Control-M Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neutral

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

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

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

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

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

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.

We use Control-M for batch automation. Previously, all of our batch work was manual, but now Control-M has significantly reduced the need for manual intervention. As a result, our batch processes are now 99% automated.

It's so easy to navigate, and especially for new hires, it's very straightforward to show them around the client because it is user-friendly. It's very easy to use. Compared to other softwares, Control-M has significantly simplified our monthly release process, making it easier to move things forward.

We're upgrading Control-M, and the process is very long. There are numerous boxes to tick and things to check to ensure everything is in order before the upgrade happens. We run three instances of Control-M, and making various changes for each is challenging.

I have been using Control-M for five years.

You might experience a brief connection issue, but it usually resolves within a few minutes. The problem is related to the web server.

Scalability is excellent. We utilize only about 20% of Control-M's capabilities. 

Support is helpful, and the online community is very good. There's the community forum, which I use regularly to find answers to questions. BMC has been very helpful in that space. They were extremely fast and solved a difficult problem our in-house team couldn't solve in a matter of minutes. 

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. We used to use in-house software.

We have three different environments where people can work. People can use our development instance of Control-M to work on their batch processes before they go live, allowing them to experiment and refine until they get it right.

It's much simpler now. Everything was a manual batch job. Using the features of Control-M every day makes our batch processing so much easier.

It makes our lives so much easier. For our operations team, which runs our daily batch overnight, viewing everything as it happens has been an absolute lifesaver, especially if things go wrong overnight. It's great to have that visibility. It has also sped up our process, reducing overhead and weekend overtime. Batch processing is much quicker now, resulting in fewer manual errors.

Control-M has so much functionality that even if you initially purchase it to handle a specific part of your batch work, it can offer much more. We've progressed beyond traditional batch processing to include MFT, which has been incredibly useful. Our file watchers and other automation features have significantly simplified our workflows and made our lives much easier.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using it for two or three years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The initial setup is straightforward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are mainly scheduling jobs on Linux Windows, SAP, and DataStage environments; a few other application integrations, like Micro Focus, and third-party applications, like Web API.

We are using it for banking and financial services.

We use Control-M as part of our DevOps automation toolchains and leverage its “as-code” interfaces for developers on a few JSON-based script applications. This is in the testing phase, but in production for one or two applications, and rolling out new applications and application updates is much faster. Earlier, we had to go through a lot of processes. We had to raise a change request and work through various approvals, then the scheduling team would do it and there would be a lot of failures. Now, they are directly creating those jobs and submitting them. It is coming in automatically because it is running in Control-M.

Multiple critical processes have been automated. Here are two of those processes:

1. Our critical banking application for end users, especially to check their bank data, e.g., how much is in their account, how much money they have withdrawn, etc. 
2. It is used for ATM withdrawals and runtime data, e.g., SMSes go out with how much has been debited or credited in their account.

Automating these processes provides more visibility to our application team. They can see critical jobs failing and immediately taking action in Batch Impact Manager (BIM) with the help of our team.

The most beneficial features are the Forecast option and Archiving feature, as well as the integration option with other applications and tools to the API. When it comes to the API integration with any third-party tool, we can integrate using the application integrator tool and API interface with web APIs, which is the best part. Control-M has its own Forecast solution. Therefore, we can forecast how many jobs are going to run, on which day, and at what time. Another benefit is the tool's Archiving feature. So, we had a lot of requirements, like when an application or end user team would say that they want to see the log or output of the job from two or three months before. So, the archive solution is very helpful because we can keep at least a year's worth of data for our environment.

It has a very good GUI. We can search for a job very easily. The web interface, user account creation, and access control are very good. From an access control point of view, we can provide access to as many users as we want. A second group of users can be given a certain number of features, according to the requirements. The web interface is very easy for end users to login and use. A lot of features have been added, e.g., adding jobs. They can add jobs to their stuff, whatever they want, then get it validated by the scheduling team and work it into production.

A lot of businesses are using ServiceNow, which is another tool. I would like there to be some integration with ServiceNow or other third-party tools as well as have easily available integrations. Right now, we need to write scripts. Apart from that, if there were some integrations with an ITSM tool, then that would be good. Because at the end of the day, most of our clients are using different ITSM tools. I know that BMC Remedy is easy to integrate with Control-M. However, if there was availability for Jira as well as other ITSM and DevOps tools, that would be a good improvement.

