Control-M Reviews

We primarily use the solution for automation, orchestrating and automating the workloads, and being able to schedule tasks. Prior to Control-M, we were manually running jobs or there was either a scheduled task on Windows, getting Task Scheduler, or we'd have a script laid out that someone would have to run through manually on a daily basis. 

We learned about Control-M and felt that it could take over that process and have it automated, while also providing some monitoring and notifications so that if something did fail, we could easily be notified and keep track of it.

It provides a holistic view of jobs that are scheduled to run. We haven't done full production on it yet. Hopefully, we'll be in production by July or August this year. That said, so far from what we can see, it's going to free up some time for certain staff that has been running these tasks manually overnight. Now, if someone gets notified of an issue, then they can address the issue. In the long run, it'll free up some time and resources to focus on other tasks. 

I like the interface, including how I can see everything and how I can put the jobs together. Depending on the experience, I can either use the GUI or I can use the command line to create jobs based on JSON scripts. It provides that flexibility for someone who has no experience of using Control-M as well as with someone who's a full-blown developer that can get very complex with creating these jobs. Generally, it provides a good interface for everyone with different levels of experience.

Control-M doesn't really process data as far as I can tell. It orchestrates other scripts. From what I understand, Control-M doesn't really ingest or analyze any data. It's a tool to help with the processing of data on different platforms. I can tell it to run a script on one server, to send the data over to another SQL server, or a different platform, Power BI for example, and run a script on Power BI so that it can ingest the data when it gets there and do what it needs to do. Once that's finished, I can send it to another platform to put a dashboard together based on when that data is available.

Once one understands the process of how it functions, it's pretty simple and straightforward to create, integrate, and automate the pipelines. There is a learning curve to understand how it all works, all the components, and all the requirements for parameters and different options. However, it's pretty simple once someone has a basic understanding of how it all works.

The Control-M interface is good for creating, monitoring, and ensuring the delivery of files as part of our data pipeline. There's a wealth of information in both the full client, as well as the web interface that they have. Both are very easy to use and provide all the necessary material to understand how to do various tasks. The help feature is very useful and informative and everything is very easy to understand.

It’s great that Control-M orchestrates all our workflows, including file transfers, applications, data sources, data pipelines, and infrastructure with plugins. There are a lot of plugins and we haven't used all of them yet. Primarily, we've only used the file transfer plugin, the Azure file service, and Azure functions. Primarily, the developers have used that to put the various tasks and workloads in place. While we haven't fully utilized everything in Control-M yet, we're learning how to use the various functionalities and transitioning from our legacy scripts and data sources. 

Some of the documentation could use some improvement, however, it gets you from point A to point B pretty quickly to get the solution in place.

I've been using the solution for almost a year. 

It seems stable. I haven't rolled the solution out to a very large environment yet. The solution we're working on right now seems to be working fine. All the issues we've seen have to do with us figuring out connectivity between Control-M and the cloud services, however, I haven't had any experiences with issues around stability with Control-M.

Right now, it's a small deployment and we have it in four environments. We have it in our dev, QA, UAT, and production environments. Right now, there are two application teams that are using Control-M, however, we have another two or three teams that are looking to get onboarded.

It's pretty scalable. I haven't done a deep dive look into it the scalability, and we haven't identified a need yet to scale out. It seems pretty scalable, yet I'm not sure as I can't speak from personal experience. I don't have experience with it yet.

It was a challenge to get the direction on how Control-M should be implemented. As we learned about new requirements from the customer, implementing those with help from the engineers at BMC was hard. The third-party contractors were one issue, however, when I escalated it to our customer representative, he was able to get me in touch with a dedicated BMC engineer and she was able to give me the information I needed and provided the context and direction on the best approaches. I wasn't able to use the third-party engineer that was assigned to us, however, the internal resource was a great partnership to help move this along.

Neutral

We were using Microsoft and internal tools. We used the basic Windows tools that were built in.

We went with this product to centralize the deployment and to centralize the management of all of the workloads.

Some of the installation components were really complex. I'm more on the infrastructure-based side of Control-M, I deploy it and then get it ready for functional use so that the application developers, script developers, and workload developers could easily access it. It took me three weeks to figure out the requirements for getting the SSL certificates as the documentation wasn't really clear on what those requirements were. Once we figured it out, it was simple, however, the support staff couldn't give me the right information to understand what was required.

It seemed like there was a gap in expectations on what was required for certificates. In terms of the installation overall, it wasn't clear what each variable or what each configuration point was referring to until we were well versed with how everything functioned. Then we were able to say, "Oh, this is what that field meant and this is what was required here." However, during the installation process, there was very limited information on what was being asked at each configuration point.

