challenges. We had to use a third-party application. So, it should be improved in terms of integrating REST API jobs. That was something that was lacking. The customer was not that happy in terms of getting the desired output. So, we had to use a third-party application called Hangfire. We would like to have more videos on REST API integration, and we would like to have easy integration with the Control-M application through the REST API.

We've been using it since 2018 or 2019.

Currently, there is not a heavy load of Control-M jobs. There are around 500 jobs, and we have around 30 controlling agents. We are now moving from the Window jobs and getting into using it for other jobs. We are also planning to upgrade to a newer version. So, there would be much more dependency on the Control-M application. 

The client installation does not have that much usage. People are moving to the web-based interface. On average, 10 people use the client, and 20 to 25 people use the web application.

Their support is pretty good. I would rate them a nine out of ten. Sometimes, they take time. I had a couple of issues, which prolonged for more than a month. It was something that I wasn't expecting, but they were not show-stoppers. They should expedite their support. The time delay from the support team and the development team should be worked on.

Positive

I was not involved with its deployment. In terms of maintenance, it is not maintenance heavy. We just happen to follow the best practice of doing a reboot every month and applying the patches.

We have a license till 2024. We are good and satisfied with it.

I would advise others to go for it. It has all the features, and it can meet the requirements of any business. Control-M has matured over the years. It is more feature-rich. It has a better graphical user interface. It is catching up with the latest technology and is going to be cloud-based. YouTube videos and webcasts are helpful for new customers in adopting the application.

We have not used Control-M Python Client and cloud data service integrations with AWS and GCP. We have not yet reached that level in this organization. It is just for basic Windows. In a previous company, we used Python and AWS but not in this organization.

We generally move to a new fix pack or release after almost a year. We just wait until there are some bugs rectified in an existing new fix pack. We are looking forward to upgrading to version 9.0.20 to be able to use other features. I am hoping that the API has been enhanced in that version. Upgrading to this version will also help our users. They can use their web application and deploy the jobs rather than having a dependency on the scheduling team.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. They just need to focus on and provide more videos on the API side.

We use it for our workload automation. We use it as a single pane of automation for our enterprise.

We are currently using three different environments for three different productions. We have production data tasks, and we have multiple different levels spread out. 

We are currently using its most recent version. In terms of deployment models, they have both models. They have an on-prem solution, and they also have a SaaS solution. It just depends on what your company needs. They can take care of you.

Over the past so many years, I have learned that one of the most important features is giving everybody one tool that can do many different types of automation and workflows. That's been invaluable. Instead of having multiple tools for different teams and different platforms, Control-M has become the one-stop-shop for a lot of these automations.

It is very easy to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines with Control-M. It allows us to ingest and process data from different platforms. It could take us anywhere from a day to a week to get a new integration in place. We've taken it upon ourselves to try to introduce that to all of our internal customers as well.

It can orchestrate all our workflows, including file transfers, applications, data sources, data pipelines, and infrastructure with a rich library of plug-ins, which is very important for us. We try to utilize all new plugins that come out. If our company uses it, we try to use that plugin at least somewhere in our infrastructure.

In terms of creating, monitoring, and ensuring delivery of files as part of our data pipeline, it is a recent project, and it is something I've been learning about recently. However, having the ability to set up a job, set up a connection, deploy that job, and automatically have the feedback on where your files are when they've been moved has made life five times easier.

It has had an effect on our organization when creating actionable data. It has decreased the time to resolve dramatically. Everywhere I've worked, having Control-M orchestrate those alerts has been invaluable.

Our internal customers and management really appreciate the ability to be proactive before things really devolve into a problem or a high-severity incident. We're trying to incorporate analytics and proactive notifications as much as possible to decrease our downtime dramatically.

It impacts our business service delivery speed. Within the past few years, we have taken projects that normally would have taken multiple months, but the duration came down to a couple of weeks. So, we've increased our productivity tenfold.

Its impact on the speed of our audit preparation process has been great. With some of the built-in tools and some of the built-in reporting, being able to pull that data at any given moment has aided audit and probably increased our personal response time tenfold. We're able to get reports and audit out to the requesters within a week, if not sooner. Without Control-M, it would typically take us at least a month or so to get that out.

It has dramatically improved our execution times. We're able to get solutions out the door much quicker. A lot of our automations have been built around that, and we're able to get valuable output relatively quickly. When developing a new solution, without having Control-M, we would spin our wheels trying to come up with something that could only do a fraction of what Control-M can do at this point. Especially for a new solution or a new execution, we would be looking at a couple of weeks if not a couple of a month or two to come up with something deliverable. With Control-M, we're able to get that down to a week or two.

Our ability to integrate with many different solutions has been invaluable. The new approach of the automation API and jobs-as-code is also valuable.

The biggest improvement they could have is better QA testing before releases come out the door.

I have been using this solution for about 10 years.

I love it. It is rock solid. It is very stable.

There are no limits. You can easily scale up depending on your workload or whatever you need in a very short time. You can pretty much automate it at that point.

