Control-M Reviews

Our use case was mainly about consolidating our data pipeline from different sources and doing some data transformations and changes. We needed to get data from different sources into a state where we could act on it into one consolidated data set.

It gave us the ability to consolidate a diverse set of solutions into one comprehensive solution that streamlined our development processes. It was straightforward to adopt and we could build on existing skills without having to have 10 solutions for 10 problems.

And when it came to creating actionable data, it gave us the ability to move faster and at scale. By adopting a solution like Control-M, we were able to scale and deliver faster data transformations and maneuvers, turning data into insights in a more efficient and scalable way.

The ability to deliver faster and at scale was important. Business and management always wanted us to deliver faster and bigger and we were able to do both with the solution that we implemented using Control-M. We were able to respond faster to changes and business needs, at scale. 

Having a feature-rich solution enabled us to aggregate all of our processes into it, and that made the overall execution, from a project and portfolio perspective, a lot more efficient.

We were also able to respond to audit requests, because it's centralized, in a much more efficient way.

There isn't a single feature that is most valuable, but if I had to choose one, it would be the rich ability it gave us for making customized scripts. That was probably the most unique feature set for our situation. We used Control-M's Python Client and cloud data service integrations with AWS and, as a feature, it was very customizable. It gave us a lot of flexibility for customizing whatever data maneuver we wanted to do within a pipeline.

The Python Client and cloud data service integrations have a rich set of features with flexibility. It did not require additional, crazy skills or experience to deal with it. It was a nice transition into enabling a data scientist to leverage existing skills to build those pipelines.

Creating, integrating, and automating data pipelines with Control-M was straightforward. It did require some knowledge and training, but compared to other solutions, it was a lot simpler. Working with data workflows, with the data-coding language integrated into Control-M, was straightforward. The level of difficulty was somewhere between "medium" and "easy." It was not that hard to leverage existing skills and knowledge within this specific feature.

The user interface for creating, monitoring, and ensuring delivery of files as part of the data pipeline was very actionable. It was almost self-explanatory. Somebody with basic user-interface experience could navigate the calls to action and the configuration that is required. It was well-designed.

I would like to see them adopt more cloud. Most companies don't have a single cloud, meaning we have data sources that come from different cloud providers. That may have been solved already, but supporting Azure would be an improvement because companies tend not to have only AWS and GCP.

I used it for a couple of years.

It's fairly stable. I don't recall any specific issues. 

It's fairly scalable. For our needs, it scaled very nicely.

We have a shared model where we have a centralized, shared service organization when it comes to data. Different people will use it, but it's centralized.

We used other solutions from BMC as well, and their customer support was always great. I give them a 10 out of 10.

Training or a Knowledge Base were available or you could ask a question by submitting a ticket.

Positive

We had DataStage from IBM and SSIS.

The switch was really about streamlining the process. We had other tools that only did partial processes or were not doing it with the speed and efficiency that we were looking for. We were looking for a solution that could streamline things and solve 90 percent of our data challenges.

The analysis that I saw validated that the ROI was within a couple of years.

The pricing was competitive, from what I understand.

We looked at continuing to use the same solutions we had been using, and there were a couple of other cloud-based solutions that we evaluated. One of them was Matillion. The ease of use was one component of our decision, as was the flexibility of scripting with Python. Those were the key differentiators.

For the on-prem solution, we had to do the patching and whatever was required by the vendor, but the cloud implementation was a model that was usable. The upgrades, changes, and patching are done directly by the vendor.

Control-M was a critical piece of the puzzle, to help us with all the data transformation and projects that we had to do. It was part of either one specific project or even a larger project that required that middle data transformation so that we could get to analytics or any other consumption of that data.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall, we have no problems in terms of scalability. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our in-house team is responsible for deployment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It is controlling our workflows, ingesting data, and then putting it up into our database platforms. In turn, those are consumed by our internal clients.

We do integrate Control-M Python Client and cloud data service integrations with some of our cloud providers. We have pipelines going out to the public cloud and some pipelines that are internal.

We have public and private cloud channels as well as on-prem. The expectation for most large financial institutions is that we will get 99.9% to the public cloud eventually. We want everything to be in OpEx as opposed to CapEx. We don't want data centers. We just want access to our data and to be able to turn it into information, which in turn, turns it into actionable items. Ideally, we would love to not support any on-prem or hybrid solutions, having everything be public.

