Control-M Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We've been using it since 2018 or 2019.

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using it for about five years.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The product is helpful for its automation components.

It is worth evaluating.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

We primarily use the solution for scheduling, including compiling for scheduling and financial scheduling across our countries.

We use the schedule for 19 African countries and also in the UK, on the Isle of Man, where our corporate business is done.

What Control-M offers at TWS that IBM Workload Scheduler doesn't offer becomes available with the next rollout of the software.

It's one of the top options on the market today. It's one of the better enterprise solutions.

The initial setup is largely straightforward.

The solution is stable and reliable.

There are lots of features you can add to the solution if you would like to.

I can't think of any features that are missing at this time. It's a pretty complete solution.

The licensing needs to be improved. It's a bit difficult right now.

You need to pay for extra features if you need them. Other options have them for free as part of their offering.

The product could be more affordable. Right now, we consider it to be expensive.

I've used Control-M on the mainframe for about four years. I never certified under Control-M, so my experience on Control-M is far less than TWM, however, I am using Control-M currently.

The stability of the solution is very good. It's very reliable and the performance is good. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

I'm not sure how the scalability works. I'm a bit confused by the process. I can't say for certain how easy or difficult it is to scale.

Likely 400 to 500 people are using the solution at this time.

I only really deal with bank clients. Control-M handles the technical support. I don't deal with them directly and have no idea how technical support works or how helpful they are overall when it comes to troubleshooting issues.

I also have experience with IBM Workload and TWS. IBM Workload and Control-M products are extremely advanced. What is better between IBM Workload and Control-M, is that Control-M charges you for all your different features. When we go to IBM Workload Scheduler, you have plugins. Those plugins are free unless they were created by a third party. If the third party created them, there's a license fee that goes to the third party for the plugins. With IBM, as far as the product, everything is supplied. There are no additional options that you have to pay for. So you pay a single licensing fee and you get forecasting, simulation, your impact analysis.

While the difficulty of the initial setup can vary, the implementation itself is pretty straightforward.

I'm not sure exactly how long the deployment takes.

The solution is quite expensive.

The solution does charge for extra features. If you want an impact manager you pay for that. If you want forecasting you pay for it. If want any of the functions of scheduling, you pay for each component separately. You also pay for agents. They do not give that as part of the product, so they're add-ons, which costs money.

We are a customer and end-user.

We use the latest version of the solution. We try to stay on the most advanced option. It is deployed both on-premises and on the cloud. We also use various clouds, including public and private.

IBM Workload Scheduler and Control-M are far superior to any of the other products on the market. 

In general, I'd recommend TWS or IBM Workload Scheduler to other organizations.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. It's a top-of-the-line product.

I've never worked in a company where we weren't using it, so it's hard to say how it improves our organization. Our Oracle Database backup teams used to do this all themselves via cron. They've automated what was done by cron with Control-M. Other than that, everybody's using it.

It saves us time. Instead of 800 applications internally doing their own thing, we centralize it into one location where there are notifications. Taking the power of economies of scale into one point of focus, it saves us money for sure. We turned a company of mom-and-pop little fiefdoms all over the place into a company where things are centralized in one location.

Monitoring is a valuable aspect of it. The monitoring tool is very good. It's very easy for expert and entry-level users to use on short notice. Also, the usability is good.

The reporting tool needs a major-league upgrade.

I also would like not to have to reach out to a third-party application company to do automated notifications. Right now, we still have people manually calling people and emailing people. There's a company called xMatters - and there are others - that has an API through Control-M that can automate any aspect of failure management. I'd like to see it build right into the product. I'd like to see a better notification product.

In some parts of Control-M the stability is good, in some parts it's not so good.

We're going to see the scalability soon when we upgrade. 

Most of the time we don't get the answers we're looking for. That's why we use a consultant company.

It works on task-based licensing.

Procurement may have looked at other products. But from our perspective, they probably would have scared the living heck out of us if they had told us they were looking at other things.

You have to talk about it more in terms of how Control-M fits into the scale of other products which BMC offers for what you're doing. It's got Helix, cloud management, ITSM, etc. BMC offers the whole scale - everything. We don't choose to use it all. But from another prospective, it's a real positive that they have this scope, that they can handle everything a corporation could throw at it.

I would like to see us use more things such as Helix. From that perspective, I would recommend it because of all the product offerings and because a lot of the approved vendors, which work directly through BMC, really make the experience a lot better.

We learn things every day about the product and the availabilities. We work in an IT environment with inquisitive people. There are millions of options available, parameter-wise, within the system and I learn something new every day, by working around smart people and intuitive people.

In terms of how the solution affects business modernization initiatives, this is all somewhat new for us. We're starting to go into a little bit of the DevOps and the Workload Change Manager, and the cloud chat-box. We're just starting to get into things like that with BMC Control-M.

I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. We've had massive growth in the last year to two years because of company acquisitions. We've added a lot of big-data processing and a lot of other processing and it's handled it quite well. We really haven't had any serious outages in quite a long time, even through the large growth we've had. We've doubled the work and it's handled it seamlessly. It's just that the reporting aspects are poor, because management always wants to know things. It's hard to get at tangible numbers without doing a lot of additional work outside of the system.

Control-M has a huge number of features, including:

• Cross-platform support
• Integration with applications such as Oracle, SAP, FTP, Hadoop, JMS, and many others.
• A GUI with various filter options that allows you to manage jobs from one screen.
• Add-ons such as BIM, Reporting Facility, and Forecast.
• Automated error handling allows you to define actions to be taken depending on the exit status of a job.
• Web-based and mobile applications allow you to manage Control-M from anywhere.

Before implementing Control-M, SAP or FTP related jobs were triggered using scripts. With Control-M, these jobs can be triggered using modules already integrated into Control-M, reducing team effort.

Also, Forecast and BIM give us a clear picture of batch job deadlines and alerts us of schedule overruns.

The cost of Control-M is a major factor. It is difficult for small-scale organizations to use Control-M as a solution.

I have been using Control-M for 10+ years and have no issues to date.

We have not encountered any stability issues. Control-M provides a highly stable environment. Fix packs are released regularly and immediately upon discovering bugs.

We did not encounter any scalability issues. Control-M can handle multiple servers, multiple cross-platform agents, and a large number of jobs easily.

BMC technical support is great. I rate it 10 out of 10. We have received immediate help with issues.

Previously, job scheduling was done internally using a SAP scheduler, Windows Task Scheduler, and cron. However, they all had limitations and we needed a single interface to handle different types of scheduling.

Initial setup and installation of Control-M does have challenges, but BMC has good technical support. Related documentation is also available online. Once you are familiar with these, setup becomes straightforward.

Pricing is somewhat on high side. But it’s recommended for bigger organizations.

We evaluated AutoSys and IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler, but they didn’t offer anything close to the functionality that Control-M offers.

If you need a one-stop solution for all your automation needs, Control-M is your answer.

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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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