Control-M Reviews

I work for the second largest chain of supermarkets in the UK. We are running about 90% of our jobs through Control-M. This applies for jobs and scripts on-premises and in the cloud.

When we used Control-M version 7, we were just doing scheduling. When we moved to Control-M version 9 six months ago, we started using the cloud plugins, like AWS.

Control-M is business-critical for our operations. It does all our monitoring and tracking.

Our command center people watch the Control-M job status and alerts. Since the pandemic started, and we are working from home, we have been providing them with Self Service. We started this two or three months back. Now, they can watch the jobs and alerts through their mobile and iPads instead of logging into their laptops.

We set up a file transfer mechanism because this will be easier for Control-M to track end-to-end.

We use Control-M as part of our DevOps automation toolchains. We have a four-person team for Control-M. We help the DevOps team create new jobs. We assign a dedicated resource to understand their requirements and how they can be integrated with other jobs. Because Control-M works end-to-end, it is critical for our DevOps daily jobs.

We use Control-M to streamline our data and analytics projects. Control-M has helped improve our data transfers. If there are no security concerns, the data can directly link to downstream systems. We use Control-M to watch all the transfers of files to their targets.

All our Control-M alerts go to our internal automation.

It has two-way integration. We now have a ServiceNow integration. 

Control-M reporting isn't that good. It is very limited. We would like the ability to create our own reports as well as the ability to publish dashboards in the cloud, which would help us. Improved reporting will help us determine statuses and get the answers that we need. However, I personally think BMC is not focusing on the reporting. I have even visited the BMC office in India, and asked, "Why haven't you improved the reporting?"

There are some latency issues with jobs between on-premises and the cloud. BMC is helping a lot to check the imports and exports from version 7 to version 9, including the EM server and the mainframe.

Control-M could improve agentless connectivity a little more. We are using it almost 100% with agents, but when we start using agentless, Sainsbury's Bank has different security mechanisms and we cannot install Control-M. For example, the agentless connection fluctuates a lot, which triggers alerts.

I have worked with Control-M for almost 10 years, since 2010.

The stability is very good. 

The scalability of the latest version is a drastic improvement compared to version 7.

We are getting good help from them. When I use Support Central, I can also see tickets that have been created by my colleagues.

We currently have IBM TWS as a job scheduler, but they don't automate their ticketing. Whereas, Control-M has automatic ticketing. 

We are using TWS for mainframe data. We are looking to start moving all our TWS jobs to Control-M now that Control-M is in the cloud. We are looking at moving these jobs around September or October, then we will have 200,000 jobs daily in Control-M.

We are trying to import from Control-M version 7 to Control-M version 9, but have experienced a major problem with its new features (database-related stuff). We are slowly fixing this as we go, with the help of BMC. Right now, we are doing this process step-by-step, but we can't upgrade everything to the latest version. We can only move everything to Control-M version 9.5.

Initially, we were first-timers doing the cloud. We had so many trials and errors. For importing, we created virtual machines in AWS and set up a lot of automation. However, we needed a static IP address for Control-M. So, we had to start from scratch to create new virtual machines with static IP addresses.

We are currently importing step-by-step. We still have two mainframe servers that we need to do and should be done by the end of August.

We have 70,000 jobs running daily. Control-M has reduced the number of jobs that we are running daily. We used to have more than 500,000 jobs running daily. This is very important to us.

Control-M has helped us resolve issues 70% to 80% faster. It provides us with alerts instead of having someone go to that particular server and check the logs to determine where the issue is. We can simply click on the alert information, then everything is in front of us. This provides us with time savings, human effort savings, and process savings.

You can't compare other tools to Control-M, because Control-M is further ahead of any other tool.

Once a year, as part of our disaster recovery, we restart Control-M and see what happens. Next, we will run those jobs through Control-M. Then, we will show management, "This is what happens if you use Control-M and if you don't use Control-M."

There are some areas of our business where we don't have Control-M. When we start doing those areas through Control-M, it will be an end-to-end solution.

We don't use Control-M for file transfers. We have proposed using Control-M for file transfer with version 9, which is in the cloud.

In the future, we will give control to the DevOps team through BMC AMI Change Manager. They will create the jobs, then send them to our BMC Control-M team for review, testing, and promotion to production. However, adopting this will take some time.

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

I manage the team responsible for the tool itself, the administration of the system. We have a separate team internally that does all the operations and scheduling facets of the tool.