In terms of strategy, there was a challenge with the customer. I was the third or fourth resource that was brought onto the project. The first three people that handled it, internally and externally, had trouble figuring out what the expectations were. I was handed the baton at the last moment. I had to tie up loose ends and try to get this up and running for the CIO before he started to send up red flags to BMC.

We had an integrator, however, setting up the timing with the integrator was a challenge. What I got from my company and the general expectations weren't clear. When I did get clarification, I wasn't able to get ahold of the contractor since he required a week or two weeks lead time. We then ran behind based on the lack of information I got. Setting up time and requirements was a challenge.

I'm also a contractor working for a customer. Being a third party, trying to work with another third party with minimal information from the client, was just a challenge all around.

There was another team handling the pricing. I'm not sure of the exact costs. 

Our customer chose this solution. 

We do not use the Control-M Python client and cloud data service integrations with AWS and GCP and we do not use Control-M to deliver analytics for complex data pipelines yet.

We haven't gone into production yet, so we haven't rolled this out to all our customers. We're still testing the features and we'll be starting the UAT in two to three weeks.

Right now, we're still in the early stages of rolling everything out. We've gone through the testing in our development environment and in QA to make sure things are good. Now, we're testing performance in UAT internally, and then we'll have customer validation within a few weeks before we go into production.

The solution will play a very critical role in day-to-day operations. However, it'll be at least two months before it becomes critical. Right now, it's still being implemented and evaluated.

It is pretty flexible on various cloud solutions, working with different cloud technologies and platforms. I would say potential users should take a look at it. It does provide a lot of flexibility, especially with the application and integration component that they have. The developers seem to really be able to get what they need out of the AI or the application into an integrated product or feature set.

Before installing Control-M, have a sit down with the Control-M solutions engineer and make sure you share with them all of the details of what you'd like to accomplish before deploying the solution. My client just said, "We want this" and they didn't give us the details about what they were looking for. We ended up having to redesign a few features, as those items were not clarified as part of the installation. When I was brought on board, the customer didn't mention they wanted HA, so that came later. At that point, we had to reinstall and add more servers.

The person who signed the contract was focused on MFTE, which is the enterprise file transfer tool or managed file transfer tool. However, later, the architecture team decided not to use that and go with another tool. Due to that decision, the client could have gone with a SaaS solution instead of the on-premises solution to Control-M and saved a lot of time, money, and hassle on deploying the on-premises infrastructure. So my advice to others is to make sure that the needs and the functional usage of the tool are identified clearly before purchasing or implementing the tool.

I'd rate this tool ten out of ten. It does what it says it does. 

We use Control-M to provide business services to our customers. The use cases involve Hadoop, a lot of file transfers, and SQL scripts. In our business, automation is used for many things and we use a lot of the Control-M modules. For example, we connect to SAP, with databases, Hadoop, MFT, Informatica, and other technologies.

What we do relates to many different business services in a retail environment.

We have hybrid deployment; over the past two years, we have had a mix of on-premises and cloud-based implementations. Ultimately, we are moving to the cloud. We are using AWS, GCP, and Azure.

The main benefit is that Control-M can work with almost all of the applications that are on the market right now. We work with technologies including Hadoop, Informatica, all kinds of databases, and file transfer with MFT tools. The real potential with Control-M is that it can be used for everything you want.

It is really important that our clients can manage their own application workflow with full autonomy. Our customers are using this capability a lot and it helps because we don't need to be present when they want to perform a simple task. It's better for them because they don't need to wait to ask or to have something changed. They can just do it themselves. Also, it's better for us because we have more time to do other things.

The expanded capabilities in version 2020 for planning and monitoring have had a positive effect on our clients' operations, as well as our own. It saves a lot of time when it comes to developing and implementing things. As a result of saving time, both us and our clients are saving money.

Control-M has definitely helped us to achieve faster issue resolution, although it is difficult for me to estimate how much by. We don't have metrics that are suitable for tracking this kind of thing.

The best part about this product is that it has a lot of features. Control-M doesn't limit us and we can use it for a lot of things.

Control-M is easy to install, use, and maintain. It is easier to work with than other products.

The web interface hosts a lot of videos and webinars and I really appreciate this because I find them very helpful. They have tutorials that explain how to approach the new technologies and explain how things can be done using Control-M. This is something that I use a lot.

The Application Integrator is helpful because not all applications have a module available in Control-M, and we can use this feature to create them.