It is being used extensively in the organization. We do have multiple locations, but because we're using a web client, it is hard to say exactly how many end users are using it at this point. It is a company-wide solution. So, we probably have a couple of hundred users at this point.

They're very responsive. I'd rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

I personally have always used Control-M as my primary. I do know that other companies have experimented in the past, but I've always come back to Control-M.

I wasn't involved in the deployment. I always came on a little afterward.

In terms of maintenance, it is relatively maintenance-free besides the patches that come out. They come out pretty and frequently, but when they do, they're pretty comprehensive. Other than that, maintenance is pretty minimal. Because it is low maintenance, our engineering team does the maintenance when required.

We have absolutely seen an ROI. Over the last five years, I've heard we've done price analysis, especially with other tools. We always come out on top with Control-M. It always has the best price-to-performance ratio.

It is critical to our business. I don't know the facts and figures, but from anecdotes and talking to other management and up levels, I can say that it is considered a priceless solution in our environment.

If we no longer had Control-M, a lot of our most important pipelines would fall apart. Workflows would go unnoticed. The automation is so deeply integrated at this point that there's no telling what would break at this point. There may be things that we're not even thinking of.

For the tooling that you get, the licensing is acceptable. It has competitive pricing, especially with all the value that you get out of it.

There are additional costs with some of the additional modules, but they are all electives. Out of the box, you get the standard Control-M experience and the standard license. They're not forcing some of the modules on you. If you decide that you do need them, you can always purchase those separately.

I would advise working with the engineers, reading the documentation, and going into it expecting to set up high availability.

Control-M has been around a while. They're very quick to market, and they're very quick to adapt. At this point, they do have offerings, either on the way or recently released, that can support multiple cloud environments.

We are currently not using the Python Client, but that is on our board, and I do intend on investigating. We are utilizing some parts of the AWS integration.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

We are a large insurance company that uses BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer for batch processing and file transfers.

The batch is running on Linux, and it also has Windows components. Micro Focus is another system that we integrate with BMC Control-M.

It's an excellent method for organizing system change management. We use BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer to script our releases, which is probably the best use of it, but everyone would have a different answer. Because it is adaptable, we do a variety of things with it.

The file transfer feature is certainly useful. 

The most important aspect is the ability to integrate different platforms. 

We can run batches on mainframes, Linux, Windows, and all sorts of strange systems.

It can be difficult to stay on the right side of the licensing structure. Obviously, BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer wants to profit from it, so it's difficult for us and not cheap. 

It's probably more expensive than many of its competitors, but technically, there's really no downside.

They have caught up with most things at the moment; for security, they added SSL a few years ago, which helps a lot, and for file transfer, they will probably have to keep upgrading to add new protocols.

I am familiar with the password vaulting interface; they could probably add something for that because user IDs are a major issue in Control-M. You can now get systems that identify where the user IDs are, and you have to go there, and if you have the appropriate authorization, you can simply select a user ID and use it for the Control-M job. An interface to password vaulting would be useful, but they may already be doing so. I don't want to say this is a big missing piece only to discover that you did it two years ago. 

Password vaulting would be a feature that should be included.

I have been using BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer for 20 years.

We are working with version 9.19, but we are also testing version 9.20, which I believe is the most recent version.

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is very stable. We use it for about 40,000 jobs per day, but I know of sites that run hundreds of thousands of jobs per day on a single Control-M server. 

There is no problem in terms of stability. The only time I've had issues was when we used unusual servers to run the server on, and many years ago there were chips made by Intel called Itanium. That release was extremely buggy, but only about ten companies in the world used it. 

Stability and reliability are not an issue if you stick to the mainstream releases. It has internal high availability, failover capability, and all of these features. It is trustworthy, and it has to be. If it fails, other businesses will cease operations, so it has to be 100% reliable.

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is very scalable.

We have an unusual setup in that we don't allow many users direct access. They must send requests to a small team that will create jobs for them. We only have about seven or eight direct users in the system, but the number of people who rely on it is in the thousands. It is a strange setup. 

Most sites are set up in this manner, with people creating jobs on behalf of the larger community. We also have Control-M Self Service, which is a web-based tool that users can't really do anything with. 

We simply have it set up so that they can only see the jobs as they execute, and that is our approach. Many businesses are reluctant to grant widespread access to Control-M because, while it can be a powerful security tool, it can also be a security risk if many people have it.

We are moving, and MicroStrategy is one of the systems we are integrating with Control-M as well as SAP. SAP users want to start using Control-M, there is nothing special for MicroStrategy, but there is a plugin for SAP that we will install and use in the future. But, it will probably be another year before we get around to fully incorporating it. It would be implemented during the PoC consideration phase.

Technical support is good, but it depends on the situation. At times they restructure and assign you to other countries to communicate with. It's been very good when I've had to talk to people in the UK. 

They have occasionally relocated us to Italy, where some of the technical knowledge may be lacking, but they have good systems. 

They have BMC communities where other users can ask questions and interact. Technical support isn't bad; I'd give it a four because it's extremely helpful. They always do their best.