Our primary use case includes supply chain, payroll, accounting, information technology, pricing validations, etc. Most of the areas of the business have some facet into Control-M.

We have automated critical processes with Control-M. It is critical in a lot of different processes. We use it for all of our server patchings every month, we schedule that so that it kicks off the job every month, then goes and updates all of our Linux servers, for example, or our Windows servers. It does deployments and things that are critical to IT business.

Automating this critical process has taken the human aspect out of that process. So, that user no longer has to be up in the middle of the night to do server patching. That's all hands-free, completely zero downtime, knowing back to the customers. It's been beneficial in that regard.

Control-M helped improve data transfers. Specifically things like processing sales information. So we have all the data from our various retail locations, our individual stores that get processed every day automatically using Control-M. And we have our daily pricing information that we send to the stores to update all the pricing for all the different locations. Those would be some of the bigger areas of business automation.

It has helped to improve data transfers. Specifically things like processing sales information. So, we have all the data from our various retail locations, our individual stores that get processed every day automatically using Control-M. And we have our daily pricing information that we send to the stores to update all the pricing for all the different locations.

The most valuable features are the scheduling aspects of the tool and to have everything scheduled and automated to be able to run on a set timeframe.

It's important to our work because we can set it and forget it. We don't have to worry about logging in and pulling that data every day or manipulating the data. It can be run on a schedule and then the proper timing after dependencies are run.

Control-M provides us with a unified view where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all of our application workflows and data pipelines. It's not super important in my particular line, but it is important for the operations and scheduling team that use the tool.

We use mobile interfaces. They allow the development teams to be able to go in and set up the jobs that they need to schedule them accordingly. There's still quite a bit of a gap between the two tools. So, a lot of our users still prefer to use the desktop client.

We use Control-M to integrate our file transfers within our application workflows. But we do not use the BMC MFT program. We use a different third-party file transfer tool.

The ability to integrate file transfers has been instrumental in allowing us to accomplish the things we need with Control-M. In our industry, we take a lot of data and either push it down to the stores or retail grocery stores. We take files and push them down to the stores or pull files and information from the stores and bring it back to corporate. So, it's two-way communication with file transfers. One of the bigger things that we do with Control-M is scheduling data moves and moving data from one location to another.

We also use Control-M to streamline our data and analytics projects. It's not doing any automation now. That would be done with the tools that it feeds, like Cognos or other reporting tools. It just collects data for us.

The integrated guides and how-to videos in the solution's web interface are okay for some of the basic user questions that we get for how to use the tool and do some of the basics, but from an admin standpoint, which is what I'm responsible for with my team, they're not very helpful. We still go back to BMC Docs, open tickets when we need to, and things of that nature to get the information.

The MFT applications should have more functionality and flexibility within that tool. Having more flexibility with that tool for handling the one to many or many to one concept. Like being able to take data from one source and push it to many locations or pull data from many locations and bring it back into a single source. That's why we still use our TPS program for the file transfers just because we don't have some of those capabilities available to us within MFT.

It is still a little difficult to get support on Control-M. It seems to be its own very specific BMC product unlike Remedy and some of the other BMC tools we have. It's quite a bit more difficult to get support for Control-M.

I would rate their support a five out of ten. They're just average to adequate. 

You don't have the option to have a dedicated support resource and engineer. Someone that works with you individually to understand your environment, to help you grow and adapt to new things, and to roadmap your maturity within the tool as you do with some of the other BMC tools.

We use Premier Support for other BMC tools, just not this one.

I have been using Control-M for two and a half years. The company started using the product in 2014.

It's very stable. We have no complaints in this area. The application is very well built and it is reliable. We were also very focused on the idea of availability when we built our environment.  We are setup with both high availability and a fail-over environments. If we were to have problems with a particular server, we have the secondary to fail over to.  Or, worst case, another environment to use in our secondary datacenter.

Scalability is excellent. It's easy enough to spin up another server and add it to the server group.

Pretty much every application that we have in this company has some kind of Control-M piece to it. That's everything from accounting and payroll for our stores and customer interfaces. We're pushing and pulling data and doing different job-related things for almost all applications.

We'll continually use Control-M. Our IT business has 3,400 people. Control-M is mostly used by some of our development teams, traditional application development groups that develop our in-house applications. We have our system administrators, our infrastructure teams, IT security, operations, and those types of groups.

