Control-M Reviews

Control-M manages pretty much everything in our hemisphere, helping us meet our financial regulatory obligations, file transfers, running scripts, PowerShell, and SQL, making it critical to our day-to-day operations.

Control-M supports our DataOps and DevOps initiatives by providing an avenue for our DevOps teams to problem-solve in an easy way, giving them a platform to build on rather than having to start from scratch.

The measurable benefits or improvements we've achieved with Control-M are critical in the finance industry, as it keeps us on target with all regulatory requirements. Without Control-M, I don't know where we'd be, and if we shut it off, the business would probably run for about six hours before we faced serious issues, highlighting its role as a key component to our success.

Control-M has definitely enabled new capabilities and business processes that weren't possible before, allowing us to go to other departments and problem-solve for them, eliminating manual tasks that have been done for years. Departments now benefit from not even needing to look back at whether a task is being done since the information is readily available, providing them more time in their day for productivity and enhancing life for our customers.

Control-M is a great product already, but everything can do with a bit of improvement. Personally, I'd like to see a little bit more color in the web interface, and in terms of its technical ability, the one thing I would be critical about is a bit more user-friendliness with the reports and the way we input information into it.

I've been working with Control-M for three years.

Once we have tested things and gotten them into play, during the three years that I've been working with Control-M, I've encountered only one problem, and BMC's support has been quite good, allowing us to solve that issue quickly and easily.

Once we have tested things and gotten them into play, during the three years that I've been working with Control-M, I've encountered only one problem, and BMC's support has been quite good, allowing us to solve that issue quickly and easily.

Neutral

The biggest return on investment from using Control-M, from my point of view, is the ease of use and the time it gives our employees back in their day to be more productive.

I would give Control-M a very good rating in building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring workflows. It is pretty easy to use, and we have taken people without any type of formal training and been able to get them into using Control-M fully as a scheduler within weeks, proving its ease of use. In terms of its use for scheduling and building, it provides options, and it comes back to having flexibility, which is appreciated by anyone who has worked in the build area. With all the plug-in options and various job types that you can create, it increases the flexibility and the avenues available for using Control-M as a solution.

I've not had much interaction with licensing. In terms of costs, I think in life you have to pay for what you want, and generally, if you want quality, you've got to pay for it, but in my limited knowledge of pricing outside of Control-M and BMC, I think it is competitive, recognizing there's not a lot out there like Control-M, making it difficult to determine what the price should be as it is a critical piece of work worth its value. I would rate this product an 8.5 out of 10.

On-premises

Other

It is a job scheduler. It is used for scheduling jobs.

It is useful for any sequence of jobs that are complicated, such as Job A can't run after Job B, but if Job C hasn't run, you can't run Job B. Building that logic into a script is almost impossible. Control-M solves that problem. Normally, in large banks, there are many different dependencies. It helps with dependency mapping.

Banks need to bring the branches online at seven o'clock in the morning, so you have to finish your batch processing by the time you bring the branches online. Typically, if you've got a big outage in the middle of the night, it would take hours to fix, which means you will run late, and your backups and all other jobs will not be completed by the time your branches open their doors. Control-M can manage that for you. It can make some smart predictions and change the workflow dynamically so that businesses can run with predictability every night.

It keeps the run times of all jobs. If you need an SLA to complete a particular suite of jobs by a particular time, for example, 2 AM, it can provide the historical average run times of each job. It can help predict or forward plan to see what time it's going to finish those particular jobs. It can do predictive analysis, so if it's not going to finish by 2 AM, it can warn you that it's not going to finish by 2 AM. You can then build in some actions. Some of them may be less important. You can omit those for the night to save time.

A large bank in South Africa would have more than one million jobs to be run each and every night. If something goes wrong in the middle of a million jobs, it can be very complicated if you're managing that via scripts or manually. Control-M solves that problem.

It has a graphic representation of the job flow. It has a very nice GUI to help you understand the sequence of events. On the GUI, if a job is green, it's running or it's completed. If a job is red, there's a problem. It uses alerting and color coding to assist the operator.

Control-M is the number one leading product in the world. What they've done about scheduling, other people are still trying to figure out, so it's difficult for me to propose anything new. There is not so much AI at this point in time, but I guess it's coming. However, predictive analysis is built into it.

I have been using this solution for 20 years.

There are no complaints regarding stability.

