Control-M Reviews

We use it to control job submission.

This product works with all the platforms that we use today. We're able to centralize our managing of job flows for all our platforms. That's how it really helps us.

It has also improved our SLAs.

In addition, it has definitely helped development. Now we have multiple developers running their jobs and it gives them a lot of flexibility.

The most valuable features are 

• the managing of file transfers
• the product keeping up with technology.

It's also very user-friendly and easy to manage job flow.

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.

It's very stable. It's continuously running - we're a 24/7 shop. The only problem that may come up is applying it to new servers with new technologies. There can be little startup problems, but they're usually ironed out. Overall, the stability of the product is awesome.

It's very scalable. The product does technically work with any other hardware, using its agents, so it's very scalable.

Technical support is very good. They're very helpful. The only downside is getting their attention and fixing a problem in a timely fashion. But a lot of it is development. If it comes to an urgent problem, they usually respond fairly quickly. And I must say, there really haven't been that many urgent problems.

Upgrades are pretty straightforward. There's not really that much mystery to them.

We did use a consultant when we went to a new release from a very old release. But going forward, we're doing our own upgrades. Our experience with the consultant was very good. I forget which consultant we used, it was about eight years ago, but they were very good. They handled everything.

My advice would be to go ahead with Control-M. Get a lot of input from their technicians. Work with them. They're very good, and very helpful.

I've learned a lot because I came from the mainframe area, personally, where now I'm working with all this Windows and agent technology I never knew before.

We do not have Managed File Transfer yet, but we do want to get to it. We like what it offers, above advanced file transfer. We're looking forward to implementing that.

I'm going to give it an eight, only because I don't have anything else to compare it with.

With version 9, there is out-of-the-box automatic failover (high availability), as well as the new agent deployment tool.

Automatic failover allows for active-passive high availability. If the Control-M Application were to fail on one server, it would automatically start up and continue processing on the backup (failover) server.

The agent deployment tool allows for upgrading or patching agents directly from the configuration manager (CCM) instead of logging into each agent one by one. A big time saver.

N/A – We are a consulting company that implements this application for clients.

I would like to see the Mainframe Control-M IN/OUT Condition feature of Relative ODAT added to the Distributed Control-M.

I have used it since 1996.

I have only encountered stability issues with the base installation; their product development team supplies fix packs for bugs.

I have not encountered any scalability issues; the product is scalable.

Technical support is 10 out of 10; support is available around the clock, 24/7.

N/A – We replace different solutions for clients usually due to high costs, lack of support or functionality of the legacy product.

Initial setup is quite easy; a wizard-based installation process.

I am on the technical services side and am not involved in pricing.

N/A – We only work with Control-M.

Do a proof of concept to see if it meets your needs.

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.