Control-M has improved our visibility and streamlining. We have better clarity into data flows. We can resolve issues faster by not trying to reverse engineer what pipeline the infraction may have come through. We are not completely there yet, but we have better clarity and visibility. 

We have a better picture of our auditability. When someone comes to us, and asks for sources, "How did the deltas occur?" We can provide answers quickly, or at least quicker than what we used to. We are actually sure of the information that we provide, where before it was like, "Hmm, I think it comes from over there. Let me double check, but it gets really convoluted over here and I think that is where it comes from." Now, if it is within the Control-M environment, it has a straightforward answer that we can provide with confidence.

The speed of our audit preparation process is faster. When questions come in about flow, data, or sources, we don't have to try to reverse engineer anything anymore. We are able to go straight to Control-M and find out what the flow is or what happened. The visibility is there. We see the endpoint on this, such as, "What is the reverse flow on it? Where did it come in? Where did that data flow come from?" So, it is not a spaghetti mess anymore. This makes auditability easier. We are able to provide answers more quickly, which in turn, makes the audit process quicker.

Control-M has improved our business service delivery speed. It is more reliable and has increased the release schedules. We are also working on testing standards, and it has shortened the window of getting things to us. It has shortened the window, not to market, but basically getting them live. 

Control-M is critical to our business. If the support ends, we are at risk in some of our critical flows. We have redundancy around it that has been purposely built. We do that with all of our solutions. That way, we are not tied into one specific vendor, then if something happens tomorrow, we don't have a fire drill. We have things in place, but to a certain extent, there is heavy reliance on this solution.

The most valuable feature is the Self Service tool. They have metrics in place almost all across the pipeline, which is really nice. 

We are not yet really a power user of it. You can take as many training classes as you need, but it is not until you are working with a subject-matter expert (SME) on it that you can find out how you can really make this tool sing. My engineers know how to work Control-M. However, if I ask them, "Oh, is this the most efficient way of doing it?" They may not be able to say, "Yes." It is doing what we want it to do. That is nice and okay, but is it the most efficient, effective way? So, we are not there yet.

I have been using it for about four years.

The platform is good. We haven't had any major outages. The stability is there.

We really haven't pushed it to any of its limits. No scalability concerns have come up for what we are doing.

If you came to me, saying, "Hey, I was looking at Control-M, but it has some issues." I am going to sit there, and go, "Tell me what the issue is." Right now, we are not using the far reaches of whatever cloud providers are out there. Control-M does well with the major providers.

The community is not as robust as some of our other tools that were replaced. The problem was the other tools that we were using didn't do everything that Control-M is now able to do, like monitoring and the entire pipeline flow.

The community and the networking that goes on within that community need improvement. We want to be able to reach out to an SME, and say, "Hey, we are doing it this way. Does that make sense?" Ideally, they come back. and say, "Yes, it does make sense to do it that way. However, if you want to do it this way, then it is a little more efficient." We understand that one solution framework doesn't fit everybody. Depending on the breadth of the data and how broad it is, you may have different models for one over the other.

I would rate the technical support as seven or eight out of 10.

Positive

We had a patchwork set of solutions in place that were getting the job done. The problem with that was we had a lot of SMEs within certain verticals. Therefore, there wasn't one overall picture. Every time we went from one step to another step, we had to start talking to another person to figure out what was going on. So, we were trying to bring everything together under one solution with Control-M.

We are able to have a better picture of our data consumption, e.g., what files or data is brought in. Previously, we would ingest data at different points. The question that would always come back to us would be, "Where did this data come from?" Then, we would always have to reverse engineer and have some documentation on it, but the documentation would be outdated. Someone would change the pipeline and forget to change the documentation. With Control-M, we can see everything in one location. To a certain extent, it is not documentation.

I am an engineer by trade. I have been doing this for over 30 years. I know that it is nice that someone puts together a document describing the environment, but as soon as that document is saved that document is outdated.

We don't throw another tool into the toolbox just because it is a nice pretty tool. We try to figure out what the benefits are. Ideally, in our world, we try to reduce the number of tools because I don't need 50 different screwdrivers in my tool kit. I make sure that I have a flathead and a Phillips, but I don't need 50 screwdrivers. Here, we brought in this solution and it replaced some existing solutions. Now, my engineers don't need to know X number of products. They only need to know half of X number of products.

The tool was vetted by another group before making it available to the organization and putting it into our toolbox. Then, when it was available, we looked to leverage it.