There are no complaints regarding scalability. I sell it to most of the large enterprises, but it's also applicable to medium enterprises.

They are very good because this is a tool that requires 24/7 support. If something fails at 3 AM in the morning, you need to fix it and get it back up and working really quickly. You can't afford to have the tool down for long.

Positive

It is very simple as long as you know the prerequisites. 

It's worth the money. It is cost-effective because you need fewer things. It has a high level of automation. Staff can go home at five o'clock. You can run a million batch jobs or tasks at night when all of your highly skilled people are at home sleeping. When your staff comes in the next morning, all of that work is completed, and the business is ready for the next day

It depends. It's packaged in such a way that you can buy the base model without all of the fancy stuff. You can try and keep your price similar to competitors. I guess it's natural throughout the world. It doesn't matter whether you're buying cell phones or something else. The best cell phone will always be more expensive.

There are other solutions, but the difference is that Control-M has constantly undergone development. Each and every year, many improvements have been coming out. The GUI is one example. Often, people think about job scheduling as something you did in the 1970s or 1980s. You don't do that anymore. A lot of the competitor tools are legacy. They're kind of locked in. That's how they work. They're not trying to evolve. We used to talk about job scheduling many years ago, but now, it is orchestration. There are fewer tools that can do proper orchestration.

The fact that it has been in the top right-hand quadrant for 20 years tells you everything about the tool.

I would rate Control-M a nine out of ten. I have been a reseller of the tool for 20 years. I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't believe in the tool, and I didn't like it a lot. I am proud to say almost all of the banks in South Africa are using it. That speaks for itself.

Control-M is a scheduling tool that I have been using for the last three years. Earlier I used Autosys as a primary scheduling tool. When I started Control-M, it was a new experience because Autosys was over the cloud and we used to log in to the browser. Control-M is specifically for the application where we are using it now. The good thing is that there are so many connectors available.

Although I have one year of Autosys experience, Control-M presents a vast opportunity for us as a developer. Currently, I am in a data warehousing project where all the tools are legacy tools such as Informatica, SalesScript, Control-M, and database. When we are moving to the cloud, Control-M is still valid and relevant. We are transferring our data to the cloud and using Control-M as a scheduler. We are not using native cloud scheduler to date because all the developers here are accustomed to it.

We are almost using around 60 to 70% of the features. Control-M is providing us with so much capability to use during our daily problem-solving.

The good thing is that there are so many connectors available. Control-M provides lots of features, and we are almost using around 60 to 70% of them. Control-M is providing us with so much capability to use during our daily problem-solving.

When I joined this project and was very new to Control-M, there was one problem that even the seniors were facing sometimes. Suppose you are using Informatica; there are lots of Informatica developers in the market or some other tools that are very known to everyone. Even though Control-M is used by lots of people, the documentation in the beginning was very hard to search for on Google. This is why we had to reach out to people who were experienced, and it was a tough job for us because a few functionalities are not properly written in the documentation.

Another area of improvement is related to multiple versions of Control-M being used. In dev, one version exists, and in production, one version exists. In production, the stable version is used. Sometimes when we change over, there are multiple domains in Control-M such as Planning, Monitoring, History, and Forecast Tools. When we hop from one domain to another, sometimes we open a job, and the detail dialog box or detail window is not able to open.

Some features which are hidden are not properly documented in Control-M itself, or maybe documented but not properly given or described with examples. This is a problem. Sometimes we are forced to connect to senior developers who have used it for five to six years or more to learn about it.

I have been using Control-M for the last three years.

There is no maintenance on my end. In the last three years, I have seen two upgrades that were done by the admin team. Control-M is using the new versions, and as a developer, I am using it.

Control-M processes about 10,000 jobs starting every day in our production environment, and adding new jobs is very simple. We don't feel any pressure on Control-M because it is processing multiple jobs in parallel.

Regarding contacting technical support about Control-M, we tried, but at that time, we didn't get any response. We reached out to our client head, described our problem, and received assistance.

As a developer, I created an account in the BMC community to get help support. We post there nearly because sometimes we need solutions very quickly, and we don't have time to connect with the guys in the Control-M help desk.

Neutral

Earlier I used Autosys as a primary scheduling tool. When I started Control-M, it was a new experience because Autosys was over the cloud.

Regarding the initial installation and setup of Control-M, I still have not installed it. I need to connect with one of my friends who are working in the ops team, as I am in the developer team. We never install Control-M here in this project.

