Control-M Reviews

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.

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.

We are using the solution for maintaining the infrastructure jobs like database Genesys and NICE. All jobs have been integrated into a single frame and a BMC Control-M readme page. Basically, we create jobs and modify the jobs. We have to analyze if any jobs fail. We settle the issues so that the jobs are up to date and should run.

The solution can communicate with the cluster. It can redirect any alarms or failures, and we remediate those actions.

We create new job scenarios and workarounds. We have special access to incidents and monitor controller operations. 

The solution is good in terms of working with other products. The integration is useful. 

Once you understand the solution, the initial setup isn't too bad. 

The solution is stable. 

It's scalable. 

We need the updates to be able to maintain interoperability. We still want to be able to verify testing in production and the environment and want upgrades to go smoothly so as not to disrupt our applications. The more seamless it can be, the better remediation will go. 

We'd like it to be easier to maintain the administrative side. Transferring files should be easier. There are a lot of dependencies. We'd also like there to be less space consumption.

There's a bit of a learning curve for new users.

When we pull job applications, if we configure multiple tenants under multiple environments with a single frame while we are logging into the applications, it sometimes freezes and takes too much time. 

I've used the solution for about one year.

From what I have seen so far, it is stable and reliable. 

We do have frequent version upgrades and maintenance and therefore haven't seen many issues.

It's a scalable product. I'd rate it eight out of ten in the ability to scale. 

We have 11 people on our team and about four people who handle administration and maintenance tasks. We're in four regions: Australia, Singapore, India and New Zealand. In these regions, there are two configured clusters - one in Australia and one in New Zealand. 

We have an administrative team that has the privilege of raising technical support. We will do the Genesys part, however, for BMC, they run the people. They will take care of coordination with the vendor and the business unit.

We use a lot of different solutions, including Genesys, NICE, Control-M ESPL, WFM, and workforce management. All are interoperable.

The company has used this solution for about seven years, and I have only been around for one. I'm not sure why they first initiated usage.

The initial setup is easy once you have some experience. It can be somewhat difficult otherwise. 

We have four people that are able to handle maintenance tasks.  

Once our teams have tested and validated the scenarios are working fine, then they will move from Genesys into services. Once Genesys services have been integrated, Genesys engineers will come and will monitor everyday operations for Control-M. If they identify any files or any jobs that have instability, they'll look for a permanent fix.

We are mediators between the vendor and customers. 

We are using around version nine. I'm not sure of the exact version number. 

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. I do need more time with the product. However, I haven't seen the product causing many issues. It's been sustainable, and we've liked having all operations in one single cluster.

We mainly use Control-M for integration in cloud environments like GCP and AWS. I'm an electrical engineer who mainly uses Control-M to access the files, documents, and data I need.

Control-M ensures that our files are secure and the data pipeline is accessible. It helps. It also allows us to create and monitor data while keeping it secure.

Control-M is critical to our business because we couldn't remotely access our files on the cloud without it. It makes our work easy when there's an issue in our admission sector. I would say it has been a significant help.

The web interface is handy. It's easy to use, and Control-M provides you with the necessary materials to understand the features and perform various tasks.

The interface is user-friendly. I had no prior experience, but I found it easy to work with. I had to review lots of documentation, but it's not difficult to navigate the different applications on it.

Creating and automating data pipelines is a bit difficult for a new user because some of the documentation isn't available. The documentation could be improved, and I'd also like to see automatic upgrades.

I was recently hired at this company, so I've been using Control-M for over a month now.

Control-M is stable. That's one reason the company chose them.

Control-M is scalable.

I rate Control-M eight out of ten. I have contacted them to help me understand how different things work in Control-M.

Positive

I rate Control-M eight out of ten. It's a solid application, and the graphical user interface is intuitive. Control-M can be used for different applications with various parameters.

I believe that the API should be upgraded with security control from the DM. There is Currently no security for the app API solution.

I have been using the solution for more than 10 years.

The solution is stable. I can say that in the previous version there was a problem. However, it is a stable solution.

The scalability of this solution is very good.  The current solution is used wide spread in my company, but I don't have any plans to expand.

I rate customer service and support a ten because it is the greatest.

Positive

I used a different solution called Computer Associates. I switched because my client switched to that solution. I never went against the solution or suggested to switch over again, because I like BMC.

The solution is complex, but it is very easy to administrate all the components from this solution.

The administration is currently done by two people. 

It pays for itself. In the last two years, I switched for mainframe to distribute systems. 

I switched to this solution within the last year. I switched from the servers payment package to the job payment package, and it is very expensive. 

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

The solution is mostly used for scheduling batches and file transfers.

The GUI is good if I'm comparing it to other scheduling products. All the add-ons are very useful, including the MFT databases, SAP plugins, and so on.

The cost of the license could be improved. 

I'd like to see MFT included as part of the overall product and not a cost add-on as AFT used to be included and they stopped supporting that and now have come up with MFT and you now have to pay for it separately.

I've been using the solution since 1998. It's been a while. 

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

I've used the solution in small sites and sites that run hundreds of thousands of jobs a day. It's pretty scalable. We have about 50 users, including developers and platform engineers, using this current iteration. The client is planning to increase the usage and the new licenses will be scaled accordingly.

Technical support has been very good. We are satisfied with the level of support.

Positive

I've worked with different clients and used different solutions. 

In terms of the ease of the initial setup, I'd say it depends on the use case, however, it can be quite complex, especially the on-prem version.

I'd rate the process a four out of five in terms of complexity.

We were able to deploy it within a month.

I am a consultant, so I can handle the initial setup myself.

The solution is a bit expensive. My understanding is that they offer yearly licenses, however, as a consultant, I don't directly deal with pricing. 

While the solution is currently on-premise, we are moving to the Helix Control-M on the cloud.

It's an excellent product. It's the best scheduling system out there, so I would recommend it.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.