I have been using it for almost 12 years.

It is very stable. If we are using agents, it runs without any issues. I have sometimes found issues when we are running it with an agentless solution. However, with the agent, it does not have many issues. It will have an issue once or twice a year.

It is a very scalable solution. 

Almost all our end user application teams are using it. 

For day-to-day administration, we have two people. For scheduling, we have four people. 

The integrated guides and how-to videos in the solution’s web interface is a good approach. There are a lot of documents and webinars. Also, the support is very good. We receive good responses very quickly.

I would rate the technical support as nine out of 10.

We migrated from Tidal Automation. In Tidal Automation, various options are not there. So, jobs are running mostly using an admin account. When all jobs are running using an admin account, that is a risk. However, in Control-M, we have various options. We can use an admin account as well as a separate account, like a user account, to run jobs. Whereas, these features were missing in our previous tool. 

We switched from Tidal to Control-M because the application team wanted more control. There is a web-based solution for Tidal, but all the data is shown there. For example, if there are 10 applications, then the web applications team can see all 10 applications, though they might only want one application. Even if the backup team wants to view just their backup jobs, they see all the applications that are working. However, in Control-M, we can control whatever applications that we want, limiting what can be seen by each team. 

The initial setup was easy. BMC provided all the documentation before starting. They did it in the development environment and targeted various applications. They showed us what they were doing before they implemented it. So, we were coordinating with them.

Deployment took three months.

I was involved during the initial setup. It was done by BMC's professional services team and I was part of the support.

It is a good investment. I think we are paying the same amount of money for Control-M that we were paying for Tidal and not getting as many features.

Control-M has helped us achieve faster issue resolution. It is 60% to 70% faster than what was happening before.

Service Level Operations have improved in the sense that fewer team members are required as compared to before. So, we had a bigger team, and that has been reduced because of Control-M's latest features, like development. Therefore, a lot of things are now being done by the application team instead of having a separate scheduling team, which has now been reduced. The application team is currently being trained to handle more things on their own. They also have visibility on what jobs are running and what jobs are failing.

In our environment, pricing depends on the total number of maximum jobs that can run, which is fine. Therefore, if the number of jobs increases, then the licensing fees will increase.

I have hands-on experience with Redwood and ActiveBatch solutions. If there are a lot of Windows requirements with Windows jobs, then definitely ActiveBatch is the best solution. If we see there are a lot of SAP-based requirements, then Redwood is the best solution and either Redwood RunMyJob or Redwood CPS work for this. If we see Unix or any other application with jobs, then Control M is the best solution.

While we do use Control-M to streamline our data, we don't use it much to view our data and analytics project since there are various third-party applications of the bank where jobs are running. The major work that we do is creating and adding those jobs to the tool.

We are not using file transfer at all because we are a US-based financial company. They have a lot of restrictions for file transfer between third-parties, so Control-M is not used for file transfers.

It is one of the best scheduling tools in the market for batch job automation and DevOps.

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

We use the solution to automate our business batches, workload processing, and some elements of our IT and system maintenance procedures and processes. These include sequential clips, programs, and workflows. We automate these and have them scheduled for regular execution. We needed an orchestrator, and Control-M fits our requirements well.

The availability of data and reports is vital, and the solution's capacity for timely processing and build generation improved considerably over time. As our operation grew, so did our use of Control-M, and there has never been a delay in the availability of data and reports, even with very high workloads. Eventually, we could also bring automated control over our back end. Control-M makes workflow orchestration simpler; it can deal with an impressive amount of transactions.

We realized the benefits of the solution a long time ago, and from time to time, there will be a situation that reminds us how valuable it is to us. Control-M is an overwhelmingly stable and steady product, free from issues and frequent disruptions. As is the case for any such tool, there are occasional bugs and fixes, but overall, it's a stable product and a fully integrated part of our operation.

The product has improved dramatically over the years; it offers a lot in terms of features and capabilities and integration with third-party tools. A wide range of models available with the product is critical in reducing manual and mundane work such as custom script writing. This saves significant amounts of time and, by association, money for the organization.