When it comes to supporting cloud services, Control-M is a bit slow. We are not advancing with the technology because we don't have the modules that can interact or use the new application services provided by the cloud technologies. BMC has been telling me that they are working hard to be more aligned with these new technologies, but they are a bit slow. Consequently, we are having a few issues when it comes to implementing Control-M. Some services that are being offered, such as Databricks, have been a problem.

The documentation is something that needs to be improved. Years ago, the documentation was very good, and I don't understand why but the documentation is no longer as good as it should be. For example, if I need to install or upgrade Control-M Enterprise Manager or Control-M server, the only information that I have in the documentation are things like "Execute this and follow the instructions on the screen".  What it doesn't tell you is what will be needed for the process. For example, you may need to enter a password or select a source, but you won't know what these parameters are in advance.

Also, it is different to find what you are looking for in terms of documentation. For instance, if you visit the Control-M download page, you see several tabs. There is a tab where you can download software and another tab where you can download patches. This is perfect. However, there is another tab for the documentation but there is never anything there.

With any Control-M product, it is hard to find the documentation. The reason for this is that they are moving all of the documentation online, in an HTML format. The problem is that it is hard to download documentation in this format. In particular, if it is a specific part that you need or a certain module, then it would be much easier to have a PDF version like they used to have. Consequently, it is more difficult for us to pass the documentation to our internal teams.

For example, if we are trying to configure a module for Informatica or SAP, it's hard because we don't have PDF documentation. We need to go online but it is difficult because it is very hard to find what you are looking for.

Another area of improvement for Control-M is the version release lifecycle. Prior to 2018, we had the same, main version of Control-M for two or three years. Since 2018, they have been releasing a new version every year. There was a 2018, 2019, and 2020 version. It seems that these new versions are being released in an unfinished state because we are seeing a lot of bugs. Historically, it has been very stable, but from a point between two and three years ago, it has not been so much so. It seems that the problem is that the versions are changing too quickly.

I have been using Control-M for nine years.

There are some limits to scalability in terms of cloud integration. There is some integration with cloud services but it is very simple. It is called the Application Integrator Module. This is a very good feature but the problem is that if we have to interact with cloud services, we need to create all of these modules on our own. We are paying a lot of money for a product where we have to create our own modules, which is not perfect.

It is very good that we have the Application Integrator available but for services that are being used by a lot of companies, we need official support from BMC.

I would rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

We have been dealing with BMC for several years and when you consider the support from a few years ago, the response that we received was more technical and more accurate regarding the problem that we were having.

As it is now, more and more we are seeing that the customer support has to rely on the product development team to resolve the issue. This is because there are a lot of bugs in the product and customer support cannot provide a solution for these. Instead, the problem has to be fixed by development, and then a patch is released to solve the problem.

For this reason, I am rating the support an eight instead of ten.

We have had cases where our clients migrated to Control-M from a competing solution. In fact, we did a migration last year from TWS, the Tivoli Workload Scheduler from IBM, to Control-M using the conversion tool. The tool was very important because it reduced a lot of work.

The problem is that the conversion was not as good as it should be. I estimate that we had to modify 90% of the jobs because the conversion was not good enough. It was still important because it would have taken a lot longer to create all of the jobs from scratch. That said, it was not perfect, at least that was our experience with migrating from TWS.

We were using TWS and another one that is called Visual TOM. It is another product that is similar to Control-M. These are both scheduling products, but Control-M has tons of features that the other ones don't have. They don't have the modules, the plug-ins, or the Automation API. They are stable and they are good, but we can't use them like you use Control-M because Control-M permits us to perform many more things. Unfortunately, with the many more things that you can do, it does introduce more opportunities for failure. However, this is true of any feature-rich solution. The more complex it is, the more prone to error it is.

Control-M is easy to install and maintain. There are not a lot of steps required to upgrade or downgrade from one version to another. With other products that I've been using, it is difficult and complicated to upgrade because there are a lot of confusing steps. But with control-M, you need only follow the onscreen instructions.

The length of time required to deploy depends on the customer. The scope and complexity of the client's requirements dictate the amount of time it will take to complete. For example, we can deploy for a smaller customer in one week. However, for a large retail customer, it could take a month to complete.

We have one client right now, where we are upgrading from Control-M 2018 to 2019, and it is going to take us almost three months to complete. Part of the reason it takes this long is that when you try to upgrade a production environment, it's really difficult to get a window to perform the upgrade or the installation or the modification. That said, it's still easier than many other products.

Pricing varies depending on which components and modules you are using.

My advice for anybody who is considering Control-M is that I recommend it. Although it's not perfect, it is relatively easy to use and maintain.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Control-M is the primary tool used in our department as an interface between desk jobs and SAP. I create and monitor the jobs in Control-M and that ties into SAP.

