What needs improvement with Control-M?

They should have a proper integration method that clearly defines the workflow. Additionally, there should be an automation system for developers to set it up more easily and quickly. My Ops team faces certain problems that need addressing.

Sometimes jobs fail without clear reasons. That needs to be improved. Licensing costs could be improved, especially for small and mid-sized businesses. After applying patch releases or version updates, some bugs appear that affect our daily activities. Testing should be more thorough before a release. When they have any release or update, we find issues in some modules and they do not work as expected. I advise them to test their releases well. Their customer support can also be better. There can be improvements in the response time.

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.

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

They could enhance the product's data flow, job processing speed, and efficiency. Additionally, improvements are needed in real-time monitoring and alerts. Developing more robust real-time analytics capabilities to monitor and report the performance status of DevOps workflows would be beneficial.

Some reports on the UI require some improvement since the UI is not so impressive. Nowadays, many similar solutions provide a better UI as compared to Control-M. We need some improvements in the overall UI features and the reporting. The speed of the operation means sometimes when you click on any of the main items, then it takes so much time to answer your query. In terms of the business, we need to receive an instant update on the processes that are currently running. It should be easily available with a single click. The scheduling of old jobs that don't run should be a different color from the ones that aren't running successfully. That way, we can easily track the job status and see why it is not running so that the web DevOps or the ITSOM team can easily track those.

There can be an improvement in the area of finance. I contacted the BMC team here in Lima and mentioned the things that can be improved. For example, S4HANA jobs are something with which BMC has already worked in several companies. Whenever I pull an S4HANA job to the Helix Control-M tool, it pulls it naturally with all the steps. A job can have several steps, and in this case, it is very easy to control the steps taken. However, in the case of the SaaS IBP tool, it can pull the job but cannot identify the steps. So, when I want to take an action in a step, I have to split the job. We are having to work longer because we have to split the jobs from, for example, 52 steps to 12, depending on where I want it to have an action. We would like the tool to be able to identify the steps so that we are not continually splitting them as it generates more executions for me. The other improvement is that in, for example, S4HANA jobs, when the job fails, you have the status of the job. It recognizes them perfectly. In the case of IBP, it also has status but at a more minimal level. Sometimes the step fails, but the job does not fail. It ends with an error in a step without identifying it for me. Another thing that we have asked to improve is that Helix Control-M can be integrated with more tools such as Odoo. Odoo is a tool for all these companies that are not with SAP. They use it as a small ERP to generate their sales. Odoo integration will help us receive inventory reports. The communication and details related to the upgrades that are going to be happening also need improvement.

They have a department that handles requests for enhancements. I talked to Control-M guys back in October or November when they had a gathering here in Atlanta. We talked about not being able to go back in history in Helix Control-M for more than two weeks. We submitted a request for enhancement. They told us that they are working on it, and they are thinking of expanding that to 30 days. We would like to see it expand to 90 days, but they are working on it. In Control-M, we were able to go back 180 days, but that was on-prem. The storage of that data was on our own servers. We know that storage is money, and we do not expect them to store that much of the data, but at least 30 to 60 days seem proper.

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

Ingesting and processing data from different platforms can be a challenge. Control-M does allow integration for this with other systems to make this easier. For example, we integrate Control-M with an in-house system to do this. I am unsure if Control-M is compliant with Microsoft Azure environment integrations. We have some clients in Azure environments. Specifically, in Canada, government agencies and nonprofits mostly use Microsoft Azure.

Regarding product design and R&D, the DevOps pipeline could be improved with better capabilities and automation. API security and authentication is another area that could use improvement; users must have static credential passwords, which is a security concern. The REST API supports FTP for file transfers, but we would like to see additional, more encrypted protocols and simplified file transfer encryption. Currently, the solution offers PGP encryption, which isn't the most straightforward.

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

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.

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

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.

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

If you want to take it and ramp it up to doing some very heavy-duty integrations, you can find yourself at first dealing with a difficult integration. However, once you get that integration going for maybe a month or so, the next person after you will have less difficulty. That's the power. They can improve their interface. They're going through huge modernization efforts and they're getting there. They're probably 75% there, however, there's still another 25% to go.

We have some plug-ins like BOBJ, and we need a little improvement there. Other than that, it has been pretty good. I haven't seen any issues.

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

The biggest improvement they could have is better QA testing before releases come out the door.

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.