Positive

It was the very first solution we worked with. We tried a few other options when I first looked at the market 20 years ago. We investigated Tivoli Workload Manager, or TWM, as an IBM product that we didn't think IBM was developing much at the time, but that turned out to be the case. 

There is another product called title software that is a good competitor that we considered, but it wasn't as reliable as Control-M and all of the CA. Broadcom now owns everything.

They have a wide range of solutions in their portfolio, but I've never used any of them. CA-7, which is not a very old mainframe-based solution, could be compared to Control-M if you only had a mainframe, but it is incompatible with Unix and Windows. I have always worked with BMC Control-M and seen other schedulers, but it's always been BMC Control-M. I am trusting the software.

It's a lot easier now; years ago, it wasn't; some of the releases were extremely complicated. They have worked hard to improve that. It can be distributed from a central location, which makes releasing new agents much easier now, and many of the issues that people had with installation have been resolved if you're using mainstream platforms.  It is now a very simple install for Linux and Windows. On the Control-M server, you can run the installation process and choose an internal database supplied by BMC, typically Postgre. That is a much easier process to do now than it was 10, 15, years ago.

For the installation process, I would give it a four out of five, maybe a four and a half out of five. There are always things they can improve on, and sometimes you notice small details that aren't quite right. For an educated user, an easy install would be no problem. It's a simple procedure these days.

You can do the Control-M components in a couple of days, but it's what you've tied it into. Many people create their own scripts and then realize, oh, hang on. To keep up with the new Control-M, we must make changes. Two days for Control-M, but what you've tailored with it, if you're upgrading, obviously if it's a brand new install, then you start from scratch, hopefully with good conventions and standards to apply. However, if it is an upgrade, you may encounter issues where people say, "We hit some scripts on an agent, and now we have to go and figure out exactly what we were doing with those scripts." But that's not the Control-M side of the story; rather, it's what the users have done with it.

If you wanted to install a Control-M survey, you could do it within a day if you were to start from scratch, using all of the defaults. 

When you start doing something different, you run into problems. But if it is simply to perform the standard installation, and you want to take the database that we'll give you, or you can have a medium-sized installation. You keep saying yes. You should be able to complete it in a single day.

I have done a lot of installations over the years. I have sometimes been the third-party consultant who comes to companies to do the installation.

I believe you can do it in-house these days. The last one I did was in-house, but if you didn't have a lot of experience, you might want to find some specialized company to do it for you. 

There are specialist partners who will do this for you, but I believe you should do it yourself because you will have control and will know what to do if someone comes in and asks you how is this configured. You will know because you will be the one who configured it.

We currently have about four people in the team who are responsible for Control-M. It's complicated because one of the guys is retiring, and I'm not sure if he'll be replaced. People looking after, I'd say four is a good number for a Control-M server. There are various components to it, such as Unix administration and database administration. Obviously, we have other people who are specialists in their fields to whom we could go and notify them that something has happened; and ask them to have a look. or to log in to check. 

Four people would be the minimum number of people who would be responsible for a server.

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is expensive.

Because we are part of a company with subsidiaries all over the world, I can only provide an answer for Switzerland. At the moment, we are probably paying around $120,000 per year just for ourselves. But, they are attempting to restructure so that they can offer a global license, because, across Europe, we obviously have about 30 different companies that all have to do the same things.

I speak with my colleague in Spain, who is experiencing the same issues with questions and having to visit the local BMC branch. We are all paying the same amount, but different countries have slightly different prices. In fact, prices can be quite high at times; obviously, Switzerland is not cheap.

Our headquarters are in Germany, and I believe it would be better if they simply forget about everyone doing their own thing, and use this product all over, get a license through Germany and use it globally.

Their pricing is really their weak point. It's pricey. I would give them a three or three and a half out of five for pricing and licensing. 

People do get value out of it, and the work it does quickly pays for itself.

We pay for the file transfer module, which is an additional cost. They are not huge sums; perhaps you pay 20% more for the file transfer module, and you obviously have to host it on the platform. We are also paying for all the ancillary costs, but you have to pay extra Self Service, which is the website, which could be another 20% on top. 

If you said $150,000 for the year, that's about right. We do it per agent rather than per job, which is the difference between the two on-premise models. You can do it per agent or per job, and we only have a few agents, each agent handles a large number of jobs.

If you are starting from scratch, I would strongly recommend the Control-M Matrix, which is BMC's current SaaS solution. It is my understanding that it is a lot less expensive. I haven't used it myself, but based on the prices, it's likely to be nearly half the price of what we currently pay.

That simplifies your life because any upgrades to the Control-M server are handled by BMC. You go to the cloud, and they give you control and a server, and you don't have to worry about upgrades and such.

The disadvantage is that BMC now has your data, and they do not currently have a SaaS solution available in Switzerland. I believe it is only in the United States that things can become complicated, and BMC would then have complete control over your licensing.

They'd be able to see exactly how much you're using because we currently report how much we use. I believe it would work well for BMC because they would see a genuine reflection on usage and could then say, "You should be paying a lot more for what you are doing with the product."

The SaaS solution is called Matrix Control-M. If I were starting from scratch today, that's what I'd look at first, but some people might want to keep it on-premises.