At this point, we are using it as a batch scheduler, which is primarily used for SAP. We use it for everything financial, like payroll, because SAP is our primary ERP.

Our system administrator uses Control-M when he is scheduling batch jobs. 

Our SAP jobs are fairly critical, because there are a lot of collections from a financial aspect coming through on a daily basis. From that regard, Control-M is fairly critical for us. We need to know when and if jobs fail since that has an impact on the collection of money.

We used to have multiple shifts of people sitting there and monitoring our jobs until the introduction of Control-M. So, with Control-M, we have been able to reduce the human capital, in regards to shift workers. Therefore, we are saving money from a cost perspective, in this regard, by about 25%. We have had a 50% reduction in staff. The ability to monitor and be notified, when our jobs have on time completion or fail, has had a big impact on the company.

It is more about the notification tools and its ability interface with SAP. It has the ability to notify people about jobs and schedule based on prerequisites, because this is not something that we can actually do within SAP. For example, if one job is dependent on another job completing, SAP doesn't have this capability. This is why we went with Control-M. 

It is very simple to use. I have only been in this position for four years, but it was really easy for me to pick up and monitor Control-M.

In the client, it provides a unified view for me. I can alter the view that I want to see jobs and conditions. This is nice to have. The fact that you can see everything in one space is very important, especially these days where everything is about data and monitoring as well as because we are working from home on a global basis. So, in real-time, I can monitor jobs, failures, or anything that might be stuck. The real-time monitoring and the ability to see everything in one place is important for us because we operate 24/7.

I use the mobile and web interface. I started off with the desktop client, and there are some slight differences in the interface between the mobile, web interface, and desktop client. This is a nice feature, because when I am on the road or going for a walk, then I have my mobile with me and I can get notifications if I need to run anything. Then, I can just log on from there.

All the modules within Control-M can interface with SAP.

Everybody's biggest gripe is the reporting capability option. It is a gripe because there is a lot of information in Control-M, but the solution doesn't have a good reporting tool to extract that information. Now, if you want all that information, you need to rely on another third-party BI tool to extract the information out of Control-M.

Two or three years ago, I was at a seminar where they said that they were looking at improving the reporting. However, from that time until now, there hasn't been much of a change in the reporting capabilities. Especially in today's day and age, where accessing data has become very important, this is something that they should be looking at.

We are using Commvault as our backup application. Currently, there is no integration between Control-M and Commvault. 

I have been in my position as an operator for four years. The company has had Control-M for over 20 years. 

Over the last three upgrades, Control-M has improved quite a bit. When I joined our department, Control-M didn't have a good reputation because it was always falling over. All our issues were addressed by Control-M with their upgrades. 

In the latest version, we find it has been extremely stable. We haven't had many failures as far as the program is concerned.

Generally, we don't interact directly with BMC because we have a service provider that we use, Blue Turtle. So, we interact with Control-M via Blue Turtle for any queries that we are having.

The initial setup was done before I joined the company.

We have a system administrator who applies our Control-M updates.

Control-M has helped us improve Service Level Operations performance. It helped us from the monitoring perspective. Now, we are able to control real-time monitoring and real-time notification of any failures that would occur within the system. Because we run it 24/7, we have notifications for any failures that have been setup. They will come through on our mobiles, and in that regard, Control-M has helped us.

Unfortunately, I can't compare it to anything else.

It just works. Control-M is very good. You only need to look at something else when an application gives you problems. However, in our environment, it is stable and just works. We haven't even bothered looking at anything else.

I can highly recommend it. It is very easy to learn. It is very stable. It has multiple interfaces, e.g., you can use it on your desktop, access it via the web interface, or access it on a mobile. The support that you get is actually quite good. It is a tool that I highly recommend. For what we require it to do, it does exactly that and more.

We have a system administrator, a chief scheduler, who is my supervisor, and two operators, including me. The four of us are power users who have scheduling capabilities in Control-M. We have different people on our BI team. Overall, 10 people have various levels of access.

We have tried Control-M as part of your DevOps automation toolchains. We are only getting into DevOps now as a company. We are still playing around with it. Currently, we are still fairly separate as far as DevOps is concerned. My department is basically the middleman between dev and operations. Whatever dev wants, we will create those jobs and test them. Once they want to send them into production, they let us know, and it then goes to operations. We are the center for those types of things.

Because we went into lockdown and the financial impact of the lockdown, projects were placed on hold. This year, they were& still on hold. Probably sometime next year, we will be starting on those projects again.