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

I've never been very successful when researching ways to utilize Batch Impact Manager. It's a tool to set up dummy jobs in your job flow and it's supposed to come back to you and say, "Okay, for this job flow, you are 50 percent complete at a certain point in time." I've had varying levels of success with it, and it's not because Batch Impact Manager doesn't work. It's just that I don't have the knowledge to make it work. I would like things like Batch Impact Manager to be a little more user-friendly, out-of-the-box. Also, BMC has a ticketing tool called Remedy, but very few places that I am aware of use it. They use solutions like Jira and ServiceNow. It would be nice if it were easier to use those solutions with Control-M. I don't have any firsthand experience where somebody comes in and says, "Okay, now JIRA and Control-M can communicate with each other. And if you want a failed job to automatically open a Jira ticket, this is how you do it." I don't believe that exists or, if it does, it is not simple. Another point is that, for a while, they were pushing a Control-M mobile app, but I haven't seen anything about it for a very long time. Maybe it was scrapped. Because I wear multiple hats in my organization, I would love it. I would love to be able to go to a mobile app, log in and see a scheduler, go to a job, and see what it's waiting on. I would be interested in the ability to support things via mobile.

New plugins could be tested better. We've had a lot of problems with the MFT plugin. We've been working through a lot of issues with BMC on it. The functionality that has existed for long periods is very stable. But the problems with the MFT plugin specifically, and problems we've had with MFT in general, have unfortunately caused the entire stack to be affected enough that our end-users couldn't even log in to the application. I wish we would have known better about how MFT impacts the application as a whole, and I wish they would have done more load testing around that. That seems to be where most of our issues have been. The issues have been so bad sometimes that the entire app goes down, not just MFT.

An issue we have run into in our lower environments is that Control-M can log you out frequently. This happens when you have a lot of applications running. Maybe it's just a configuration issue, but this is a pain point that would be good to look into.

Compared to similar technologies, AFT takes a lot of time when transferring a large file from server to server. The history module only contains a maximum of 10 days, but we would like to have access to more. For example, it would be helpful to have 30 days or two months of history available. There should be more granular control available for monitoring applications and sub-applications. For example, when we want to monitor a job, we can specify the application, but we want to have the option to only specify sub-applications that are related to it. As it is now, all of the sub-applications are monitored.

We have been experimenting with centralized connection profiles. There are some bugs to be worked out. So, we don't feel 100% comfortable with only using centralized connection profiles. We do have a mix of control on agents out there, which leads to some complications because earlier agents do not support centralized connection profiles. A lot of the areas of improvement revolve around Automation API because that area is constantly evolving. It is constantly changing, and it is constantly being updated. There are some bugs that are introduced from one version to the next. So, the regression testing doesn't seem to capture some of the bugs that have been fixed in prior versions, and those bugs are then reintroduced in later versions. One particular example is that we were trying to use the Automation API to fetch a number of run ads users from the environment. The username had special characters and backspace characters because it was a Windows User ID. In the documentation, there is a documented workaround for that. However, that relied on two particular settings in the Tomcat web server. I later found out that these settings work out-of-the-box for version 9.0.19, but those two options were not included in the config file for 9.0.20. So, it led to a little bit of confusion and a lot of time trying to diagnose, both with support and the BMC community, what is the issue. Ultimately, we did resolve that, but that is time spent that really shouldn't have been spent. It had obviously been working in 9.0.19, and I don't know why that was missed in 9.0.20, but that's a primary example of an improvement that can happen. We've also noticed that the Control-M agents themselves now run Java components. Over time, they tend to destabilize. It could be because garbage collection isn't happening, or something is not happening. We then realize that the agent is consuming quite a large amount of memory resources on the servers themselves. After recycling the agents and releasing that memory, things go back to normal, but there are times when the agent becomes unresponsive. The jobs get submitted, and nothing executes, but we don't know about it until somebody says, "Hey, but my job isn't running." When we look at it, it says Executing within the GUI, but there is no actual process running on the server. So, there is some disconnect there. There is no alerting function or the agent there that says, "Hey, I'm not responding." It is not showing up in the x alerts or anything like that. The integrated guides have not been that helpful to us. I do find a lot of the how-to videos on the knowledge portal to be useful. However, there are some videos where the directions don't always match with some of the implementations. There are some typos here and there, but overall, those have been more helpful for us. Its pricing and licensing could be a little bit better. The regular Managed File Transfer piece, is a little overpriced, especially for folks who already have licensed Advanced File Transfer. What I'm also noticing when I'm trying to recruit for Control-M positions is that the talent pool is quite small. There's not a whole lot of companies that utilize Control-M, and if they do, most people don't want to let their Control-M resources go if they're good. There is a high barrier of entry for most people to learn Control-M. There are Workbench, Automation API, and so forth mainly for developers to learn, but there are not a whole lot of resources out there for people to get more familiar with administering Control-M or things like that in terms of the technology or even awareness. So, it becomes very challenging to acquire new resources for that. A lot of the newer people coming out of college don't even know what is Control-M. If they do, they think of it as a batch scheduler, which is certainly not true in its current transformation. Control-M is a very powerful enterprise tool, but the overall perception has not changed in the past five to six years that I've been working with Control-M. There's not much incentive for people to dive into that world. It is a very small community, and overall, the value of Control-M is not being showcased adequately, maybe at the C-level for corporations. I've had multiple conversations with other people and other companies who have already exit using Control-M. About 70% of the companies out there do not take full advantage of the capabilities in Control-M. So, that type of utilization really hampers and hinders the reputation of Control-M. That's because people then acquire this untrue concept that Control-M can only do X, Y, and Z, rather than the fact that Control-M can do so much more. I don't know if it needs a grassroots marketing movement or a top-down marketing movement, but this is what the perception is because that's what I'm hearing and that's what I'm seeing. For some of the challenges that I face working in Control-M, when I go back to my management and say, "Hey, I want to spend more money in this space," they're like, "Why? Can you justify it? This is what we see Control-M as it is. It's not going to bring us value in this area or that area." I have to go back and develop a new business case to say, "Hey, we need to upgrade to MFT enterprise or something like that." So, it definitely requires a lot more work convincing management in order to get all these components. In the past, we had to justify acquiring a workload change manager. We had to justify acquiring the workload archive. All of these bring benefits not only to our audit environment but also to the development environment, but the fact that we had to fight so hard to acquire these is challenging.