As a Control-M user for over 15 years, I see it as very straightforward to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines. Even in the beginning, when Control-M was more of a data architecture product, it was easy to pick up. I've seen multiple people adapting very well in terms of adapting and enabling the capabilities of the solution for business; it's straightforward. 

Ideally, agent lift modes of connectivity would be established on different platforms. We can get applications integrated directly with Control-M. That's a recent feature. There are ready-made platforms and plugins which allow us to see templates for workflow orchestration in third-party and custom in-house applications. It's a straightforward solution, and this is an area where Control-M excels.  

Our customers are pleased being with Control-M, despite some minor hiccups, which happen with any solution. They have been happy with the product for years, and it's an enterprise-wide batch workflow orchestration tool. That's how it is established in our organization and what our users are satisfied and familiar with. 

The process execution speed is excellent and has constantly improved over the years.

The bottom line is Control-M is a mission-critical solution, it's integral to our organization. 

Regarding product design and R&D, the DevOps pipeline could be improved with better capabilities and automation. API security and authentication is another area that could use improvement; users must have static credential passwords, which is a security concern.

The REST API supports FTP for file transfers, but we would like to see additional, more encrypted protocols and simplified file transfer encryption. Currently, the solution offers PGP encryption, which isn't the most straightforward. 

We have been using the solution for around 15 years. 

The product is stable.

The solution is scalable; we increased our usage over the years and plan to continue that. 

We have multiple teams at multiple geos and deployments; we're an enterprise-sized organization.

Recently, there are some bugs with the product development, which necessitated R&D's involvement, which isn't ideal. We have fully integrated the solution into our production businesses, so any stability issues have a significant impact. There were cases where workarounds weren't provided quickly, with stubborn bugs needing environmental solutions.

Neutral

I've worked with multiple other workload orchestration tools, including IMB Tivoli Workload Scheduler and a CA automation product. Control-M stands above the competitors in terms of stability. CA underwent an acquisition, leading to changes in product strategy and mergers with equivalent products like Automic, so Control-M was the surer option. It is also more robust and has greater system availability than the competitors.

The initial deployment was complex, and this was by necessity. It is important to note that deployment is now more straightforward due to years of knowledge, experience, and newer features.

It took around two weeks to set up the Control-M infrastructure, and the process of bringing in business data and full adoption took place over years. It could be done faster, as in our case, there were other considerations involving budgeting, testing, and timelines. Setup of the initial infrastructure takes a few weeks, and then getting the platform running and configured can be done in a day or two. Further configuration and integration with LDAP and monitoring tools can take a little longer.

The solution can be managed and maintained by two or three staff members, but the number of staff involved in a deployment can vary significantly. It depends on the specific scenario and teams.

I would say we have a return on our investment; we have a vast amount of transactions and business automation implemented on a massive scale. We have adopted Control-M extensively, and it would be challenging to migrate to another solution in a reasonable time. We often look at alternatives but considering factors like timelines, resource availability, and team bandwidth, we keep coming back. The solution provides enormous value to our organization.

The solution is not cheap, it comes with quite a hefty price tag. Control-M is the market leader, but we still want the price to be as friendly as possible. 

The solution comes with the base module and an additional one with a few extra plugins, which is helpful. 

We evaluate competitors yearly, but in terms of value for money, we always return to Control-M. We get an excellent return on our investment.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I would advise any organization to do a proof of concept for their scenario before making a decision.

We don't currently use the Python Client, it's something we are planning to look into. We haven't started working on it, but we are in the review process to understand the client, and how it could fit into our operation.

The solution doesn't create new data as such, but it processes on top of the business data. 

We don't currently use the product for analytics, but we do plan to get Control-M data onto other systems for analytics and machine learning tasks.  

If we didn't have Control-M we would use an alternative solution. If there was a better one we would use that, or a product with a favorable cost and value proposition, which is a key factor.  

The tool always positively impacted our business, including our business service delivery speed. Over the years, there were one or two issues, but the vendor supporters could keep up. Some bugs required extensive development, and the support is excellent in this regard. They always have the right staff to assist during major productions or changes. Compared to before we had Control-M, it's as if we were previously traveling by foot, and now we've discovered the wheel. 

