Control-M Reviews

It provides enterprise scheduling for a lot of things, e.g., supply chain, payroll, reporting, sales and marketing, and web services, which is our online store and ordering.

We are currently running jobs on Control-M for databases, web apps, proprietary applications, Workday, Oracle, WebSphere, Kafka, and Informatica stuff on Unix and Linux. It is flexible. I haven't had any problems with compatibility.

It used to be on-prem, but now it is in a different data center in a different city. So, it is a VM.

We use the GUI, but there is a web interface that some users are using on the business side. Those users can easily check on their job flows on the web interface, so they can see whether their job has completed or it is waiting for something. It can check the status and  history of what happened, for example, the previous day.

The scheduling is quite easy to use and pretty robust.

Control-M provides us with a unified view, where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all our application workflows and data pipelines. It also provides the ability to filter. So, if I don't want to see everything, I can also narrow it down or open ViewPoint. This is very important since we have thousands of jobs to monitor. If we did not have this ability, it would be very difficult to see what is going on.

It is easy to use, and you can set things up very quickly. We can copy jobs, making copies of the existing configurations and setup. 

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.

I have been using Control-M for at least 12 years.

I haven't seen any significant issues with Control-M in several years, e.g., we haven't had to call support. So, it has been very stable.

It runs all the time. We are running thousands of jobs with little issue, especially when I compare it to some of the other systems that we use for other things. It has been very stable.

One to two people are needed for day-to-day administration. I usually do it myself.

I haven't seen any problems with scalability in terms of performance or stability. 

There are at least 50 people using Control-M. Some of them would be architects, senior programmer analysts, database administrators, Unix administrators, software engineers, and team leads.

I had an issue one time at my previous company. There was some issue with the database. We worked with Level 2 support to fix it. Other than that, there is not too much to talk about really in terms of problems. 

The integrated guides and how-to videos are very good in the solution’s web interface for reducing the time to full productivity with Control-M. BMC puts out a lot of webinars and videos on their YouTube channel. Sometimes I do use those. I go in and watch the video or webinar to see what is new or how to do things, which is very valuable.

We migrated from CA Unicenter, which was out of service and quite clunky. That system didn't have a graphical user interface; it was command line-based. It had a console, so it was very difficult to see what was going on. It was also difficult to troubleshoot. It took a long time to find information or set things up. Therefore, management decided to move to Control-M, especially since I had experience with it. It has been much easier to use and work with than CA Unicenter.

CA didn't have File Watchers. It had another way of achieving that outcome, but it was very cumbersome and not always reliable. It was also difficult to troubleshoot. 

There is a lot of logic in Control-M that you can do. For example, after a job completes, there are actions you can do. There are actions before the job completes or before it starts. There are actions you can do afterwards. There was some logic that you can add to the job, and we just didn't have it with CA.

The calendars are also a lot easier to work with using Control-M. The CA calendars were just terrible. In Control-M, we have a lot less calendars, about 20 calendars, compared to 80 or 100 in CA.

It is faster to implement things like new jobs or projects with Control-M. Whereas, in the past, certain things would be executed manually, like scripts and workflows. It is very easy to use. I can set up jobs and workflows quickly, which helps developers to test.

It is very easy to set up a PoC. If someone just wants to do a quick test, it is very easy to do. Assuming that everything is in place, it is quite easy to test or set up cyclic jobs.

We did the setup twice. The first time was a migration from another system, which was not BMC. That took three months, which was still pretty fast, and it was very successful. The second time was an upgrade to version 19, and that took about two months, and it was also quite successful. From my perspective, the solution was very good as far as upgrades go. We didn't have any major issues, before or after the upgrade.

We had a vendor help us out, but overall it was very smooth and a success. We used Control-M’s Conversion Tool when migrating from CA Unicenter to Control-M and the vendor helped us. Using the Conversion Tool was very important because it speeded up the process. It took all the information from one system and transferred it over, which saved us a lot of time. So, we spent more time on the verification. We spent less time on the setup and spent more time just verifying the setup to make sure everything was correct. It was a time saver for us.

My experience with BMC during our initial deployments and upgrades was very good. I got quick responses with good information. The people that I dealt with were knowledgeable and helped to resolve the problems. So, my experience was very positive. I would rate them as 10 out of 10. I never had any issues.

Control-M has helped us achieve three times faster issue resolution. We have it integrated with ServiceNow, so it tickets automatically. Whereas, in the past, we used to do it manually. We had operators opening tickets, so it speeds up ticket resolution for opening and assigning a ticket. Also, Control-M captures some errors. Sometimes, this helps to troubleshoot any problems. You can set up alerts for jobs that run too long, etc. So, it has a lot of features that we use.

