Control-M Reviews

Many companies are using Control-M in Mexico, two main companies from the retail sector have been using Control-M for around 15 years for all the administration of their processes. 

It has been helpful in reducing costs and resources.

Its compatibility with the new technologies and platforms, like the Google Cloud or Amazon, is the most valuable. Its console allows us to view the duration and execution of a process. It is also very easy to use and easy to implement.

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.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. All our clients are big companies.

Their technical support is very good. We need to create tickets, and their response time is good.

Its implementation is pretty fast and easy. The duration depends on the size of the infrastructure. It could be implemented between one to three months.

I would recommend this solution. It has good stability and integration capabilities. It is also easy to use and easy to implement.

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

Our primary use case of this solution is to keep track of our help desk tickets.

The solution helps us to make sure that help desk tickets don't go unnoticed.

I find it very helpful to be able to keep track of all our help desk tickets.

We don't use the program that much, so it is stable enough for us.

I don't think the solution is very scalable. The version we're currently using is discontinued and I haven't upgraded yet. We don't plan to upgrade soon, because we're working on our other back-office software that's more for our business.

The technical support is okay, because it's an end of life product.

The biggest reason for upgrading what we currently have, is the workforce becoming more mobile and we need to give users easier access to submit help desk tickets. That is why we are looking for a solution that can offer this feature.

We used a consultant for the deployment and the initial setup was pretty straightforward and easy.

We haven't seen a ROI yet.

Licensing costs are around $3000 a year. 

My rating for this solution is five out of ten. It's not bad, but it's not good either. There's a lot of room for improvement and I think it can be more user-friendly. In the next version I would like to see something with integrated mobile device management so that I can keep track of software and devices, having it all in one software for our help desk. I think it would be very useful.

Our primary use cases for Control-M are scheduling, jobs, monitoring, and acting on job scheduling.

We value Control-M mainly for the ability to control multiple nodes in a coordinated manner. Control-M has the ability to really coordinate across a lot of nodes. That's the most valuable thing. 

Control-M is a mature tool with many features. It's pretty stable and very easy to learn. You can become an expert in it within a short time.

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.

It is stable.

Control-M is very scalable.

Comtrol-M technical support is done through a local agent. We are in Israel, so the agent in Israel is the one giving it. It's adequate, not perfect. It's okay.

Previously we used some collection of ad hoc tools. It was a consolidated solution, i.e. a single solution that was used across the board.

The setup of Control-M is okay. It was done before my time by the vendor or a vendor agent. A third party authorized by the company itself helped with our implementation.

This is the first time for us implementing the solutions using Control-M.

We use Control-M with two administrators on average, sometimes three. With self-service, it's about 15 people who use the self-service option of it for end users, if not more.

I would like to suggest that Control-M implement a more modern way of using new tools. They should look at what they implement to determine if it is a legacy type or a batch type, then it would work better.

If they intend on moving to more modernized tools, then this approach might not be best for them. Control-M is really good for legacy, corporate enterprise but less optimal for modern, open source environments.

Overall, the main great improvements needed in Control-M is for better self-service. Give it more functionality for this self-service. The tool itself needs better out of the box connectivity to additional standard market tools.

I would rate Control-M at a seven or eight out of ten because it fits legacy stuff but once you're stepping into modern environments then you find yourself struggling. Control-M is a workhorse, but it's not 100% perfect.

Workload Manager.

Using it to moving large amounts of data.

Scalability.

12 years.

No issues with stability.

Yes, it is not currently suited well for the Cloud.

10 out of 10.

Very simple to install.

Control-M Virtual Terminal (CTMVT) for AS400: Because most of my customers are in banking, where their core banking processes run on AS400, Control-M Virtual Terminal helps us automate the interactive process on AS400.

This product helps my customers speed up the daily batch processes and also provides early warning if one or more processes are not running normally. For example, before we started using Control-M, one application took three hours to complete its end-of-day processes because many processes were waiting for human interaction. Control-M cut out the time waiting for human interaction.

Improve the capability to analyse the process output by making it more flexible. Actually its current capability is strong enough and I have no problem with Control-M implementation, but it would be great if the output analysis could accommodate functions such as arithmetic operations or regular expressions. Current capability only supports string matching.

Let me explain more technical details for this. For example, I have a job/task that has output:

Jobname : Test A
Result : Completed
Numbers of errors : 0

Currently Control-M has ability analyzing job / task output only with string / pattern matching operation, for example when output has text "Result : Completed" do something. What i mean good for improvement is Control-M has ability to analyze the output with arithmetic operation, for example i want when Numbers of errors greater than 0 do something.

To avoid misunderstanding, this is only for output analyzing, because Control-M itself has function to analyze return code number from the job/task.

I have used it for five years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

The technical support is good. I've used them many times for technical issues. So far, their support has been good for resolving all the issues.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The pricing is fair enough, considering its functionality.

I would recommend that others wanting to implement workload automation tools choose BMC Control-M as their solution.

We schedule all our batch jobs for business systems through Control-M. Almost all the applications in the organization are scheduling batch jobs with Control-M.

Using BIM, Control-M helped us to improve Service Level Operations performance.

The pressure on our operations and maintenance has been reduced.

It is capable of service orchestration, which is needed by my organization.