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

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.

Its cost should be improved. It is more expensive than other solutions. Its architecture is old. AutoSys gives more flexibility.

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.

In general, it is a very good product, and we are very happy with it. It meets all of our expectations. Although we have used the Smart Tables facility for a long time, today we have had a need to process services that include processes that combine Mainframe and non-mainframe jobs (Windows, SAP, Informatica). An improvement for Control-M EM would be the possibility of creating combined Smart Tables, that is, they include mainframe and non-mainframe jobs so that the work order can be generated with the Unique option. Today, to achieve this we must manage global Conditions with Variables and generating a unique code to pass to the MF tables and not MF. Let me name this feature “Global Smart Tables”. Another need we have is that Control-M MFT also supports commercial file transfer protocols such as CA-XCOM.

There is definitely room for improvement. Version 9.0.20 actually comes with a web-based interface, but there are still a lot of things unavailable with it. There will eventually be more inclusions added into the web interface, but there is still a long way to go. There is also the automation API, which is a way to interact with Control-M, but it also needs a lot of improvement for other people to understand how to use it. The documentation isn't really straightforward for the initial setup. It says, "Follow the on-screen instructions." The reason why people read the documentation is to have a heads up of what to expect and what is coming up. However, when you say, "Follow the on-screen instructions," I believe that is inappropriate.

Control-M reporting is a bit of a pain point right now. Control-M doesn't have robust reporting. I would like to see better reporting options. I would like to be able to pull charts or statistics that look nicer. Right now, we can pull some data, but it is kind of choppy. It would be nicer to have enterprise-level reporting that you can present to managers.

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.

After we complete FTP jobs, those FTP jobs will be cleared from the Control-M schedule after the noon refresh. So, I struggle to find out where those jobs are saved. Then, we need to request execution of the FTP jobs again. If there could be an option to show the logs, which have been previously completed, that would help us. I can find all other job logs from the server side, but FTP job logs. Maybe I am missing the feature, or if it is not there, it could be added. When integrating different projects through Control-M, sometimes dependencies cannot be identified.

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

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

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

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

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.

There are four things that need to be improved about Control-M: * Improvement in the slow architecture. Distributed architecture is not currently supported. * The report form and display function are weak; they are not very powerful. * The Web interface is not yet a complete replacement for the C/S interface. * SSO and multi-tenant features are not yet supported.

With the current version update, I'm not sure why we needed a separate database upgrade. Why not put it all in one package? Previously, you could do it either via a manual upgrade or an in-place upgrade but it wasn't separate. But for the current version, we needed to upgrade the database separately. It meant doubling our tasks to do the upgrade. That is something that needs to be improved.

In these three areas, I would like to see improvements in Control-M: * It is not giving us diagnostic logs during job runs. * I would like them to beautify the dashboards, in terms of the number of jobs processed which have failed or are in progress. * Control-M doesn't have any dynamic reporting facilities or features.