Control-M obviously has agents that will work in the Amazon and whatever cloud, the Google Cloud, but that's a different story.

Where you can have it on-premises but have your agents somewhere in the cloud. That's not a solution I've considered, but I suppose it's becoming more popular.

I would rate BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer a nine out of ten.

Our organization is a bank, and all batch processes are in Control-M. 

We have installed it on a mainframe. It is an on-premise distributed system.

For the bank, Control-M is one of the jewels of the queen. It is the heart of the bank. For batch processes, Control-M is most important. We have Control-M working seven days a week and 24 hours a day. 

All file transfers are managed from Control-M MFT. Some of our clients who are small companies send the data to the bank about their employees' salaries. The bank takes that data and prepares payments for different people in the company. Control-M MFT is used for the information transfer between the bank and Visa, American Express, or Mastercard. All of the information is sent by using file transfer in Control-M.

It has improved our data transfers. It gave us the security and the vision of what is happening with our file transfers.

All of its features are very valuable. We have been working with Control-M for many years. For people who have been working with it, there is no other way. This product is a part of us.

It is very easy to use. Our operators are new people, and they start to work with Control-M from the first day in the bank.

In our bank, all new applications need to be implemented with Control-M. We try to look for the best way to establish communication between both products. One of the new features for us is Application Integrator. It is a very interesting feature because it lets us integrate with those applications that are not included in Control-M. By using Application Integrator, we can easily integrate new technologies. With the help of Application Integrator, we recently integrated with Blue Prism, which is a robotic product. We could integrate such processes into Control-M. Now, we are working with Ansible, and we are putting Ansible automated processes into Control-M.

In general, it is a very good product, and we are very happy with it. It meets all of our expectations.

Although we have used the Smart Tables facility for a long time, today we have had a need to process services that include processes that combine Mainframe and non-mainframe jobs (Windows, SAP, Informatica). An improvement for Control-M EM would be the possibility of creating combined Smart Tables, that is, they include mainframe and non-mainframe jobs so that the work order can be generated with the Unique option. Today, to achieve this we must manage global Conditions with Variables and generating a unique code to pass to the MF tables and not MF. Let me name this feature “Global Smart Tables”.

Another need we have is that Control-M MFT also supports commercial file transfer protocols such as CA-XCOM.

I have been working with this product for more than 30 years. Personally, I have been working with Control-M since 1988. Here, in the bank where I am working, when we started in 1995, the product was on a mainframe.

It is the most stable solution that we have had. It has been working on the mainframe for two years without any problem. It is a very stable product.

We have not had any problem with scalability. The bank has been growing for the last 15 years, and we had no problem with Control-M. Control-M has adapted to our growing architecture. All new applications that we have, such as SAP, Informatica, or databases, are covered by Control-M.

We have about 40,000 processes per day. We also have 100,000 execution per day. All batch processes are integrated into Control-M from different systems, such as Windows, SAP, Informatica, etc. All file transfers between the headquarter and the branches and the external providers are managed from Control-M.

The bank has 6,000 employees. The system and IT teams have about 600 people. We have about 30 people for operations, monitoring, and implementation. In the technology area or system programmer area, we have six people. All of them are using Control-M.

We work around the clock, and we have three teams that work per day. Each team has about 10 people. We have people for Operation Console who are looking at batch processing in terms of whether it is working fine. Four people are there to implement new jobs in Control-M. They are working with the calendars and resources. We have three people to administer the product, and there are other people to administer the jobs on Control-M. 

BMC has very good people. Their support has been excellent. We had very quick replies. Their technicians have always been very friendly, and they have a lot of knowledge of the product.

They always provided a very good solution. When we had a Severity One problem, they call us immediately and solved the problem even on the weekend.

Its initial setup was a long ago. It was very simple. The bank had about 6,000 offices, and it took about eight months to automate the whole batch processing.

At that time, people were not ready to use automated processes. The most difficult thing was to change the mind of the people. When we started with automation, people thought that they will lose their jobs with this kind of tool, and it was very hard to change the mind of the people. Using Control-M was very simple, and it was easy to use Control-M to automate manual jobs. From that stage till now, all new systems are syncing with Control-M, and all new developments are integrated into Control-M.

Initially, we used a partner. At that time, it was New Dimension Software. It became BMC in early 2000. Now, we have a lot of people in the bank with Control-M profiles. When we use any new feature of Control-M, we don't need any partner.

I am the Control-M specialist for technical support in the bank. My job in the bank is to set up all new products.

I have been working with Control-M for 30 years. So, I have seen other products. It is very easy to automate our daily manual jobs. It is not at all complex to set up the product. It is also very easy to teach to another person. It is not complex like other schedulers. It is a very easy tool.

So far, we have only been using its Windows client. We have now started to use its web interface. We are also starting to use the DevOps technology with Control-M.

We have migrated from Control-M 9.18 a month ago. We will start using centralized profiles. We will also start to work with Manage File Transfers (MFT) B2B. It is a new feature that we will start using to improve our customer delivery processes.