Control-M helped us double or triple our Service Level Operations performance.

CA sent us a proposal and IBM also sent one for Tivoli Workload Scheduler. We saw their presentations and packages, then did some research. We thought Control-M was the best solution based on experience and feedback from others. I had experience on Control-M already. I had been working on it for several years and had a positive experience. The other thing was just ease of use. Tivoli and Unicenter just do not seem as polished. They didn't look as easy to use, especially Tivoli. I think we heard that Tivoli was very clunky and not easy to use.

It was mostly my experience with it. Control-M was easy to use, very stable with no issues, and easy to configure and maintain. Whereas, CA was not as easy to use nor polished. CA also always keeps on buying other companies and incorporating things, so the experience is not as smooth. With Tivoli, we just heard that it was terrible to use and lacked a good interface. We had another Tivoli product from IBM for backups, and it was just terrible.

Give Control-M a chance. If somebody is considering the solution, they should install a demo on their system and use it. It is very easy to use. It has a lot of options and features. BMC is pretty good when it comes to upgrades and implementing new features, so there is always stuff coming in. There are a lot of new options that we haven't even tried.

Of course, you should compare all your options, but Control-M is a good choice. It is probably the best.

In the future, we will probably use Control-M as part of our DevOps automation toolchains and leverage its “as-code” interfaces for developers.

I would rate it as nine out of 10. The reporting is something I would like to see improved. Other than that, there is not much I dislike about it. I work with it every day. I have been working with it for the last dozen years or so. It is an excellent product. It just needs more reporting.

Most of my work goes through Control-M, e.g., all my development work. When it goes to production, it moves to batches. This will be either daily or monthly batches.

There are many applications running in Control-M, e.g., a quantitative risk management ALM application.

Most of our production jobs at the organization level are fixed through Control-M, running as either mainframe jobs, Informatica jobs, or QRM software-related jobs. Also, file sharing through FTP jobs and dependency setups between different software patches all run through Control-M.

We use file transfer jobs in our workflows. For example, if I want to share reports to end users in the production shared area, where specific users have access, Control-M makes this very easy as soon as a job is complete. The FTP job copies the report to a defined shared area, triggering an email to the user with a link. As soon as users are notified through email, they can open the email and click on the shared link to view the reports.

We have automated critical processes with Control-M. Our report deliveries are now automated. We automated our batch jobs and can check our dependencies through Control-M with minimal manual intervention. This has saved a lot of time and manual mistakes. For example, we used to copy old reports and send them via email, then users would come back to us, saying, "These are not this month's reports. These are old reports." After automating these reports with Control-M, there were no errors at all.

Multiple software can be collaborated through Control-M, then we can seamlessly monitor when it goes into production after a scheduled daily or monthly deployment. Even though we don't have any privileges to change these jobs, we can monitor them with read access and see how they are being executed. We can also verify their dependencies and see the logs. If there are any failures, we can get the logs from Control-M and fix them in the development environment, in the cases that are required to be done as soon as possible. It provides a complete picture about how the batches are running in production.

We have a lot of things that need to be considered. Everything needs to be done one after another in Control-M, where it provides us a pictorial representation of job dependencies, and even a person without technical knowledge can understand it by looking at the pictorial representation of jobs. So, we can provide the exact time when it can start. Then, we can update the users about the expected time for the job's completion. In case of any delays, we can understand them, then provide a new ETA to the users. Without Control-M, it would be difficult to provide these estimates.

We are using the web interface. We are not going through the mobile because we are a bank. Everything we do is through our laptops, not through a mobile. The web interface supports our business initiatives well. Whenever we want to see the updates, we need to connect to Control-M. We know what needs to be monitored and verify them depending on what their dependencies are. If the batch is still running, we can understand the historical information, then calculate and provide an ETA to users.

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. 

I have been using Control-M for almost six years.

I have never faced any issues with stability. It is very good.

10 to 20 people are administering it.

I have never faced any issues with its scalability.

500 to 600 people are actively using Control-M. These are business analysts, team leads, managers, developers, and senior developers. Anyone who is touching the development and production would have access. 

Whenever we have issues, they are resolved through our organization's admin.

With the integrated file transfer feature, most things are automated. Previously:

• We used to copy the report, then send manual emails. However, with this feature, we are able to complete tasks with minimal monitoring because they are automated. Users are automatically notified as soon as the reports are complete. 
• We used to work during the daytime and after business hours. We were forced to open and view that the reports were there. Or, we waited until the next day to copy the reports, sharing and sending them by email. With this feature, we are less bothered. We can wait until the morning of the next day. We just go into the office and see if the reports have been shared already, seeing that everything is okay. So, during the night, some reports are generated and emailed to the users. 