Regarding the audit preparation process, features like workload archiving come with an additional cost, which not all organizations can afford. I would instead maintain something locally on the system, but the solution is straightforward in terms of data necessities.

Control-M has to catch up in some areas, but it also offers specific capabilities and customization options. Application integration provides scope for exploration and deployment in custom developments. As a product supplier, BMC could focus on improving in areas indicated by their biggest customers. There is a lot of room for improvement.

File transfer support is Control-M's only significant limitation, as it only supports SSTP and STP transfers. Overall, other tools offer better security and file size in terms of file transfers. Therefore, the solution slows down when dealing with larger file sizes or a high volume of files, but it is sufficient for smaller organizations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because of security issues that we have, we are a private and public enterprise. Our main area is the lottery in Portugal. This is the most important business that we have. Also, because the money comes from the game, we need to invest it in social, health, and real estate areas.

For my current organization, it is a new tool. We are implementing the tool right now. We have a lot of impact jobs running every day and night, but in a skeletal matter. So, these jobs are running at one o'clock in the morning. With historical run jobs that we needed, we know it took six or seven hours to finish. Then, we have another cron job in another system at eight o'clock. With Control-M, we can reduce a lot of this time. Because when this job is finished, it will immediately start the job in another system. At this moment, we do this manually with an operator. Sometimes, they have errors because it is manual. It is not robots who do the job. Also, it takes a long time. We are losing time between jobs, if it is not automatic.

Our operator guys mostly use the web interface. As a client, we are more using the UI for the planning of the jobs. However, if we want only to do monitoring, then we only use the web interface. As we continue to work from home, there are a small number of operators who are still at our work. For security purposes, it is important to have the web interface in place because we don't like to install it on our clients because we don't have administration of the PCs. We cannot install on laptops without authorization. Access to Control-M only with a browser is really important and makes our job easier to do. We can access Control-M with a laptop, app, or mobile.

Before Control-M, we didn't have a centralized view and could not view what happened in the past to determine what will happen in the future. The Gantt view that we have in Control-M is like a project view. It is nice because we sometimes have some application maintenance that we need to do. So, in a single console, we can hold the jobs for the next hour or two. We can release that job when it is finished. This is a really nice feature that we didn't have before. It is something really simple, but we didn't previously have a console where we could say, "For the next two hours, what are the jobs that we will run? And, hold these jobs not to run." This is really important.

We use the Conversion Tool for audit purposes. We have had things working for a long time, but not documented. The Conversion Tool is nice because it helps us understand our jobs, whether they should be in Control-M or not. 

The most valuable feature for us is Managed File Transfer. We have a lot of file transfers in-house. Every FTP was being done by hand. Managed File Transfer is simply the best thing for us. This is the most used feature.

The credentials vault is really important. Before Control-M, every user's operator needed to know the username and password to access a system. With Control-M, we don't need to share passwords anymore. We write down the username and password one time, then we use it without knowing the password. 

The amount of integration that Control-M already has. We use the web services. We are using the SQL and Oracle integrations because we have a huge environment and a lot of applications in-house. Because we have integrations with all these tools, we don't need to give access to the operators. Now, we have everything in a single pane of glass. The operators can see all night what is happening, where, and if they need manual intervention.

One of our most used features is Control-M's library of plugins for orchestrating and monitoring work flows and data. We have a lot of different applications, plugins, and API automation, which are really important for us. We are migrating a tool from Apache, which is Java code. So, we can schedule the Java code with the API automation plugin that Control-M delivers for us. We are now starting to operate this way.

We use the Control-M Role-Based Administration feature. It is integrated with our Active Directory. We have groups in Active Directory, who are administrators and operators. Then, we map this role-base directly in Control-M. Role-Based Administration empowers us to decentralize product teams to manage their own application workflow orchestration environments with full autonomy. We divided this by environment: production, non-production, and demo environments. For each of these environments, we have different roles in Microsoft Active Directory. These roles are implemented by Control-M Role-Based Administration.

The use of Role-Based Administration eliminates the need to submit tickets or requests to the Control-M administrator. They don't open tickets and are autonomous when doing their job. From a security posture standpoint, it is important for us because we know that only the people who have credentials can access these environments, doing the job that they have to do.