I need to connect with one of my friends working in the ops team, as I am in the developer team. They have the access to install, uninstall, or configure anything.

Regarding pricing, I cannot comment. As a developer, this is not in my hands, and it was decided by the client.

If Control-M is selling their product to new customers who have never used anything, then who will support the new customer? The customer may not have the senior engineer who has used Control-M earlier, so the documentation matters. Control-M can improve this in the way that others have; for example, Databricks, Google Cloud, and Azure have so much documentation.

Whatever we wanted, we have it. Control-M is not executing anything; it is just a scheduler. It schedules an Informatica job, and Informatica is running on its operating system, managing all the logs, and showing us that the job is completed. I have not seen any lagging. This can be answered by the ops team better because as a developer, I own a few applications, and when they start and end, my duty is done. Overall, I would give Control-M a rating of eight out of ten.

On-premises

Other

My use case for Control-M is that it's a job scheduler for some jobs regarding data warehouse jobs and billing tasks for a telecommunication company, mainly monitoring jobs.

The best features of Control-M that I most appreciate are the integration and unification of different systems, such as BMC Remedy, integration with alerting systems, and the unification for the dashboard—something akin to one dashboard to monitor everything, which is very good. It can communicate with different platforms such as cloud, different systems, and OSes. I also appreciate the visualization; when we are designing a tree, a job tree, the option to visualize the dependencies and the mapping is very user-friendly.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization, particularly in the flexibility it offers in scheduling jobs. It has a nice feature called Calendar Integration that integrates with the company calendar to allow for the holidays and special events regarding the organization, not only the public calendar, but specifically for the organization.

There are some areas in Control-M that have room for improvement, particularly some constraints regarding the scripts, such as limitations in how they can be executed and integrated; it's not the normal scripting way in some cases. It's not in all cases, but in some cases, there are limitations and constraints in running the scripts. 

Additionally, Control-M requires some hardware resources in terms of system requirements; it consumes some hardware resources.

I have been using Control-M for about five years or more than five years.

The stability of Control-M gets a nine from me; although we faced one issue during this year regarding its stability, nine is good for it.

Scalability for Control-M is good; I would rate it an eight due to the high license cost, but it's scalable.

I would rate the technical support for Control-M a nine.

Positive

I have seen a return on investment with Control-M; we have the real-time alert feature. Our administrators get alerts for any job failures or emails for any issues, which saves our business. We also have reporting tools embedded in Control-M to generate daily reports and keep historical data. All of this handles our job, mainly the monitoring and automation for the scheduling. That's why we are using it.

My thoughts on the pricing of Control-M are that the cost of the license is very high. You have to implement some cost-saving measures, such as cleaning up jobs that are not required anymore on a monthly basis, in order to control the license, as the license is very costly. 

Additionally, there's a dependency on training; on a yearly basis, or whenever there's a new version, we need to schedule training and an official training from an accredited course center or from BMC itself, which is very costly.

I haven't dealt with other solutions or vendors on the market, but I can say Control-M is better than good when it comes to automation.

There is a good feature about the drag-and-drop; we can easily create and modify jobs with drag-and-drop in the interface, which makes it easier and user-friendly. BMC is a good strategic partner; they are helping us in mapping out our migration strategy, and we have a team from their side that supports us in our job. They know our case and they are specialized in our system, following up on our system.

I recommend Control-M to other users because it's user-friendly, it has a unified dashboard, and it's easy to schedule and use. However, there are certain limitations, especially for larger organizations, to afford the cost of the license and the cost of training. For a small organization, I wouldn't recommend it, as it would be very costly for them.

I would rate Control-M an eight out of ten, considering I have some concerns about the cost and the training, which is also related to cost. 

Hybrid Cloud

Control-M serves as our main business use case for business application batch job scheduling. Control-M is not a user-interacted system; it is a batch scheduling system where our applications interact with Control-M rather than users. We do not use Control-M as a DevOps tool, but we utilize it for all our applications, which are batch-based applications. Control-M orchestrates workloads across multiple environments. Control-M is handling complex data pipelines and analytics processes effectively.

The features of Control-M that I prefer most are Control-M/EM, Control-M/Server, and Control-M/Agent, which make up the Control-M batch scheduling system.