Since we are using version 9.0.18, the web interface is a bit outdated and doesn't really support all our needs. However, we are migrating to 9.0.20, which should give us a lot more options, even in the web interface. The unifying features between Control-M for different platforms needs improvement. The scheduling options on the Control-M mainframe jobs are different than they are on our Linux server. There are a few differences here and there. There are capability-related issues between versions, but I think the latest fix pack has that covered. BMC has been doing a pretty good job about this.

The user interface is not that good. While we know that BMC is working on it, the user interface is how we work in the client. Also, the web version is quite slow when compared to the client version. Currently, per our requirements, we are planning to use Control-M Web more. However, because the UI is not good and still not up to the standard, we are not using it fully. This is one area where BMC needs to really focus further development. For installing or upgrading the PeopleSoft and SAP plugins, currently there is no way to do it via Control-M Configuration Manager. So, we are installing or upgrading the plugins, like PeopleSoft and SAP, manually. If BMC could provide an option via Control-M Configuration Manager to upgrade these plugins, it probably would reduce a lot of manual work as well as ease our work. This is one improvement that I personally want to see, because it would help our way of working.

The reporting has improved. It is not where it should be yet, but we have seen improvements. The biggest thing for me is the restrictions regarding templates for reporting. You can't create your report with your own parameters. We have a meeting weekly with BMC and our customer lifecycle architect, and this comes up quite frequently. We have been privileged enough to do work with the developers. They are aware of the requirements regarding reporting and what our customers are asking for. What I found lately about the YouTube videos, specifically, is that they are very simple. Usually, when I watch a video, I would read the manual, instructions, etc. to see if I understand it. I would hope that the interactive sessions, Q&As, or videos could be used to handle more complex issues of what they're discussing. An example would be the LDAP authentication for the Enterprise Manager. They would typically just go through the steps that are in the documentation. What people typically looking at those videos are looking for is how to do the more complex setup, doing it with SSL and distributed Active Directory data mines. Things that are not documented. I find those videos helpful for somebody who is too lazy to read the manual. I expect them to handle more than what is available in the documentation and the more complex situations. The high availability that comes from BMC with its supplied Postgres database is very limited. Even using your customer-supplied Postgres database is problematic. We have engaged with them regarding this, but it is difficult. My company doesn't want to do this and BMC doesn't want to do that. We just need to find some middle ground to get the proper high availability. We're also moving away, like the rest of the world, from the more expensive offerings, like Oracle. We are trying to use Postgres, which is free. The stability is good. It is just that the high availability configuration is not ideal. It could be better.

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.

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.

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

I will say that at one time we used to run on Solaris and not Windows, however, we were taken over by a company that decided that everything had to be on Windows. We put this in when we were the previous company, and then we were more or less given to the current bank by the FDAC, during the 2009 banking crisis. At that point, they wanted us to implement their solution, which was rudimentary at best. It was a CA product that did not meet the needs. I could not convert what we had in Control-M, to run in that system at that time. While they have a very good reporting facility, the reports that I'm asked to produce, a lot of times aren't necessarily what we need. They need to be better customized. I haven't been able to produce the right reports through their reportings facility. I was a Perl programmer and a C programmer at one time. Perl just worked right in there. A lot of our reports were written in Perl, which right now they don't like at all as Perl's not ideal for our company. I can't get to the database tables I want to get to. The database tables they allow me to get to aren't the ones I'm looking for, as, usually, I'm going right into the database, into the raw database, and pulling things out for the reporting I need. I can't do that through their reporting facility, Crystal Reports.

A Control-M on-prem license is based on the number of jobs, which is the number of tasks a particular customer wants to have. These tasks have to be run within 24 hours window. For example, if you have a license for 100 jobs, you can run a maximum of 100 jobs in a 24-hour window. If your operations could not run 10 jobs, and they ran only 90 jobs, they just carry over to the next day, but the next day, they will have 110 jobs. Control-M asks you to buy those 10 more licenses because you were out of compliance in terms of the number of licenses. This is something that needs to be indicated in Control-M GUI so that customers know the number of licenses they're going to use in this time window. Their support and documentation should be improved. I am not that satisfied with their customer support. Sometimes, they don't have the answers. Their documentation is very poor. It is not well written, and it is not in a very logical manner. You can use it on Unix, Linux, Windows, and AIX, but it needs some improvement on iSeries. It needs a built-in mechanism inside the system to give you an option to restore from the last point of failure. If a process crashes, the Control-M needs to have a mechanism in iSeries where the process can be restored from the last point of failure.

I can't think of any features that are missing at this time. It's a pretty complete solution. The licensing needs to be improved. It's a bit difficult right now. You need to pay for extra features if you need them. Other options have them for free as part of their offering. The product could be more affordable. Right now, we consider it to be expensive.

I think it's slightly expensive but at the same time, it's a good product.