We require only one staff member for day-to-day administration. She was responsible for all the day-to-day administration of the tool like adding users, provisioning users, making sure hotfixes are applied to system upgrades.  

We recently did overall system health initiatives. It was also a point of contact for our operations scheduling group. If they have questions on the tool if there are any issues, or things of that nature.

Technical support through BMC Support can be challenging at times.  If any issues need to be escalated to R&D then you have to work with directly with the team in Israel.  This can cause problems coordinating between time zones.  

We previously used ESP. There were a few reasons the company decided to move from ESP to BMC Control-M.   

1. The need for a product that was distributed based vs. mainframe based.  The company was working to retire the mainframe so there wasn't as much of a need for a product that was heavily mainframe focused. 

2. We were told that BMC Remedy and BMC Control-M were integrated so job failure ticket automation would be simple.

3. There was a desire to have the same vendor for our automation, orchestration, monitoring, CMDB, and ITSM tools.  BMC was able to meet this requirement.

For the initial conversion, we used BMC. Through the last couple of upgrades, we used other BMC preferred partners.

We have used both CFS and Cetan Corporation to assist us with upgrading the application.  Both companies were knowledgeable and we were able to perform the upgrades without problems.

Recently, we have been able to upgrade the environments without assistance from a third party.

The licensing and pricing are bundled together with our other BMC products. I don't know the specific cost of Control-M by itself. For us, it is based on how many jobs we run annually.  We run roughly 9,000 jobs a year.

If I had to guess, I would say it's in the neighborhood of about $250,000.

Since it is based on a per-job run, if we increase the number of jobs that we run annually, the cost will increase accordingly.

There are also additional operational costs, hardware for servers, databases, BMC maintenance, etc.

Yes, other vendors were evaluated at that time.  Control-M was selected primarily because of the integration between it and other BMC tools.

Make sure that you spend enough time to design and build your environment, both high availability and failover are critical to overall success.  Because we rely on Control-M so heavily, it needs to always be available. Control-M is critical to the success of our business, we cannot accept downtime. We do everything we can to keep the system running 24/7, 365. For example, we have invested additional time and resources to fully automate our monthly server patching. Now we can patch our environment with zero impact to jobs. 

Another piece of advice, use BMC as a partner for professional services, especially when doing your initial implementation.  It is a big endeavor and BMC can help you be successful.  Lastly, spend time training your staff on how to use and administer the product.  Control-M is a powerful but complex application.  It requires skilled and knowledgeable operators and admins to keep the system working well.

We started to use Control-M in 2019 with the MFT (Managed File Transfer) module. Last year, we also started to use Control-M for SAP jobs.

Our transfer processes with MFT from Control-M, are quicker and safer now because we have implemented a lot of rules. For example, it helps balance jobs. Also, there are workflow capabilities, so that if a job succeeds it can call another job. And in case of failure, it can restart the job and warn us by email or by a Teams message. That kind of warning for the support team means we can address problems before the business complains. These are benefits we did not have before Control-M. Improvements to data transfers via Control-M are on the order of 80 percent.

Issue resolution, with Control-M in place, is about 90 percent faster, because most of the issues are resolved without intervention. It has also helped improve Service Level Operations performance by between 80 and 90 percent.

In terms of automating critical processes with Control-M, it's not only for transfer jobs but we have some applications that need to be restarted every week for performance reasons. Instead of having someone connecting on Sunday to do that, we can do it automatically with Control-M. These are OS jobs and it's very critical for us to restart them.

The kinds of things that Control-M is allowing us to do now that we couldn't do with our homemade solution are in terms of physical operations, the monitoring through the dashboard, and the reporting. With our previous solution we didn't have any reporting, but now we can export reports to PDF and share them with the business. We also have Control-M/Forecast to plan the maintenance of our system and to know which systems and jobs will be impacted during a maintenance period.

The most valuable feature of Control-M is the collaboration. We can all work together on it and have a better view of things with the dashboard, and that's true even for business users. The unified view where you can define, orchestrate, and monitor applications, workflows, and data pipelines is important because we have more than one team working on Control-M. We have a support team, a job-creation team, and a SAP team. We can all work together on it. It avoids anyone from working on his part and not using the latest modifications. In case there is an issue, we know who made the mistake, and we can also roll back the mistake. That is very good.

Our line-of-business personnel use Control-M's web interface. We have tried the mobile application, but we haven't used it enough. The web interface is very good. Previously, a business user would ask us, "What about my file?" Now that we have Control-M, they are up to date on it. The self-service portal is very helpful because it gives them a view of the latest version of the interface and they can consult it without having to ask us every morning about a given operation.