The integrated file transfer feature has saved us a lot of time and manual effort, approximately two to three hours a day. Also, users are notified as soon as the reports are complete, where they used to wait until the next morning. They can just verify their email using the office provider mobile. Then, they connect to their laptops and get the reports. So, if they need the reports and are waiting for them, then they are not required to wait until the next morning to receive them, saving about 10 hours of their time.

I was not involved with the initial setup. That was before my time.

Our data transfers have improved using Control-M processes, e.g., our monthly batches. When we used to do things manually, like copying files and reports, we used to take three to four days to complete a batch. However, with the automated file transfers and report sharing, we have been able to complete a batch within two and a half days and our reports are on time to users. So, 30% to 40% of the execution time has been saved.

Control-M has helped us achieve faster issue resolution. Whenever we come across any data-related errors, instead of going into the process, we just get the Control-M log. Nearly 50% of our issues are resolved by looking at the Control-M logs. 

Control-M has helped us to improve Service Level Operations performance by 30%, because we no longer need to manually copy reports and receive email notifications. So, the process has improved a lot.

Organizations looking for seamless integration with different applications can move forward with Control-M. In my experience, Control-M provides a good solution. It also integrates with different applications and software.

At this point, we are not using the solution's streamlining for data and analytics projects.

I would rate it as eight out of 10.

We are mainly scheduling jobs on Linux Windows, SAP, and DataStage environments; a few other application integrations, like Micro Focus, and third-party applications, like Web API.

We are using it for banking and financial services.

We use Control-M as part of our DevOps automation toolchains and leverage its “as-code” interfaces for developers on a few JSON-based script applications. This is in the testing phase, but in production for one or two applications, and rolling out new applications and application updates is much faster. Earlier, we had to go through a lot of processes. We had to raise a change request and work through various approvals, then the scheduling team would do it and there would be a lot of failures. Now, they are directly creating those jobs and submitting them. It is coming in automatically because it is running in Control-M.

Multiple critical processes have been automated. Here are two of those processes:

1. Our critical banking application for end users, especially to check their bank data, e.g., how much is in their account, how much money they have withdrawn, etc. 
2. It is used for ATM withdrawals and runtime data, e.g., SMSes go out with how much has been debited or credited in their account.

Automating these processes provides more visibility to our application team. They can see critical jobs failing and immediately taking action in Batch Impact Manager (BIM) with the help of our team.

The most beneficial features are the Forecast option and Archiving feature, as well as the integration option with other applications and tools to the API. When it comes to the API integration with any third-party tool, we can integrate using the application integrator tool and API interface with web APIs, which is the best part. Control-M has its own Forecast solution. Therefore, we can forecast how many jobs are going to run, on which day, and at what time. Another benefit is the tool's Archiving feature. So, we had a lot of requirements, like when an application or end user team would say that they want to see the log or output of the job from two or three months before. So, the archive solution is very helpful because we can keep at least a year's worth of data for our environment.

It has a very good GUI. We can search for a job very easily. The web interface, user account creation, and access control are very good. From an access control point of view, we can provide access to as many users as we want. A second group of users can be given a certain number of features, according to the requirements. The web interface is very easy for end users to login and use. A lot of features have been added, e.g., adding jobs. They can add jobs to their stuff, whatever they want, then get it validated by the scheduling team and work it into production.

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.

I have been using it for almost 12 years.

It is very stable. If we are using agents, it runs without any issues. I have sometimes found issues when we are running it with an agentless solution. However, with the agent, it does not have many issues. It will have an issue once or twice a year.

It is a very scalable solution. 

Almost all our end user application teams are using it. 

For day-to-day administration, we have two people. For scheduling, we have four people. 

The integrated guides and how-to videos in the solution’s web interface is a good approach. There are a lot of documents and webinars. Also, the support is very good. We receive good responses very quickly.

I would rate the technical support as nine out of 10.

We migrated from Tidal Automation. In Tidal Automation, various options are not there. So, jobs are running mostly using an admin account. When all jobs are running using an admin account, that is a risk. However, in Control-M, we have various options. We can use an admin account as well as a separate account, like a user account, to run jobs. Whereas, these features were missing in our previous tool. 

We switched from Tidal to Control-M because the application team wanted more control. There is a web-based solution for Tidal, but all the data is shown there. For example, if there are 10 applications, then the web applications team can see all 10 applications, though they might only want one application. Even if the backup team wants to view just their backup jobs, they see all the applications that are working. However, in Control-M, we can control whatever applications that we want, limiting what can be seen by each team. 

The initial setup was easy. BMC provided all the documentation before starting. They did it in the development environment and targeted various applications. They showed us what they were doing before they implemented it. So, we were coordinating with them.