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

We use Control-M to provide business services to our customers. The use cases involve Hadoop, a lot of file transfers, and SQL scripts. In our business, automation is used for many things and we use a lot of the Control-M modules. For example, we connect to SAP, with databases, Hadoop, MFT, Informatica, and other technologies.

What we do relates to many different business services in a retail environment.

We have hybrid deployment; over the past two years, we have had a mix of on-premises and cloud-based implementations. Ultimately, we are moving to the cloud. We are using AWS, GCP, and Azure.

The main benefit is that Control-M can work with almost all of the applications that are on the market right now. We work with technologies including Hadoop, Informatica, all kinds of databases, and file transfer with MFT tools. The real potential with Control-M is that it can be used for everything you want.

It is really important that our clients can manage their own application workflow with full autonomy. Our customers are using this capability a lot and it helps because we don't need to be present when they want to perform a simple task. It's better for them because they don't need to wait to ask or to have something changed. They can just do it themselves. Also, it's better for us because we have more time to do other things.

The expanded capabilities in version 2020 for planning and monitoring have had a positive effect on our clients' operations, as well as our own. It saves a lot of time when it comes to developing and implementing things. As a result of saving time, both us and our clients are saving money.

Control-M has definitely helped us to achieve faster issue resolution, although it is difficult for me to estimate how much by. We don't have metrics that are suitable for tracking this kind of thing.

The best part about this product is that it has a lot of features. Control-M doesn't limit us and we can use it for a lot of things.

Control-M is easy to install, use, and maintain. It is easier to work with than other products.

The web interface hosts a lot of videos and webinars and I really appreciate this because I find them very helpful. They have tutorials that explain how to approach the new technologies and explain how things can be done using Control-M. This is something that I use a lot.

The Application Integrator is helpful because not all applications have a module available in Control-M, and we can use this feature to create them.

When it comes to supporting cloud services, Control-M is a bit slow. We are not advancing with the technology because we don't have the modules that can interact or use the new application services provided by the cloud technologies. BMC has been telling me that they are working hard to be more aligned with these new technologies, but they are a bit slow. Consequently, we are having a few issues when it comes to implementing Control-M. Some services that are being offered, such as Databricks, have been a problem.

The documentation is something that needs to be improved. Years ago, the documentation was very good, and I don't understand why but the documentation is no longer as good as it should be. For example, if I need to install or upgrade Control-M Enterprise Manager or Control-M server, the only information that I have in the documentation are things like "Execute this and follow the instructions on the screen".  What it doesn't tell you is what will be needed for the process. For example, you may need to enter a password or select a source, but you won't know what these parameters are in advance.

Also, it is different to find what you are looking for in terms of documentation. For instance, if you visit the Control-M download page, you see several tabs. There is a tab where you can download software and another tab where you can download patches. This is perfect. However, there is another tab for the documentation but there is never anything there.

With any Control-M product, it is hard to find the documentation. The reason for this is that they are moving all of the documentation online, in an HTML format. The problem is that it is hard to download documentation in this format. In particular, if it is a specific part that you need or a certain module, then it would be much easier to have a PDF version like they used to have. Consequently, it is more difficult for us to pass the documentation to our internal teams.

For example, if we are trying to configure a module for Informatica or SAP, it's hard because we don't have PDF documentation. We need to go online but it is difficult because it is very hard to find what you are looking for.

Another area of improvement for Control-M is the version release lifecycle. Prior to 2018, we had the same, main version of Control-M for two or three years. Since 2018, they have been releasing a new version every year. There was a 2018, 2019, and 2020 version. It seems that these new versions are being released in an unfinished state because we are seeing a lot of bugs. Historically, it has been very stable, but from a point between two and three years ago, it has not been so much so. It seems that the problem is that the versions are changing too quickly.

I have been using Control-M for nine years.

There are some limits to scalability in terms of cloud integration. There is some integration with cloud services but it is very simple. It is called the Application Integrator Module. This is a very good feature but the problem is that if we have to interact with cloud services, we need to create all of these modules on our own. We are paying a lot of money for a product where we have to create our own modules, which is not perfect.

It is very good that we have the Application Integrator available but for services that are being used by a lot of companies, we need official support from BMC.

I would rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

We have been dealing with BMC for several years and when you consider the support from a few years ago, the response that we received was more technical and more accurate regarding the problem that we were having.

As it is now, more and more we are seeing that the customer support has to rely on the product development team to resolve the issue. This is because there are a lot of bugs in the product and customer support cannot provide a solution for these. Instead, the problem has to be fixed by development, and then a patch is released to solve the problem.

For this reason, I am rating the support an eight instead of ten.

We have had cases where our clients migrated to Control-M from a competing solution. In fact, we did a migration last year from TWS, the Tivoli Workload Scheduler from IBM, to Control-M using the conversion tool. The tool was very important because it reduced a lot of work.

The problem is that the conversion was not as good as it should be. I estimate that we had to modify 90% of the jobs because the conversion was not good enough. It was still important because it would have taken a lot longer to create all of the jobs from scratch. That said, it was not perfect, at least that was our experience with migrating from TWS.