One of the restrictions that we had was with some of the licensing, and not having any insight on the financials part of the product. I don't know what the licensing on the product is, but we don't have an unlimited enterprise license. So, there might be a limitation on either the cost of the licensing or the number of seats.

There is always a learning curve any time you are using a new product. Our engineers who are using Control-M are kind of happy with it. There really are no negatives on its learning curve. I am always weary with new products since it is another thing that someone needs to learn, but now there are other products that we don't use because of Control-M. What I would not be open to is bringing in another product, where we need our engineers to know how to work it and make it efficient as well as support other products already in our environment. So, I like that we can get rid of three or four products and replace them with a single product. As long as the learning curve is not too steep, that is an advantage to me.

We are looking into using Control-M to deliver analytics for complex data. So, the solution is doing either machine learning or complex analytics on top of the data flow. While we do some analytics, it is not to the extent that we really want to.

I would rate this solution as a high seven or low eight (out of 10).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been using the solution for 22 years.

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

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

Technical support tends to be very helpful.

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can't speak to the exact licensing costs. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have been using the solution for around seven years. 

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use it for scheduling nightly processing of data.

It has improved our organization a lot. It has helped us control any problems that we have with jobs. We have critical jobs that run and we can tell ahead of time if there's a problem. There are alerts that we can send out. And if a certain job goes down, we can tell what the impact is and which jobs are impacted that are waiting for that job to complete.

We're better able to meet our service level agreements because we do a lot with the Fed. There are certain things we have to have done at a certain time. The automation the product provides means we either meet our or are ahead of our deadlines. In addition, we can tell if a job is running long and if it's going to meet the SLA. And if it's running long we can see why it's running long. That's a benefit for us.

Before, we used to schedule jobs on the servers and we'd have issues with the servers. With Control-M, we can tell if there are any issues coming up because we can run the critical path and see if there are problems before they actually happen. On the server, we couldn't necessarily tell if something wasn't running.

When it comes to creating actionable data, it gives the auditors a very accurate and timely report. Our audit preparation process is much easier. We don't have to do as many manual reports anymore. Previously, it was painful. We had to do everything manually with multiple spreadsheets and it was just ugly. With Control-M, it's all in the database and we just extract the information from the database.

Also, our management team is happy with the orchestration of our data pipelines and workflows. They're happy because they get to see the information through the reports that we create. We're also meeting our service level agreements with the end-users, in terms of getting them their data. And customers are happy because their information is being put into their accounts on time and correctly. 

And for projects, the orchestration of data pipelines is helping because we can go through the testing before we move something into production. That means that when we have a major project or an upgrade coming up, they can run it all through the test, try different scenarios, sign off on it, and then move it into production. It's a very streamlined process. If we didn't have Control-M, our projects would be slower because we'd probably have to be doing a lot of stuff manually.

It's very critical for our business. If we have an outage coming up, for example, if we have to shut down power, we can tell what's going to run and if anything is critical during that time frame. We can manage the data much more easily.

• The reporting facility is very helpful in creating reports for auditing. 
• The FTP function is very easy to use.
• It is simple to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines and to ingest data from different platforms. It integrates well between platforms.
• The Control-M interface is also very easy and very comprehensive. It's pretty simple to navigate through all the different functions.

It's very important for us that Control-M orchestrates all our workflows. And the plugins have enhanced what we already have.

I would like to see more auditing capabilities. Right now, it has the basics and I've been trying to set those up to work with what our auditors are looking for.

I've been using Control-M for 12 years.

It's very stable. We've had no downtime with it. The only time that ever happens is if we have lost the server but that's been very rare.

It's scalable. We use it across multiple states, geographically. We have about 1,600 end-users. 

The technical support is wonderful. I've had no issues with them. Contacting them is very simple, you can do it online. And I usually get a response back within an hour.

Positive

We did not really have a previous solution. We just scheduled tasks on the servers. There was no uniformity.

Our return on investment is that we don't have a lot of downtime anymore. The information that we receive and post to our customers' accounts is quick and there are fewer errors. As a result, we don't get as much feedback from the customers compared to what we used to get.

The pricing is reasonable. It's not an exorbitant amount. The licensing is pretty reasonable for the number of jobs that we run.

The plugins will be an additional cost.

The only maintenance required is due to the updates that come out from BMC. Three people manage that part of it.

If someone said to me they're looking for a process automation solution, but they're concerned that Control-M isn't modern enough to work with multiple cloud-based data sources and tools, I would tell them they can test it. They can physically set up a test function and see the product work for themselves. It wouldn't be a full-on PoC, just a snippet, but they could see the functionality and how things interact. It depends on what they're trying to accomplish too.