I would like to have a web version of Control-M to replace the client. Currently, our support and jobs-creation teams are using the client and that needs to be installed on a PC. It's very heavy, consuming a lot of resources compared to the web portal. I know that they're trying to improve the client with the latest version, but for me, there hasn't been enough improvement yet. I think their roadmap shows that there will not be a new version next year, due to the crisis. I think the next major version will only come out in two years.

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

It's very stable. In the last year, there have only been two issues. One was our fault, due to our configuration. The other was because of the Control-M application. We had to call support to get them to solve it. But overall, it's a very stable application.

The scalability of Control-M is very good.

We plan to expand the jobs Control-M is running, including operating system jobs, and then maybe database jobs such as SQL Server and Oracle. Currently, we have more than 2,100 jobs and we are planning to have 30,000 within two years.

In terms of the number of our employees who are using Control-M, we have about 40 admin users, including on some support teams, our SAP team, and our job-creation team. On the business side, we may have about 15 users. For day-to-day administration of Control-M we need three to five people.

We started with Control-M to replace our file exchange solution, which was a homemade solution. Our needs were growing and growing and our solution was not enough to support them.

For the MFT part, the initial deployment took about four months because we had to convert all our jobs and all our scripts to Control-M. It was not easy because we had a homemade solution, so there was no conversion tool for it. That meant we had to do it manually, with some scripting on our side.

In terms of our deployment strategy, for SAP we started with one SAP system from among the many we have. We started with a complex one, which was Redwood. The version of Redwood we had was not supported by the Control-M importing tool. Again, we had to do it on our side without a conversion tool.

I was the project leader for the implementation of Control-M in our organization. We brought in an external company to help us install the solution. Our experience with that company, to be honest, was not good. We have now changed to a better one. We now work with Ogchee.

We have had a person from Ogchee working with us, full-time, for a few months. He is here to help us and to support the application. But we also worked before with BMC support, and it was okay.

We have definitely seen return on our investment with Control-M. The benefits are very good.

We did not really look at other options because we had some good information from an external partner about Control-M and that is why we went directly to Control-M.

Don't hesitate to use Control-M, because there are a lot of benefits for your everyday work, especially the collaboration, scalability, and the visibility from the tool.

I would rate Control-M a nine out of 10. The one missing point is because the client is not that mature.

The business services that Control-M supports for our organization include everything from finances, marketing, data analysis, big data, data lakes—pretty much everything.

We have it on-prem and we also use it in the cloud. We still have most of our components in the data center right now.

When it comes to data analytics, Control-M helps make sure that as we're ingesting data and running it, that the workflows are kicking off in the correct order, and that we're actually getting the data. It's also making sure we return data to the appropriate business units or partners. It definitely streamlines our data analytics. It has sped things up because we don't have to wait on humans anymore to kick things off.

Our line-of-business personnel use Control-M's web interfaces and it gives them a view, a red-light/green-light dashboard. They can see if things are behind or ahead. It helps them keep track of the stuff that's important to them without having to call other people or put in tickets.

In addition, the use of Control-M as part of our DevOps automation toolchains and leveraging of its “as-code” interfaces for developers has considerably sped up our ability to roll out new applications and application updates. It's also allowed our developers, even when they have one-off projects, to easily use the automation API and Jobs-as-Code to kick those off without having to write that kind of function by hand or find another tool. It has been a big part of our DevOps process.

We have also automated critical processes with Control-M. The top-three are 

1. a number of financial processes
2. data ingestion
3. and what we call partner management. 

Those automations mean we get things done consistently and on time. It also lets us know if we're not going to meet our deadlines and enables us to be proactive instead of reactive.

By using Control-M 20’s Role-Based Administration feature, we have been able to decentralize teams to manage their own application workflow orchestration environments. That's important because it frees up resources. People can get things done more quickly without having to stop what they're doing. And it allows them to focus, instead of constantly being pulled in a thousand directions or having to call in different people for help. It helps eliminate tickets or requests to a Control-M administrator, and that frees up our operations personnel to focus on what's more important for the business. Instead of watching for and answering tickets, they're actually able to be proactive and look for potential bottlenecks or to help people enhance their processes.

Another benefit comes from using Control-M 20's Centralized Connection Profiles. Being able to store all connection profiles in a central database helps with efficiencies, with DevOps initiatives, and it helps with ownership.