Control-M is easy to use because our key application is a batch-based application, so Control-M performs the job for us by handling all the automation and related tasks.

The measurable benefits my company has achieved with Control-M include improved SLA and reduced errors, as manual batch job runs lead to numerous errors and failure to meet the SLA.

Since we have been using Control-M from day one for batch scheduling, we do not have a percentage showing improvement because we have not used manual scheduling at all.

Regarding AI or automation, we would appreciate the opportunity to explore the AI functionalities because the application we are currently using does not support AI. It would be beneficial in the future if Control-M were to have AI capabilities.

I have been using Control-M for around eighteen years.

Control-M is a stable product stability-wise, and we do not encounter many issues. The only problem occurred when we upgraded to the latest version, which resulted in CPU spikes in Java, and this was resolved with support and a patch.

The support for that issue was adequate. We called support and eventually received a solution after reaching out multiple times, and the issue is now fixed.

Control-M's scalability is adequate. It is a scalable product, and we have not over-engineered it, so it meets our business needs.

We provide direct feedback to our support partner for Control-M, so nothing comes to mind at the moment. I consider the current support to be adequate.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate customer service and technical support as seven. A score of seven is decent enough. I am not saying Control-M support is a perfect ten, but I consider seven to be a good rating.

Positive

It has been a long time since we looked at other solutions, so I do not remember what we considered.

We do not handle Control-M deployment ourselves. We simply install it, and it is a stable environment, so we do not keep deploying it regularly.

BMC's service team supports our deployment and migration strategy well, with professional service and good support during our recent upgrade.

The biggest return on investment when using Control-M is ensuring that all batch jobs for our business applications meet the agreed SLA, which justifies our investment since we use this tool for a critical application.

Control-M is not inexpensive. Looking at other tools in the market, they are offering competitive prices, but Control-M, as a BMC product, is definitely not inexpensive, and BMC could improve their pricing strategy.

We have looked at other products when considering switching, but I cannot name them. I do not see a major difference between the products we looked at while considering Control-M. Pricing-wise, the other products were less expensive.

I would rate Control-M as a seven as a product. My advice to other companies considering Control-M is based on all our lessons learned, especially regarding issues we encountered during migration and implementation, which should be taken into account. I have assigned a review rating of seven to Control-M.

Public Cloud

Other

We have been using it in the institute to manage all the student data and post-study processes.

We have been using Control-M in our IT department to maintain server backups and database updates and schedule regular updates. Furthermore, it is being used in our library system to automate periodic updates of library catalogs. Control-M also automates email notifications for event announcements and fee structures.

The best feature is that we can automate everything. Moreover, we can access all the features through one dashboard, which is beneficial. 

We have been using Control-M for managing simple automation tasks. It will be very effective in managing other types of tasks. Control-M has the potential and can be very useful in managing business aspects.

The licensing cost can be improved. Although it provides good value, it could be better. The pricing model should be optimized.

Its initial setup is a bit complex. They could provide more documentation and tutorials to make the initial setup easier to understand. Enhancing the documentation could simplify the setup process.

We have been using it for more than one and a half years.

The tasks we have been handling are straightforward automation tasks. Considering that, I would rate it a ten out of ten.

It is scalable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.

We have 50 to 60 users.

Technical support has improved. In the past, they were not as supportive, but they are better now. Based on recent experiences, I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

This is the first solution that we have used.

The initial setup and configuration are a bit challenging. There is a bit of a learning curve for some people. It takes a few days.

At the time, there were not many recommendations or resources to understand and deploy it properly, so it took us a couple of weeks to understand and deploy. It has been simplified over the last eight to ten months.

We implemented it in-house.

It has reduced the total cost of ownership by 30% to 40%. 

It has saved a lot of time for our employees and staff members. For a small task, there have been about 40% to 50% time savings.

It is a little bit expensive.

Our relationship with BMC is more transformative. We consider BMC as a strategic partner and trusted advisor.

I would definitely recommend Control-M to every institute because it is extremely helpful to manage every task without any manual error. I would suggest trying Control-M at least once. It is also recommended to start with the documentation and familiarize oneself with basic concepts before integrating it into the business aspect. 

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Public Cloud

Control-M is used for scheduling, specifically scheduling application jobs. We have always been using Control-M, as we inherited it. We work with all technologies within the business using Control-M, including WebMethods, Axway, and IBM MQ. In the managed file transfer space, using Control-M, I find that it is not as user-friendly as other products available for MFT.