I would rate Control-M as eight out of 10 because the reporting needs improvement.

We primarily use Control-M for financial services. We do file transfers, payroll, HR, and other related tasks.

The top three processes that we have automated with Control-M are payroll, HR reports, and time reports. This automation gives HR, and the business in general, a clearer picture of what is happening as far as the payroll timesheets go, including who's punching in and punching out. Essentially, it improves transparency.

Control-M provides us with a unified view where we can define and monitor applications, and this is very important to us, especially in the audit process. We have auditors and they request certain information; using Control-M, we can log in and create the report according to the parameters they're asking for. It makes life much easier.

Our developers use the web-based interface to monitor their jobs. They do not have access to do anything else but they can tell if their jobs have run, or not.

Our developers leverage the “as-code” interfaces and it makes it very easy to roll out new applications and application updates. Everything is automated as far as transferring files in and out to certain people. This is helpful because it doesn't have to be done manually. It also generates reports automatically for us. Control-M jobs produce the reports so we don't have to create them every day.

We just started using Control-M to streamline our data and analytics projects. So far, it has given us some actionable insights. The streamlining has improved our business service delivery because we can tell if something is running behind, and why. We know if there's an issue before anybody notices.

Control-M has improved our data transfers because it is much easier to do encryption back and forth when sending files.

This product has helped us to achieve faster issue resolution. I estimate that issues are now normally resolved within 10 minutes. It's very quick.

Control-M has helped us to improve service-level operations performance. We have a critical job stream and because we're an institution, we have to have certain data out at a certain time for the federal reserve. If we can detect when something is running behind, and why, then we can notify them ahead of time so that they know the reports are going to be late. It helps them on their end, too. This way, they don't have to call and ask us where their report is.

The most valuable feature is the reporting function. It allows us to pull up reports for specific information that the end-users are looking for.

The planning and monitoring features in Control-M 20 help us because we can forecast to assist with network maintenance. For example, if we have something major going on with the network and there is going to be downtime, we can do a forecast to see what's going to be running at that particular time and adjust things accordingly.

I would like to see more audit report templates added, and perhaps more customizability in terms of reporting.

I have been using Control-M for 15 years.

Control-M is very stable and we've had no major issues with it.

Scalability is not a problem. It absolutely extends with our needs and the jobs that it needs to run in. At this time, it is running payroll reports and other payroll jobs. We are looking at expanding this to other applications in the future, although there is nothing definite yet.

Technical support is very responsive and we have never had any issues with them. Generally, if we have a problem or question, we can open a ticket with BMC and we usually get a response back within an hour, or no later than two hours.

I would rate their support a ten out of ten.

We work with BMC for upgrades and support. We are part of the AMIGO program.

We have absolutely seen a return on investment with Control-M. It is centralized and it's made everything easier for the business end, in particular for getting their reports on time. 

The pricing of Control-M is reasonable. 

The developers in our organization are responsible for creating the scripts. There are 20 of them and they monitor their jobs. With respect to operations including creating, running, modifying, and killing the jobs, there is a group of six staff in charge of that. This group also creates the schedule and the calendars, so essentially, they take care of the day-to-day administration.

My advice for anybody who is considering Control-M is that if they have questions then BMC is great to talk to, but there is also a BMC community and if they have questions or want to know how it's running or working for other organizations, they can post and generally get a response back. There are user groups specifically within Control-M.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Self Service, BIM features are most valuable. As no need to login to EM client and check the job status. From any where we can login to self service poral and validate the process status. Different Control modules.

5 years back, our organisation runs Control-M 6.2. After upgrading to ver 7, application team benefited with the new features and very to easy manage their application jobs. Productivity has increased, introduced Job naming standards, stream line the application based on the priority.. etc...,

All is well in Control-M tool . Thank you for new enhancements of tool . But for some issues, BMC will suggest to upgrade to new version which will not be feasible to standards of the organisation. Hence some work around should be shown to run the business until new version was upgraded.

I am working on Control-M tool from past 10 years in different organisations.

No, its very pretty simple to deployment and configure all the components.

No issues with stability. Its easy to switch PROD to DR and vise versa, if there are any issues.

No

10 out of 9.

10 out of 0

N/A

It's straightforward to use Control-M compare to other tools. Easy to migrate from other tools to Control-M.

Up-gradation from ver 6.2 to ver 7 was done in-house.

As technical personal. I am not able to answer this question.

Compare to other tools Pricing and licensing was more. It should be decrease.

In my previous organisation, I have refer Control-M for batch process. But due to pricing client has not agrees and then client has decided to go with Active Batch tool.