We were using TWS and another one that is called Visual TOM. It is another product that is similar to Control-M. These are both scheduling products, but Control-M has tons of features that the other ones don't have. They don't have the modules, the plug-ins, or the Automation API. They are stable and they are good, but we can't use them like you use Control-M because Control-M permits us to perform many more things. Unfortunately, with the many more things that you can do, it does introduce more opportunities for failure. However, this is true of any feature-rich solution. The more complex it is, the more prone to error it is.

Control-M is easy to install and maintain. There are not a lot of steps required to upgrade or downgrade from one version to another. With other products that I've been using, it is difficult and complicated to upgrade because there are a lot of confusing steps. But with control-M, you need only follow the onscreen instructions.

The length of time required to deploy depends on the customer. The scope and complexity of the client's requirements dictate the amount of time it will take to complete. For example, we can deploy for a smaller customer in one week. However, for a large retail customer, it could take a month to complete.

We have one client right now, where we are upgrading from Control-M 2018 to 2019, and it is going to take us almost three months to complete. Part of the reason it takes this long is that when you try to upgrade a production environment, it's really difficult to get a window to perform the upgrade or the installation or the modification. That said, it's still easier than many other products.

Pricing varies depending on which components and modules you are using.

My advice for anybody who is considering Control-M is that I recommend it. Although it's not perfect, it is relatively easy to use and maintain.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We install, configure, and deploy Control-M for customers and make it run on-premises from them. After that, the customers take over.

BMC uses partners. They don't sell directly in the Middle East. So, they don't directly install the product and sell it. Instead, they go through partners, like my company.

We, as a company, don't use Control-M, but we sell Control-M to customers. We go onto a customer site, install the product, and configure it per their requirements. Then, we get their feedback and support related project stuff.

From a services perspective, we actively use BIM, which is the affiliate manager. We use the history to see the forecast. When the customer gets Control-M, the affiliate manager comes along with it. 

It is 100% on-prem, primarily because the Helix part of Control-M is not hosted in the Middle East yet. For many customers, there are regulations since the primary customers are banking, insurance, etc., which all require their data to remain within the country.

My customers are primarily banking customers, so they have their end of day processes that happen at night after the bank closes. These processes would involve AML, banking, and end of month payroll-related stuff across multiple organizations.

We do maintenance, project management, and support. Once a project is done, the customer has a support contract through BMC. That is through us. Customers cannot directly get in touch with BMC to open cases. It has to go through a partner. Therefore, we offer first and second line support to the customer.

There is definitely room for improvement. Version 9.0.20 actually comes with a web-based interface, but there are still a lot of things unavailable with it. There will eventually be more inclusions added into the web interface, but there is still a long way to go. 

There is also the automation API, which is a way to interact with Control-M, but it also needs a lot of improvement for other people to understand how to use it.

The documentation isn't really straightforward for the initial setup. It says, "Follow the on-screen instructions." The reason why people read the documentation is to have a heads up of what to expect and what is coming up. However, when you say, "Follow the on-screen instructions," I believe that is inappropriate.

I have been using it for two or three years.

It is very stable. We hardly get calls in respect to issues on Control-M, particularly on version 9.0.19. 9.0.20 is still pretty new in terms of deployments. However, with version 9.0.18. I have had a couple of problems from customers.

You barely need one person for customer maintenance because the system is pretty stable. Of course, if it is version 9.0.18, the number of support cases that come in are more compared to version 9.0.19. We also get information requests from the customer where they might have audit requests or want to enable certain protocols because of security compliance within their organization. In these cases, they reach out to us. 

It is not that we are always involved with the customer. It is not an onsite model. If there is an issue with the product, the person calls. We have 20 customers whom we manage at the moment for BMC. That is just done with three people: an onsite resource and two employees, including myself. The onsite employee is with a telecom vendor within the UAE. His job is monitoring and maintaining the system as well as assisting the customer. He does everything in respect to Control-M at the customer site, e.g., defining jobs, monitoring jobs, executing jobs, and making sure that they are done properly. Another of my colleagues and myself deal with all the other customers from a project and support perspective. It is primarily support because once a project is done, then a customer has support with us. We manage those cases, involving ourselves in those cases. We understand what is required. If we have the information already and know how to do it, we will give them the procedure, etc. If we cannot do it, we get in touch with BMC to get the relevant answers.

I have not had an issue with scalability per se. If there is any kind of resource crunch, the customer just needs to add resources. If it is a memory usage, then add memory to the virtual machine and you are good to go. 

You can have jobs at multiple customer sites. For that, there is a different level of scalability altogether from an infrastructure perspective.

BMC support is good. I would give them eight or nine out of 10, most of the time. They reply quickly, even before the actual SLA time. However, in certain worst case scenarios, I would give them a seven out of 10.

Most of the time, the integrated guide immediately opens up the relevant page. You can get the necessary information from that. The videos are really basic. For example, with version 9.0.20, there are videos that come up by default in many places as part of the help page, which is ideal for beginners. Whereas, at my level of implementation, we are looking for more detailed explicit knowledge for a specific scenario. For beginners, the web help is more than enough, if a person is patient enough to go through it.