Some companies have found Control-M a very costly solution, and they think it’s not worth the investment. My recommendation is that they can evaluate some points like Control-M is a leader in EMA Analysis (similar to Gartner Studio), and see the potential of Control-M and the immediate benefits that it can have to the Business. It’s my understanding that BMC will be releasing Control-M Saas, which will have a new commercial schema, more accessible than the On-Premise schema.

Some companies have found Control-M a very cost solution, and they thing it’s not worth the investment. My recommendation is that they can evaluate some points like Control-M is a leader in EMA Analysis (similar to Gartner Studio), and see the potential of Control-M and the immediate benefits that it can have to the Business. It’s my understanding that BMC will be releasing Control-M Saas, which will have a new commercial schema, more accesible than the On-Premise schema.

Its installation can be better. Currently, we have to install it manually. The file transfer feature can also be improved. It is not very easy to transfer a file from business to business. In terms of new features, they can include new technologies. It can have API integration.

The Web interface is coming along but still has some missing pieces. Today, you must still rely on the full GUI client to do everything you need. The next major release needs to focus on the lightweight web client. I'd also like to see more out of the box support for Docker, etc.

MFT needs some more polishing. We ran into problems a few times & struggled to get them sorted in time. But, BMC gave their full support to us at such times. APIs are not there one hundred percent yet, but BMC just adopted a monthly release mechanism for APIs. I can see that they are on it full time. Inbuilt integration with Connect Direct could be helpful. A developer sandbox could be very helpful to try out new features or experience them. Application Integrator can be helpful, although I don't see many templates being built by BMC experts. The hub that is available is mostly user-dependent.

Control-M MFT and Control-M API both need improvement. The Control-M MFT has to support checksums for FTP transfer between our own Control-M agents. The Control-M API does not support SQL database-type jobs, where a job has been configured to use the SQL catalog to locate SSIS. BIM needs further improvement to include any dynamic-type jobs with the workflow. The support and bug fix timeline need improvement.

The company has been working with BMC on the MFT. There are still some things about MFT which don't work the way that we want with our needs. So, we would like to see that improved. While the solution has affected the collaboration between our development and operations within our company, there is a need and opportunity to further that relationship with the use of this tool, so the enterprise uses it on all platforms. We will get there, but we are just not there yet.

I'm not sure how the solution fits together with our business modernization initiatives, as there are things outside of my area, even though Control-M is the scheduling tool of the company. They may use other things, e.g., Big Data.

The reporting tool still needs a lot of improvement. It was supposed to get better with the upgrade, and it really didn't get better. Its reporting aspects are poor, and management always wants to know things. It is sort of hard to get at tangible numbers without doing a lot of additional work outside of the system. It needs help, because it's such a useful thing to have. It needs to be more powerful and easier to use. Our users always want access to the database directly, so they can do their own queries and pull their own data. However, there really isn't a tool that we can give them that does what they want, and we don't give access to our production database. Although, in our new infrastructure, we are setting it up so we have a mirrored one where they can run queries, because there has been so much demand. Though, it would be nice if there was a tool within Control-M so people wouldn't be asking for this. I don't want to have to reach out to a third-party application company to do automated notifications of any form. Right now, we still have people manually calling people and emailing people. They should have built-in integration for better notifications using an API, similar to what xMatters offers.

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

They have Workload Change Manager, and I would like to see a little more of that. Being in the business that we're in, there's a lot of hesitance. We are very hesitant to change things in the banking industry. It isn't bleeding edge by any means. Getting people to buy into things is sort of the hard part, because everybody wants their money to be handled properly.

I would like to see the ease of upgrades improved, although they may have addressed that. We're still at an early version, but we plan to get to the latest and greatest very soon, where we can take advantage of easy upgrades. Their technicians should be more involved when we're applying new technology to Control-M, such as cloud. We're working with cloud right now, with AWS, and getting the attention of a technician, sometimes, can take some time. It would be nice if they had somebody assigned to it. Dedicated support.

We would recommend modernizing the look and feel of Control-M. They also need to move towards more self-service and development in their environment. It's very antiquated. Opening up to more open source tools and switching the connectivity to additional tools would also be improvements. Most of the tools that are available with Control-M are antiquated. The self-service is currently not as function-rich as competitors. Control-M is not the best.

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.

* A smartphone interface would be welcome. * Finding documentation on the website can be a bit confusing.

I would like to see automatic license management. And probably more importantly, some kind of machine learning to help identify the optimum automation path.

I don't think that we're actually looking for new features. I think we are more looking for a better cost/license/performance model because BMC, while we could say it's the best, is also the most expensive.