No.. Happy to work on Control-M and looking to upgrade current version Control-M ver 7 to 9. One suggestion after a stable version released there should be gap of 2 year of support.

Control-M is a scheduler tool, and we have multiple batch jobs that are currently running in our organization. 

We are currently one version behind the latest one. The latest version is 9.0.19.200, which also has Control-M Python Client, and we are planning to go for the latest version.

We currently have it on-premises on the Windows platform. We are planning to migrate to AWS.

We have multiple technologies, and we have different types of jobs, such as Informatica jobs, SAP jobs, database jobs, web service jobs, etc. In such an environment, from the support perspective, usually, we need to log in to multiple technologies and check if a job is executed or not and if there is any error, which is not easy. Control-M acts as a one-stop shop to check the status of all jobs. The maintenance or support team members can easily log into Control-M and verify the job status.

It has been helpful in reducing the burden on our resources during the weekend. It has also been helpful in reducing delays and data mismatches.

It is easy to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines with Control-M. You can drop and drag whatever you want and then provide a time for the scheduler. There are many inbuilt plug-ins, such as the Informatica plug-in and the SAP plug-in. We are using these plugins. It is pretty easy and simple.

It allows us to ingest and process data from different platforms. For example, you can have a flow that starts with a REST call. Once that is processed, the records are picked from the database and sent to SAP. You can easily design a pipeline workflow and schedule jobs. You can also specify the dependencies. For example, you can specify to execute Job B when Job A is completed or execute Job C when Job A and B are completed. There are multiple options in Control-M to ingest and not miss data from any platform.

Testing is easy. You can have multiple environments, such as development environment, testing environment, staging environment, and production environments. You can easily test your workflows, and you can easily promote from one environment to another environment. You can promote from the development environment to the staging and production environment. There is an option called Promote, and you can use that option to promote to whichever environment you want.

We are an enterprise, and when the data moves from one technology to another technology, multiple teams get involved, which requires multiple communication exchanges between the teams. Sometimes, there might also be delays in getting the data from one team. With Control-M, we can create a workflow where we can specify to proceed for job B after job A. There is no need for a team to send emails to another team. There is no delay. Team A doesn't have to inform team B to run a job because otherwise, there will be a delay. Control-M eliminates such issues. It has improved our business service delivery speed.

It has good reporting capabilities. You can get a report of the status of all your jobs. You can see how many jobs are pending and how many are processed. You can also share these reports with the management. There is also a URL that you can give to your management or customers. They can check the job status, and they will have knowledge about the status and any abnormalities.

Automation of Control-M has improved the speed of process execution. No manual intervention is required using Control-M. You don't need to have a resource waiting to do a job at a certain time. You can automatically schedule a job, even over the weekend. It results in faster speed and better utilization of resources. You can also integrate it with other solutions. For example, if a job fails, a ticket can automatically be created in ServiceNow or BMC Remedy and assigned to a specific group so that they can look into it.

I find Control-M for SAP and Control-M for Informatica good. You can connect to the Linux or Windows servers, and you can run multiple jobs. 

Control-M Managed File Transfer is also a very nice feature for transferring multiple files.

It meets our requirements, and it is simple and easy to use. 

They can give more predefined plug-ins so that we don't have to create them. 

The security layer for Control-M MFT can be better. 

We have been using Control-M for the past six years.

Its stability is good.

Its scalability is good. We would like to increase its usage, but its price is a challenge.

Their technical support is very good. They also have a community portal. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We didn't use any other solution previously.

I am responsible for installing and managing Control-M. Its initial setup was straightforward. It took about nine hours to get it installed and up and running. The number of people required for deployment and management of jobs depends on the scope of your operations. If you have 50,000 jobs a day, two people are enough.

Its maintenance is handled by the server team. We have it on-premises, and they take care of the patches and upgrades. If it was on the cloud, the upgrades would be done automatically.

Its pricing is a little bit high. They could provide an enterprise-level license for an unlimited number of jobs. Currently, it is based on the number of jobs, and if you exceed the number of jobs, there are charges. For example, if your license is for 3,000 jobs per day, but you run 3,050 jobs, you will have to pay for the extra 50 jobs. They charge $120 per job. So, it is too costly.

To someone who is looking for a process automation solution but is concerned that Control-M isn’t modern enough to work with multiple cloud-based data sources and tools, I would say that Control-M is the best option even when working with cloud-based data sources. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. Control-M is the best solution to replace any enterprise solution if its price suits you.

Overall, we have a great visual of all of our key business processes, and it gives us a secure way of transferring everything in and out of the business so that if anything were to be intercepted, it would be secure and not compromised.