Personally, I have worked previously with a competitive product: Automic One Automation Platform. I was working with Broadcom earlier, doing a similar profile, where my portfolio was dealing with retail support and projects. So, I was deploying Atomic solutions. After that solution, I made a change and moved to BMC, as a partner. I have been working with Control-M ever since. Therefore, I have exposure with other automation products.

The initial setup is straightforward.

If all the prerequisites are ready, a full-fledged setup for a single system would take 15 to 20 minutes to deploy.

Normally, we deploy with high availability so it has an uninterrupted service, even if a server goes down.

Once the PO is all done for a project, we have a pre-kickoff with our company and the customer. We basically run them through the prerequisites and understand their priorities. For example, some customers are more inclined towards Windows and others are more inclined towards Linux. Most of them would like to have the DR environment in the setup, meaning it would be the primary site with two servers for high availability and a DR site with two servers. All these technicalities for the infrastructure and environment would be run by the customer along with the prerequisites. 

From a project perspective, we ideally implement the process flow. So, we understand their documentation. Then, we have an actual analysis and design phase, where we sit down with the customer stakeholders and get their requirements in terms of the actual process flows early on. Until then, we just know at a high level that these are the number of database jobs that will run on Control-M. We don't have explicit details at the analysis and design phase. We literally sit with them and go through their documentation, understand what they want to implement on Control-M, and how we can make it better or include notifications. After this, we start off with the installation. Based on the outcome of the analysis and design, we implement the process flows.

The annual licensing within BMC Control-M is on a per task basis. Three- and five-year contracts are also offered. The customer usually buys a bundle of tasks, e.g., 5,000 tasks, then my team configures Control-M for their usage. 

It is a good, stable solution. It does depend on what exactly you are implementing, because automation solutions are primarily back-end solutions, e.g., back-end processes and batch processes, which can be executed on Control-M. However, sometimes customers get back-end solutions confused with RPA, which is front-end automation. When customers decide that they want to use some kind of an automation tool, they should really understand what their process flows actually need. There is a handshake that can be given between the front-end and back-end, but there are some customers who come to us wanting to buy Control-M, but they are actually looking for an RPA solution because their operations are front-end.

I would rate Control-M as eight or nine out of 10 in terms of stability and features.

We use it as a scheduling tool. We use it for infrastructure backups and running scheduled tasks, but nothing in regards to data analytics.

It is an infrastructure process behind the scenes: custom backups and custom file migrations.

We leverage Control-M for backups. That would be a critical process that we have integrated. This allows teams that rely on the backups to have a single pane of glass through the dashboard to determine if their backup is successful. It allows email alerts or triggers, if something fails or we need to do manual intervention.

My organization has been able to script scheduled jobs in Control-M to potentially replace legacy products that are at end of life or end of service. The previous backup applications that were being used for specific files, folders, or applications were no longer being supported, therefore being able to use Control-M to replace that has been very valuable.

We rely on Control-M for automation. Anything that would have been a manual effort previously or legacy, Control-M has been able to replace.

The scheduler allows you to pretty much run anything from anywhere. It is very convenient. The sensor reporting that the scheduler gives you can monitor hundreds of jobs that could potentially be running in a given hour.

All the scheduled tasks are available in a dashboard or workflow view that different teams leverage. This is important and great. Having the ability to have a dashboard or workflow allows for easier troubleshooting. We also have alerting set up through email triggers, which are very helpful.

We leverage it for file transfer. We don't necessarily have application workflows dependent on those, but we do have Control-M for the migration of files. The visibility of a successful transfer is very useful, e.g., the ability to report on that or view whether that job succeeded or failed in the dashboard. You have an alert that would trigger on a failure. So, failure is automated. The Control-M job could retry that file migration a number of times based on logic that you have programmed into the job, and having to avoid manual intervention is useful.

The alerts are helpful and can contribute to faster issue resolution in the event of an issue.

The infrastructure updates could use improvement. Some of the previous updates that we have run to get to version nineteen were troublesome. So, a more seamless upgrade path for the infrastructure components would be useful. I don't know if they have replaced that in version 20 or if version 20 has an easier path, but I would like to see the upgrade from one version to the next version be a little smoother.

I have been using it for about five years.

The platform has been great. I don't think we have had any downtime besides our upgrade process.

The scheduling process has been able to handle almost everything that we have asked it to do. It seems to be able to run pretty much anything from anywhere within our environment.

This solution was a new integration/installation done before my involvement.

The application was a part of the infrastructure when I joined. We have been able to add automations for components that were otherwise manual. 

The upgrades are a bit complex. The last time we did an upgrade, it took several hours.

The upgrade was planned. We ran into an issue, then we had to reach out to support. They were quick to respond, but the resolution did take several hours. They did a good job. The issue was resolved in a timely manner during our upgrade window. Their service was an eight or nine out of 10, as far as issue resolution. To be a 10 out of 10, I would like something prescheduled. If we could have had support personnel available for the upgrade procedure, it would have been helpful. So, it was just the time element.

The product is helpful for its automation components.

It is worth evaluating.