The best features in Control-M are its ease of use and robustness; it is very feature-rich, which is what we use it for—scheduling. It is easy to integrate Control-M with technologies for our DataOps and DevOps processes as things change. The integration aspects of Control-M are out of the box, so they are straightforward to use. From using Control-M, I have seen improvements as they grow with the versions; with the newer versions come enhanced functionalities, such as the latest version allowing access through a web GUI instead of the client GUI that you have to install, which is quite helpful because you can access it from anywhere.

We are not on the latest version of Control-M; we currently have version 20 and 21.

I have been using Control-M for 10 years.

Regarding stability with Control-M, I would rate it nine out of ten for downtime, bugs, and glitches.

Control-M is very scalable, and I would rate it a nine.

I would rate the vendor's technical support for Control-M as a nine.

Positive

We have tried to look at other products, but there is no other product out there that does what it needs to do as Control-M does, which is why it is still around—it simply does what it needs to do.

The deployment of Control-M was quite complex to get in, but once it is in, it does what it needs to do. It took weeks to get Control-M deployed.

Control-M requires maintenance from our end, as we have to perform patching whenever needed, but that does not happen very often—probably once a quarter. Patching for Control-M is easy.

I have definitely seen a return on investment with Control-M in terms of time and resources, but I cannot speak to the financial aspect—I do not know. I would estimate that I have saved perhaps 20% to 30% on time and resources using Control-M.

From what I know about pricing, I would probably put Control-M in the expensive category, but you do pay for what you get; you are paying for a premium product.

We looked at AWS products for scheduling with Control-M; I cannot remember the actual name of the scheduling tool at AWS, but it is nowhere near as advanced as what we need.

Approximately 100 users work with Control-M. They are not all Australia-based; some users are from India, so we have offshore resources as well. My relationship with BMC is both transformative and transactional. Regarding the transformative aspect, I have impressions of BMC as both because we partner with them; we might not be strategic partners, but we value their advice all the time—not just product advice, but sales as well. We consider ourselves a partner with the vendor, but I do not know if we are officially a signed partner; we are a partner at the base level. When I refer to our relationship with the vendor, we are considered an entry level partner; we are not a reseller, so we cannot resell their products, but we are partners and we consult while using their products internally and with customers to support their customer base. Our clients are generally enterprise businesses. I would recommend Control-M to other users; I know they are going all web-based, which they believe is the best way to go, but I can tell you that everybody I have spoken to has said the contrary—they actually prefer the client GUI that you can install, which is easier to use and more feature-rich, while the web GUI is very hard and difficult to navigate through. I have rated this review a nine out of ten overall.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

We use Control-M for ACS and Azure services as it has inbuilt cloud integration. We have a product that works on government databases where we use data scraping and then integrate it with Azure and OpenAI. This integration allows us to process data and get insights. We also use AWS services to save the processed data in the AS.

Control-M is a bit faster compared to other solutions. The job and coding are easier. Also, my DevOps and Ops teams work collaboratively with it, enhancing its efficiency. The workflow is much easier compared to the ACS services we were using. Automation is more advanced, deployment is fast, and version control has been simplified.

They should have a proper integration method that clearly defines the workflow. Additionally, there should be an automation system for developers to set it up more easily and quickly. My Ops team faces certain problems that need addressing.

I have been using Control-M for four to five months.

The downtime is higher compared to AWS. Indexing and databasing are more challenging, and the endpoint sometimes gets reset automatically. The accuracy rate is about 80% to 85%.

As we hire new interns and DevOps partners to scale our business, Control-M scales well with the enterprise's growth. As the workload on Control-M increases, its scalability is much higher. Its cost is very low.

I never had direct communication with technical support because solutions are available on the web. We didn't have a one-on-one conversation, but the support is adequate through online resources.

Neutral

We migrated from AWS to Control-M. It was more cost-effective and capable compared to AWS services. We were a startup with limited resources.

The setup was manageable with certain experienced DevOps staff, making it easy to deploy on the local server.

There was an built-in DevOps team that found Control-M more cost-effective and capable than AWS services.

New users should have a comprehensive understanding of how BMC and Control-M operate. Good coding skills are essential, as well as utilizing open-source codes. Monitoring should be done by someone knowledgeable about the system. I would rate Control-M a seven out of ten.

On-premises