The extended capabilities of version 20, especially the web interface, help because we don't have to deploy clients or maintain the clients. It lets pretty much anybody who wants to use it just fire up a web browser and use it. That's the biggest capability of version 20, for us.

Overall, Control-M lets us spot problems more quickly. And in terms of Service Level Operations performance, it helps because we now can be proactive instead of reactive. If we know that we're not going to meet an SLA, we can meet ahead of time instead of having to wait and see.

Among the most valuable features are

• the measuring and monitoring of the SLAs, the service level agreements—they code in recovery actions for when things go wrong
• the single pane of glass enables us to see everything, all the processes, in one place
• the ability to integrate with all sorts of different platforms and services.

It provides a unified view where you can orchestrate and monitor all your application workloads and data pipelines. That's very important because with cloud, software as a service, edge computing, traditional data center, and legacy apps, there are all these environments. If you don't have that single pane of glass or that one place to look at, you're going to invest a lot of time and resources into tracking things down when they go wrong. You really need that single pane of glass to show you what's going on across all your disparate systems, in one location.

We also have Control-M for internal and external file transfers. It's really just a part of our normal, everyday procedures. It makes sure that they happen. It makes sure that we got the files. It makes sure that data has flowed back to the appropriate departments.

They really need to work on improving the web interface, as there are still a lot of bugs. 

Also, the new Helix Control-M version doesn't seem quite ready for prime time for many of us. 

In general, they need to do a lot of work on shoring up their testing and quality assurance. A lot of bugs seem to make it into the product.

I've been using Control-M for about 21 years.

It's a highly stable product. It has to be—it runs your business. It's very mature in that arena.

It's highly scalable, so as your enterprise grows it's very easy to continue adding in agents or to expand out your management platform, with little or no downtime.

We use Control-M for financial applications across the spectrum, including marketing, data analytics, data analysis, and partner management. We continue to grow and as new things come online we're adding them in.

They do a really good job in terms of how they expand the product and keep up with the times. It's very cloud-centric, but at the same time, it can also handle legacy-type stuff. Overall, they've done a very good job on that.

What we had previously were all home-grown solutions. We switched to Control-M to get a grip on our environment, to have the single pane of glass to enable us to monitor and manage everything from one location. And the big thing that Control-M allows us to do now that we could not do previously is to orchestrate workflows across all types of disparate systems.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy to get going, easy to install, easy to create workflows consistently. There wasn't a huge learning curve. We learned as we went, but it was pretty easy to learn the product.

Our deployment took about a month.

The integrated guides and how-to videos in the solution’s web interface, for helping get to full productivity with the solution, are very helpful. People watch them. They need to be a little more in-depth and they need more of them, but what they have is a good start.

We have about 120 people in our company who are actively using Control-M. They range from developers to operations personnel, financial analysts, marketing analysts, and data scientists. We have a team of three for day-to-day administration of Control-M but they do more than just Control-M.

We worked with a partner to deploy Control-M. Our experience with them was very good.

We have definitely seen return on our investment in Control-M, many times over.

It's an expensive product, there's no doubt about it. It's one of those solutions where you're paying upfront to reap the benefits down the road. You're going to spend a lot of money upfront, but the benefits you're going to get out of it are going to quickly pay for it. That's something people don't understand sometimes.

We looked at a few others including IBM's Tivoli and Computer Associates.

The biggest difference is that Control-M is a more mature and growing product. The other ones were very stale. They just didn't seem to be keeping up with the times. Also, Control-M requires a lot less administration than the other products did, and Control-M was a lot easier to learn than the others. The others had a very high learning curve.

Look at Control-M from a high level, not only down to the details. See how it can benefit your company. Most companies have data centers, they use cloud, they use software as a service—they use a mixture. But even if you're 100 percent cloud, Control-M can still benefit you because it is going to give you that vision that you've never had before of what is going on in the company. And it's going to present it to you in a way that business owners and business management can understand. It's also going to allow you to do some amazing things with automation around the automation API and Jobs-as-Code. So instead of having all these siloed systems, it is really going to help you get many things under that one roof.

My biggest advice to anybody looking into this product, or any product like this is, is to do your due diligence and get your training. It's very important to have some sort of education on this going into it. That training could be formal training or it could be help from a Control-M partner for your implementation. You can get the easy stuff out of the product on day one, but to get to the things that are really going to save money and make you say, "Wow," that takes some knowledge.