It provides us with a unified view, where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all our application workflows and data pipelines. This is very important for scheduling my organization's batch jobs.

The error content of Control-M is clearly displayed.

There are four things that need to be improved about Control-M:

1. Improvement in the slow architecture. Distributed architecture is not currently supported.
2. The report form and display function are weak; they are not very powerful.
3. The Web interface is not yet a complete replacement for the C/S interface.
4. SSO and multi-tenant features are not yet supported.

I have been using it for 10 years.

The solution is very stable.

We upgrade versions according to the plan. Adequate testing is done before upgrading.

Two people are required for day-to-day maintenance.

It provides general scalability.

There are about a dozen people who use the solution: administrators, operators, and observers.

We have opened case requests to their support.

We did not previously use another solution.

The initial setup was straightforward.

While there is no specific ROI, there have been fewer failures with our batch scheduling.

There are human costs in addition to the standard pricing and licensing of this solution.

We evaluated other options. The main differences between solutions were their Gartner scores.

Buy and use it.

We developed a localized platform for managing Control-M.

We don't have MFT functionality.

The biggest lessons from using this solution: service orchestration and automation.

I would rate this solution as nine out of 10.

We use it to handle most of our batch processing and all of the transactions that we do on a daily basis. It's a large financial institution which handles quite a bit of processing on an individual basis, and we both mainframe and distribute it.

We are receiving files from another system, then we use the File Watch Utility (because we have no view into the other system and how it works). However, when files arrive on certain servers, we're able to pick them up and trigger further downstream processes from them.

Control-M has improved application reliability and the SLAs in our company by quite a bit. You can see if problems are coming. If we have an SLA in a couple of hours, we know well before that couple hours if processing is behind, and it allows us to take some preventative action.

• The ability to go from one system to another.
• To be able to trigger something off of it, yet we are still on a mainframe for our batch processing. 
• To be able to trigger something from the batch, then distribute that back and forth.
• The solution has always been very streamlined. 
• Ease of use
• The BMC customer service behind the tool has been most valuable.

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.

The solution is very stable. We have our mainframe as well, which has not been bad at processing, and it's pretty stable. With the application of Control-M, we've seen minimal downtime. If there has been downtime, it hasn't been with the application. It has been with the hardware, and you can't get around that part of it.

It is a good application for scaling. We're able to scale pretty fast, whether we're building a small or large set of jobs. When we have new servers being built, agents are already put on them, and we can work pretty quickly without having to step back to handle it.

The technical support is extremely helpful. You can provide just a basic description of your case. If they need to, they can log onto your system. They can shoot you into the right direction, whether it's a knowledge article, community forums, etc. Overall, it is great technical support. Though, it has been a while since I've had a technical call with them.

Sometimes, with technical support, they will take feedback, but you don't know where that feedback goes or if it proceeds along in the thought process.

They did previously use CA-7 for the mainframe. They switched for the ability to use both distributed and mainframe from one central point.

We did recently migrated to version 9.0. Our organization did use a reseller. Our national IT group manages the application. We are just the user of it, so I wasn't involved in any of that.

It has absolutely saved us time. It has made us more efficient. As far as the processing between systems, we don't have as many people. They have been able to focus on other efforts, because we have been able to automate more stuff with Control-M.

Do the trial demo. Reach out to others via the BMC community forums. I don't believe a license is required. It's just a sign on. There are multiple vendors who are resellers or BMC partners who will provide you with input. All you have to do is ask. Feel free to ask others. The people who I have dealt with have always been forthcoming with information. They will tell you what they see as a plus or minus.

It has helped us streamline some things in IT operations, which is probably a slight improvement. We haven't seen any negative impacts.

I've used it in different forms and versions for about 20 years now. I'm pretty familiar with it from an operations standpoint. The tool itself is a ten, and the customer service behind it has made that even more so.

It's worked pretty well. I haven't been able to take a lot of advantage of some of the new features, so I haven't been able to expand on those. For what we do now, it chugs along pretty well.

Self Service for repeatable, low impact workload automation processes. BIM for SLA management. GUI client for visibility into the enterprise schedule. New to v9, the automatic Agent upgrade features have been quite helpful too. Relatively easy to perform upgrades and fix packs.

Offers a single pane of glass to our enterprise batch\workload automation environment. Allows us to empower business users to execute their own processes on demand through Self Service. We're able to proactively predict system availability thanks to BIM. Our 24/7 staff have all the right utilities to monitor and manage the schedule.

Advanced File Transfer (AFT) has limitations that cause us to use a bit more licensing than we feel is appropriate.

Almost 13 years.

No

Not usually.

No.

9/10 - Everything is typically great with customer service.

8/10 - After getting through the basics with lower level support, we tend to get problems resolved after proving our issue is "real" and we get put in contact with a technical SME.

We've used other stand-alone products that have their own scheduler while we've owned Control-M but have migrated away from that model to give ourselves the best visibility to the enterprise environment. We've broken down the silo and migrated all scheduling into Control-M.

We've been using the product for quite a long time, so reviewing initial setup wouldn't be applicable to current times. I feel the setup of v9 is quite straightforward.

In-house.

BMC does NOT have a great licensing model from my perspective.

We've evaluated many other products along the way... Just about every other major competitor in the market.