My advice is "use it." It's very end-user-friendly. It works, depending on what you're trying to do. All the platforms work very well and it doesn't take a lot to get it up and running. And the help is out there if you need help.

Overall, it's very well done. We go through the AMIGO (Assisted Migration Operation) process, and there's a lot of help out there for Control-M. There's a community as well if we have questions. We really have no complaints. The solution has sped up our process execution.

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.

I am a project manager and am responsible for the Control-M infrastructure.

Control-M is the only batch infrastructure that we have, so we run all of our batch activity on the platform. We are using the web interface, for example, the workload change manager and application integration. There is not a particular sector but rather, we run all of our batch jobs on this tool.

Control-M provides us with a unified view of our workflows, which is important to us because our processes are standardized. We have set up a company that is used mainly for scheduling, which is also involved in creating flows and monitoring them. As such, standardization from the point of view of the user is important. Effective standardization facilitates our work. 

We have automated many processes with ServiceNow, including some that are critical. For example, if we need to stop 100 instances, we can open a ticket in ServiceNow and it automatically creates the job flow in Control-M that sends the command to stop the instances.

The integration with our incident management platform has meant that we have been able to achieve faster issue resolution. The reason is that we have eliminated the manual phase of opening an incident. It was very time-consuming and it is not easy to calculate how much time we have saved, but I estimate that our process is 70% faster.

Control-M has helped us to improve the performance of our service-level operations by approximately 60%.

The integration with ServiceNow is good. When a job ends and there are problems with it, we automatically open an incident in this platform, and the number of the incident is forwarded to Control-M. This means that we have a record of it with the log of the job. This is a feature that reduces manual work. It is not officially included in Control-M; rather, it was developed for us by BMC.

The web interface supports us well because we have done some customization for each area of our company, and the client can see all of the jobs that they are interested in seeing. One can watch their flow on a phone or tablet. For example, we have integration with WeLink and our clients can see the flow of the billing workflow.

We use Control-M as part of our DevOps automation, and for our company, this is very important because it reduces the amount of work that has to be done. We are a very big company and we have millions of jobs scheduled. The more that we can automate, the better it is for us.

Integration with some applications and platforms is complex and requires development. We have done some integration with the application integrator, but it was more like a manual solution. This is an area that can be improved. 

I began working with Control-M approximately 20 years ago.

In past versions, there were issues with stability and it was a negative experience for us. However, in the version we have now, stability has improved. At this point, the product is good and stable.

Scalability-wise, there are no limitations. We have between 500 and 600 users including our DevOps team, applications teams, and others. For example, some people work on solving problems, others handle scheduling, and some only use it for viewing or monitoring the workflows.

We have a strong collaboration with BMC and we are constantly in contact with them.

The support is good and we are satisfied with it. In general, the responses are fast and the solutions that they provide are good.

In the past, we migrated from IBM's Tivoli Workload Scheduler (TWS). We did not use the Control-M migration tool at the time because it had not yet been developed. We completed the migration manually.

The reason that we switched to Control-M is that we stopped using the mainframe.

There was no particular problem for us in regards to the implementation process, as we had BMC to assist us. We have a very large environment and our migration took between twelve and eighteen months. We have thousands of agents and many Control-M environments.

We did not follow a particular implementation strategy.

For implementing and setting up Control-M, we collaborate strongly with the BMC team.

We have approximately 20 people of varied roles in charge of the day-to-day administration.

My impression is that we have seen a return on investment from using Control-M. As it is our only solution for batch processing, it helps us to centralize all of the batches that we have. This, along with the standardization of workflows, are the most valuable features of this product.

The licensing is managed by the commercial section of our organization.

We evaluated several options and we found that Control-M was the most complete solution.

We use Control-M to integrate file transfers within our workflows, although we don't use the managed file transfer capability that comes with it. We are currently analyzing it and we are deciding whether to use it or not. At this time, we use other programs for our file transfers. Our analysis will show whether we can migrate the process to this new feature.

Overall, Control-M is a good product. We do have small requests that we give to BMC, although they are very specific. The product covers a good percentage of our needs, as-is.

This is a product that we will continue to use and I can recommend it to others. I expect that in the near future, we will migrate to the most recent version, 9.20, and that we will use some of the newer features that it offers. That said, there is always something that can be done to make a product better.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.