Control-M is mainly an infrastructure tool that we use for scheduled tasks. The IT teams and most of the operations teams are the ones who use it. I would estimate about 10 people, but the management of the application is centralized.

The big lesson learnt: Reach out to support when using the product and do something that you could reimagine.

We don't have any data analytics in Control-M.

We don't have developer integration with Control-M at this point.

Control-M is doing a fantastic job for what we use it for. The product is a nine out of 10.

Control-M is the primary tool used in our department as an interface between desk jobs and SAP. I create and monitor the jobs in Control-M and that ties into SAP.

At this point, we are using it as a batch scheduler, which is primarily used for SAP. We use it for everything financial, like payroll, because SAP is our primary ERP.

Our system administrator uses Control-M when he is scheduling batch jobs. 

Our SAP jobs are fairly critical, because there are a lot of collections from a financial aspect coming through on a daily basis. From that regard, Control-M is fairly critical for us. We need to know when and if jobs fail since that has an impact on the collection of money.

We used to have multiple shifts of people sitting there and monitoring our jobs until the introduction of Control-M. So, with Control-M, we have been able to reduce the human capital, in regards to shift workers. Therefore, we are saving money from a cost perspective, in this regard, by about 25%. We have had a 50% reduction in staff. The ability to monitor and be notified, when our jobs have on time completion or fail, has had a big impact on the company.

It is more about the notification tools and its ability interface with SAP. It has the ability to notify people about jobs and schedule based on prerequisites, because this is not something that we can actually do within SAP. For example, if one job is dependent on another job completing, SAP doesn't have this capability. This is why we went with Control-M. 

It is very simple to use. I have only been in this position for four years, but it was really easy for me to pick up and monitor Control-M.

In the client, it provides a unified view for me. I can alter the view that I want to see jobs and conditions. This is nice to have. The fact that you can see everything in one space is very important, especially these days where everything is about data and monitoring as well as because we are working from home on a global basis. So, in real-time, I can monitor jobs, failures, or anything that might be stuck. The real-time monitoring and the ability to see everything in one place is important for us because we operate 24/7.

I use the mobile and web interface. I started off with the desktop client, and there are some slight differences in the interface between the mobile, web interface, and desktop client. This is a nice feature, because when I am on the road or going for a walk, then I have my mobile with me and I can get notifications if I need to run anything. Then, I can just log on from there.

All the modules within Control-M can interface with SAP.

Everybody's biggest gripe is the reporting capability option. It is a gripe because there is a lot of information in Control-M, but the solution doesn't have a good reporting tool to extract that information. Now, if you want all that information, you need to rely on another third-party BI tool to extract the information out of Control-M.

Two or three years ago, I was at a seminar where they said that they were looking at improving the reporting. However, from that time until now, there hasn't been much of a change in the reporting capabilities. Especially in today's day and age, where accessing data has become very important, this is something that they should be looking at.

We are using Commvault as our backup application. Currently, there is no integration between Control-M and Commvault. 

I have been in my position as an operator for four years. The company has had Control-M for over 20 years. 

Over the last three upgrades, Control-M has improved quite a bit. When I joined our department, Control-M didn't have a good reputation because it was always falling over. All our issues were addressed by Control-M with their upgrades. 

In the latest version, we find it has been extremely stable. We haven't had many failures as far as the program is concerned.

Generally, we don't interact directly with BMC because we have a service provider that we use, Blue Turtle. So, we interact with Control-M via Blue Turtle for any queries that we are having.

The initial setup was done before I joined the company.

We have a system administrator who applies our Control-M updates.

Control-M has helped us improve Service Level Operations performance. It helped us from the monitoring perspective. Now, we are able to control real-time monitoring and real-time notification of any failures that would occur within the system. Because we run it 24/7, we have notifications for any failures that have been setup. They will come through on our mobiles, and in that regard, Control-M has helped us.

Unfortunately, I can't compare it to anything else.

It just works. Control-M is very good. You only need to look at something else when an application gives you problems. However, in our environment, it is stable and just works. We haven't even bothered looking at anything else.

I can highly recommend it. It is very easy to learn. It is very stable. It has multiple interfaces, e.g., you can use it on your desktop, access it via the web interface, or access it on a mobile. The support that you get is actually quite good. It is a tool that I highly recommend. For what we require it to do, it does exactly that and more.

We have a system administrator, a chief scheduler, who is my supervisor, and two operators, including me. The four of us are power users who have scheduling capabilities in Control-M. We have different people on our BI team. Overall, 10 people have various levels of access.

We have tried Control-M as part of your DevOps automation toolchains. We are only getting into DevOps now as a company. We are still playing around with it. Currently, we are still fairly separate as far as DevOps is concerned. My department is basically the middleman between dev and operations. Whatever dev wants, we will create those jobs and test them. Once they want to send them into production, they let us know, and it then goes to operations. We are the center for those types of things.

Because we went into lockdown and the financial impact of the lockdown, projects were placed on hold. This year, they were& still on hold. Probably sometime next year, we will be starting on those projects again.

I would rate Control-M as eight out of 10 because the reporting needs improvement.