We transfer financial files between Google cloud. We use it for the I series. We have a lot of automated jobs, around 3,000 jobs per day, that we load that range between just regular commands for our planning allocations, finance, or data warehouse along with Google cloud. We're starting to implement a lot of that, but a lot of it has been automated and it allows us to process everything in a timely manner.

We are in the process of implementing the managed file transfer which gives us the dashboard, but we are still fine-tuning that. Overall, it does give us a great picture and helps everything. If there's something delayed, it gives us the opportunity to send out a notification to a team to say that their process is delayed. We get tickets created and have everything sorted in a timely manner.

We use Control-M's web. It makes it very easy for us to show them what they need to see and what they don't need to see. They mainly can just view the tasks that they have, but it's pretty divvied up permission-wise.

Control-M integrates file transfers within our application workflows. It has made everything a lot quicker. We've been able to get files transferred to vendors and we've been able to retrieve files from vendors rapidly and securely.

It also streamlines our data and analytics project. Mainly developers will create either different types of processes that we will implement within Control-M to make it automated and that definitely, I would imagine, helps streamline and format certain projects and reports that we send out to executives that helps out a lot. I don't know the exact extent of it, but I would imagine that it has helped our business service delivery. 

It has helped to achieve faster issue resolution. With the shouts and notifications that we get, we're able to create tickets as soon as a problem surfaces. So as soon as we do get a job failure, we get an email notification that prompts us to create a ticket, page out the team, and get it resolved in a matter of our terms of our SLA.

The most valuable features are the Advanced File Transfer and the managed file transfer. They make transferring files securely seamless. It's very easy to set up, get deployed, and have it transferred to and from vendors. As long as we can get our firewall rules implemented at a decent time, it's very easy and seamless to get important files transferred in a secure manner.

Control-M has automated critical processes. We run a lot of our backups through Control-M, daily sales reporting, and warehouse initiatives with shipping and planning. There are a bunch of finance processes that go through here that are time-critical. It's made everything more streamlined and secure and it comes through much quicker than doing it manually.

We have had a few small bugs with the configuration of the different types of jobs where it is the order of operations if it's doing a statement, we've noticed that if you try and do a little bit of both, it may cause one of them not to work. 

We've also had a few database bugs within our organization. I think we are migrating to OpenJDK rather than just regular Java and that has since shown some issues with our Control-M instance, timing out and causing our jobs to stop running. We are still working with BMC to fine-tune that and get that resolved.

I believe the file transfer process does everything that it needs to do. I don't believe that there's anything that would need to be changed there with all the features that it has, it's pretty robust. But overall I don't really see many changes that we would need.

I have been using Control-M for three to four years. 

Other than the database connections that we've had and as of, I believe when we upgraded or moved away from Java using OpenJDK, it's been hit or miss. I know that we've had a few instances where our jobs just stopped processing, but we're not sure if that's related to the application itself or if that's something in our environment, but overall I am personally okay with the way that it runs.

We run it on windows as well as Linux, and we are still trying to work on getting it to our DR site. But, I believe we are able to process quite a bit through there.

We use it for our I series AS 400. We also use it for Google Cloud, Cognos, ADP, many custom applications that we run as well, but we do a lot of I series.

I do not plan to expand it to other applications in the future.

My department consists of eight people, and we are mainly data center analysts. I'm their manager. We also have developers with a select few developers that are able to get in and view it, but they cannot actually create anything. They can just view and see what is running.

Between five to 10 users are responsible for the day-to-day administration of Control-M.

I've never used Control-M before, prior to being here and all I had to use were the help guides from the web, as well as the user interface that we have. The help administration guide has been the only way that we are able to get questions resolved and to go through support.

Their support is hit or miss. We have had successful sessions with them. And then we have other ones where there are fingers being pointed and it doesn't really solve anything. We have a rep that my manager goes through, but we seem to usually get issues resolved in a timely manner.

We have seen ROI. We were able to have fewer people manually running tasks. We're able to put them right into here and we're able to scale and move a lot of file transfers through here.

It is a little bit expensive. I believe that however we are set up, it might be per job that we load or the highest number of jobs that are loaded monthly and I believe it is quite expensive.

My advice would be to try and utilize as many features as you can. Don't get overly creative with things because that can just confuse other people. If there are other users getting in there, you want to definitely have a standard workflow on how jobs should be created, organized, and make sure that you keep track of what's being changed so that if something were to fail it's easily trackable.

It's a very robust application and there is a lot that can be sent to it and sent out of it and you do not want it to get into the wrong hands because you can do quite a bit with it.