The biggest thing I have learned from using Control-M is that you never know what you can automate until you try.

Control-M is used to schedule jobs and run them regularly. It helps to automate processes and reduce manual effort, minimizing the risk of errors and enhancing efficiency. Our clients use Control-M for various use cases, especially when there is a need for regular, automated job executions.

Control-M significantly reduces manual errors and enhances automation. It provides better scalability and more efficient data processing, making it a highly reliable solution for daily job operations.

Control-M can cross all platforms and offers integration for container and cloud solutions. This versatility is very helpful for my customers. The job scheduling capabilities are extremely convenient and easy to use, making Control-M a superior solution compared to others in the market.

I have no immediate ideas for improvements. I do not have any specific suggestions for additional features that should be included in the next release.

I have been using Control-M for about a year.

We do not encounter significant stability issues with Control-M. It runs jobs daily with stable performance.

Control-M is highly scalable. It offers complete functionality, making it an excellent choice for handling extensive operations.

Customer support is very responsive and efficient. If you open a case, it can usually be handled within one to two hours, especially for urgent issues. Their support is available in real-time and resolves issues promptly.

Positive

The initial setup of Control-M is easy and not difficult.

I always implement Control-M on-premises.

The pricing for Control-M is very expensive. It would be beneficial if the price could be reduced.

If your organization aims to reduce manual errors and enhance automation, Control-M is a suitable choice. It minimizes the risk of operational errors and missing processes, offering better scalability and automation.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

Our organization works with the cloud and databases. Our primary use case for Control-M is automating orchestration and scheduling jobs across the cloud and on-prem. We use it to monitor and report on jobs. We also use the index to integrate with the cloud service. It leverages our ability to manage workloads across various cloud platforms like AWS and GCP. 

Implementing Control-M saved us time by reducing our manual intervention. We can divert more resources to meaningful work. It reduced the amount of manual intervention needed by 30 to 35 percent. 

In addition to improving efficiency, workflow orchestration enhances our integration with other tools. We can orchestrate across on-prem and cloud environments and reliably create and integrate data pipelines. Workflow orchestration is critical to our DevOps. Control-M is constantly surveying the network.

The most valuable features of Control-M are automation and orchestration. It allows a different schedule, and we can manage thousands of jobs. It ensures we can complete them on time accurately. This automation reduces our manual intervention, significantly reducing error.

Control-M should receive more notice when it releases new features. The user interface is also a bit complex, and the navigation should be streamlined. 

I have used Control-M for a year and a half. 

I rate Control-M eight out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Control-M nine out of 10 for scalability. 

I rate Control-M support eight out of 10. 

Positive

We used Broadcom before switching to Control-M. The migration was a little complex.

Deploying Control-M is somewhat complex. It's easier to convert to the other tool. We spent more than two weeks on the deployment and received some support from the Control-M side. We had almost five teams of people working on it. First, we set up the environment. Then, we ran the installation and reconfigured the database. After that, we did functional and integration testing. 

Switching to Control-M reduced our total ownership cost.

Control-M isn't cheap, but this is an enterprise model. 

I rate Control-M nine out of 10. I will recommend it. It's easy to integrate and has the flexibility we need. 

We mainly use Control-M for integration in cloud environments like GCP and AWS. I'm an electrical engineer who mainly uses Control-M to access the files, documents, and data I need.

Control-M ensures that our files are secure and the data pipeline is accessible. It helps. It also allows us to create and monitor data while keeping it secure.

Control-M is critical to our business because we couldn't remotely access our files on the cloud without it. It makes our work easy when there's an issue in our admission sector. I would say it has been a significant help.

The web interface is handy. It's easy to use, and Control-M provides you with the necessary materials to understand the features and perform various tasks.

The interface is user-friendly. I had no prior experience, but I found it easy to work with. I had to review lots of documentation, but it's not difficult to navigate the different applications on it.

Creating and automating data pipelines is a bit difficult for a new user because some of the documentation isn't available. The documentation could be improved, and I'd also like to see automatic upgrades.

I was recently hired at this company, so I've been using Control-M for over a month now.

Control-M is stable. That's one reason the company chose them.

Control-M is scalable.

I rate Control-M eight out of ten. I have contacted them to help me understand how different things work in Control-M.

Positive

I rate Control-M eight out of ten. It's a solid application, and the graphical user interface is intuitive. Control-M can be used for different applications with various parameters.

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.