We use Control-M Centralized Connection Profiles. We create the connections for the user and password. After that, we don't need to share passwords anymore, which is important for us.

We develop software. More frequently, we are working with microservices and APIs, using our integration tool, MuleSoft. While Control-M is really a good tool to integrate with other tools, it is important for them to continue improving their microservices and API.

I have been working with Control-M for more than 10 years. First, I was working in a consulting company, as a consultant, where we implemented Control-M. Now, in the last year, I have been a customer in a huge organization in Portugal. 

We can work with jobs that should run daily because of it. When we need to do an upgrade, it is really important for us not to have any downtime.

We are always afraid to install the latest version. However, with Control-M, it is really comfortable to move onto the latest version because of the stability. When I worked as a consultant, I never had any problems. Even when we had Control-M in two data centers, if one goes down, then we can run Control-M in another data center. Few software solutions have the stability of Control-M. 

We have different areas: real estate, games, social activities, and healthcare. The scalability for us is really important because we have different agents installed by business area. We don't mix it. Also, we have to always buy our VM servers per business area, so we can upscale how we want, which is really nice to have in Control-M. Critical jobs can run from different servers if something is not working.

BMC support is an eight out of 10. Everyone has centralized outsourcing for the first line of their service desk. They always ask some of their normal questions. After a while, once those guys know our workflow and understand that we already have some knowledge in Control-M, it is really fast to solve the problem.

We really needed a job scheduling tool. At the end of the day, we bought BMC Control-M. It is for a distributed environment where we have a lot of different working systems, operating systems, and applications. Control-M is the application and tool that meets our expectations.

The initial setup was straightforward. It is really easy to understand the architecture, and even install it. Based on some internal rules that we have in-house, Control-M fits well with our architecture.

It took a day to install and a week to implement. After one week, we had some jobs working and were able to get the users to see, control, and monitor the jobs. We had it deployed and working in less than a week for Windows, Linux, and HP-UX operating systems as well as VMS.

My principal difficulty implementing in-house was that people didn't understand what the job scheduling tool can do for us. It was long hours, and a lot of days, saying to our internal colleagues that this is the right tool. With this tool, we didn't need to have a lot of consoles anymore, i.e., working 24/7 to try and open every console to understand what is happening. We can have a single tool for all the jobs, applications, and operating systems. We can monitor and schedule all the jobs. They thought this is rocket science and doesn't exist. This solution has existed for a long time and is really important. 

The use of Centralized Connection Profiles has helped lower our total cost of ownership. Before BMC Control-M, we had different environments with the same users. We saw before that even the passwords for the different environments are the same. Before Control-M, we had passwords in emails and chats. Sometimes, the password would expire. With Control-M, we changed that. Every environment has an administrator who needs to write a password. We give them access to write the password directly into Control-M. The person configuring the job only needs to know who the user is, not the password.  With this functionality, the time that it takes has been reduced.

It reduces the duration for a lot of our jobs. We no longer have a window for maintenance applications at night.

This is an area where it is a little difficult to work with BMC. They want to do licenses by job, which is what we have. For example, the simplest is to license by job, but they can also license by nodes. While the licensing is simple to use, it might not be the correct licensing model for the customer. It is okay because we want to license by job, which is something measurable. At the end of the day, licensing by job is the most important.

We evaluated other vendors, like CA, but CA was bought by another company, and we have been a little afraid. Our organization always buys with a tender. Our tender had a lot of requirements on it and only Control-M could meet them all. It was a public tender, so we didn't really choose Control-M. We had a huge list of requirements that we really needed for job scaling. Only BMC could do it. IBM Tivoli tried to answer, but it didn't meet all our requirements.

Most tools have a huge GUI. You need to open five to seven windows to go to the parameters. Sometimes you don't have all the parameters in the GUI. With Control-M, it is three clicks and we have all the information that we need. We can see that in Control-M, we can see that all the perimeters are there for one job, like Managed File Transfer. It is very intuitive, and we can understand where to find the parameters to configure.

I think that every single company should have Control-M installed, because it is really important and useful for everyone.

I would rate this solution as a 10 out of 10.