I would rate Control-M an eight out of ten. 

We have used Control-M mostly as a file transfer and in conjunction with Hadoop.

We have many feeds coming in from different companies which are used by the business for various reasons and we must collectively have a central point to gather the files and feeds. We also use Control-M for encryption, decryption, and sending data across to different business users that begin at a point of time and making sure that we are not missing unnecessarily. It's a real help what we are getting. The example for us is we have a lot of business which depends on feeds which, if not properly processed, affect the stock exchange. So Control-M acts as a mediator in between that and provides it in a very efficient way. This has reduced a lot of manual intervention required as a business.

The feature we use most in Control-M is related to the file transfer module. It is quite advanced compared to other tools like Automate, etc. The new version which has come of same MFT has a lot of advanced features which makes it very easy to work with. There is less need for written programs and more GUI-based stuff.

One feature I would like to include is in the middle of the monitoring domain. In the monitoring domain, if I have to update a number of jobs, the only way to do it is by manually clicking on each job. I would like a feature that allows me to do a mass update in the jobs, which I feel is still lacking.

This version has done an amazing change, compared to version 7 and the versions after that. I'm not sure what they should change at this stage. One recent feature they have come up with is if we can upgrade Control-M agents from a central location. I would still prefer a solution where I can do an installation of the controller module from a remote distance. That's something they don't have. I know why it has still not come up, but it could be a great feature if we could include that somehow. To push out these sort of installation setup files onto another machine and get it in installed. It is not there for now, though.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten. The reason for this rating is because of the scope of implementation. It will have an ultimately upper hand to the other tools in the market. They can show what most other controls don't have. Nevertheless, these features would really help as well. I would like to see more of them.

It is a very stable solution and BMC, the parent company, really comes up with tech packs and upgrades, which add new features and also resolve issues. Also, their knowledge base is quite full, which helps a lot to find the solution easily from the website.

I rate them nine out of ten for scalability.

On average, the control team consists of around fifteen people. This ranges from the elements of both which is the monitoring team and the L2 support which is for the scheduling team. Then there is also L3, who is the administrator. Apart from that, we have certain business users that will use the help service module often.

If we are looking at a 24 path sell and support, we would need close to seven members on a daily basis. That's the same for L1, L2, and L3 teams to each do daily support. L1 would be for monitoring, L2 for scheduling, and L3 is administrative.

We do have certain programs to increase usage down the line, which we're considering. I would say close to 60 to 65 percent of the company is using Control-M right now.

The technical support is great and I would give it a ten.

My main experience is with this as the central unit, but I have used other tools. The main reason I chose Control-M was firstly that it is user-friendly. Secondly, the market is wide open for Control-M, and a lot of other organizations use it. So it gives Control-M the upper hand in the market to work on something like this.

It was quite simple since Control-M has a very user-friendly GUI. That made it fairly easy to relate with the business and convert it into something which looks familiar.

We kind of started from scratch, so I think it took two to three months for us to set everything up at the initial stage. The strategy was to tackle one business at a time so that we don't complicate stuff because not everything is automated. We started to target one business/application at a time and converted them each into something which Control-M can work with.

We did the deployment on our own based on our experience. We had previously deployed it for certain clients basically so we were primarily the consultant for that.

I may not be able to convert it into a value in this way, but it does more in terms of reducing manual intervention. This, in turn, means less human resources are being used. For instance, if there are three people in a team and controlling certain work, they could probably put more on one resource. So that reduces the cost of resources in the whole organization.

We have account based licensing. There are two or three types of licensing. One of them is based on the number of jobs, so we a license close to 4,000 jobs per day.

The cost is based on the different modules, which we buy from them. If we a buy a hardware module, which we are presently using and integrating, that is an additional cost, but I'm not sure of the amount. Each module comes with a different cost.

I have experience with alternates like IBM Tivoli and another software called JAMS. These are the ones that I have worked on and the features and user-friendliness of both of them is fine. It's such a different level compared to this, so that's the reason I'm sticking to Control-M.

For those who want to implement, there are a few cons. Cost-wise it is not very simple for every business to implement it. So they should really plan if they are going to use it extensively. If not, they should think twice about it. 

If they are thinking of implementing, though, they should analyze the business and check which controller modules will really help them enhance their work and ultimately transform their work into an automated solution, which in turn will reduce their cost. 

I would really suggest someone who is planning to use Control-M or wants to deploy is first to check which modules are really required and also what kind of licensing makes sense for their business. If its a very large enterprise then it would be great to use a premium based license. If not, it's better to use a job count based license. So that is a point which they should check before implementing.