Deployment took three months.

I was involved during the initial setup. It was done by BMC's professional services team and I was part of the support.

It is a good investment. I think we are paying the same amount of money for Control-M that we were paying for Tidal and not getting as many features.

Control-M has helped us achieve faster issue resolution. It is 60% to 70% faster than what was happening before.

Service Level Operations have improved in the sense that fewer team members are required as compared to before. So, we had a bigger team, and that has been reduced because of Control-M's latest features, like development. Therefore, a lot of things are now being done by the application team instead of having a separate scheduling team, which has now been reduced. The application team is currently being trained to handle more things on their own. They also have visibility on what jobs are running and what jobs are failing.

In our environment, pricing depends on the total number of maximum jobs that can run, which is fine. Therefore, if the number of jobs increases, then the licensing fees will increase.

I have hands-on experience with Redwood and ActiveBatch solutions. If there are a lot of Windows requirements with Windows jobs, then definitely ActiveBatch is the best solution. If we see there are a lot of SAP-based requirements, then Redwood is the best solution and either Redwood RunMyJob or Redwood CPS work for this. If we see Unix or any other application with jobs, then Control M is the best solution.

While we do use Control-M to streamline our data, we don't use it much to view our data and analytics project since there are various third-party applications of the bank where jobs are running. The major work that we do is creating and adding those jobs to the tool.

We are not using file transfer at all because we are a US-based financial company. They have a lot of restrictions for file transfer between third-parties, so Control-M is not used for file transfers.

It is one of the best scheduling tools in the market for batch job automation and DevOps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are using Control-M mainly to schedule our jobs and also for file transfers. We are now in the process of using Control-M to take some workload off our mainframe. 

We use it mainly for job automation and handling large chunks of data automatically.

We have Informatica workflows, which make up about 50% of all our jobs. Then, we have all kinds of software on Windows and Linux servers. The file transfers are another big thing on Control-M. However, we are mainly using it to automate our in-house scripts, like monitoring and whatever needs to be done.

We mainly use desktop clients. Some users are also on the web. Currently, we don't use the mobile interface at all.

We have some batch jobs or Informatica workflows that create the files for file transfers. We have those on Control-M, so it is all automated and happens through the conditions.

Our daily customers' accounts and credit card actions files are processed by Control-M automations every day. That is pretty much part of the core of our business. Other critical components are some monitoring scripts and health checks on our servers, which are run from Control-M. This has made things easier because we have the Batch Impact Manager on Control-M. So, we can use that to send emails, like, "We haven't received the daily-files yet. Or, the daily files are going to be late." Therefore, we have proactive monitoring if things aren't running on schedule.

I don't think it transfers data any faster than before. However, we now have better control and can also send emails to the correct people directly from Control-M, like, "Hey, this transfer is now complete." In terms of data transfers, and if something goes wrong, it is easy to just rerun the file transfer.

If we are using the Batch Impact Manager, it has caught a few times where the job has been running for a while and may not meet the deadline. There may be a loop somewhere, where one job has been stuck for a few hours. So, in this case, the Batch Impact Manager notifies us that it is taking quite long. There are days that this is useful to locate issues.

Multiple scheduling options allow you to do anything you want, whenever you want, and however you want. You can easily be in control when things happen.

Control-M provides us with a unified view where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all our application workflows and data pipelines. This is quite important because I am our Control-M administrator. So, it is pretty important to me personally, but also for the company. It may not yet be quite in the center of our business, but we are clearly using Control-M as our main scheduling program.

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.

I have been Control-M for two and a half years.

The stability is pretty good. We haven't had any issues with Control-M being unstable in the last two years. They are up and running 24/7.

One person is the minimum needed for day-to-day administration of Control-M. We have three admins, who are also our SFTP and file transfer team. Someone just decided that they should be the Control-M admins, so they made all three of us go through the admin classes. Now, we have three admins. 

Scaling has been pretty simple and a straightforward process. We just recently got the Control-M Workload Change Manager, which is an additional plugin to the main software. That installation was also quite easy. We got it up and running pretty quickly.

We have about 10 people using Control-M actively, who are system specialists and business intelligence specialists. We have three admins, then we have some batch job designers from the mainframe team using Control-M. We have also trained some of our Informatica people so they can monitor their own workflows and create new jobs. They can basically do whatever they need to do by themselves. 

I would rate their technical support as five out of five. They have been really helpful and knowledgeable. Even though there have been some cases where support has originally said, "Well, we don't know for now," they have asked for data and provided us with a solution pretty much every time we have had any issues. 

If they don't have a solution on hand, they take it to the lab. We communicate with them and the lab, then everything works out pretty well. Even if there is a big issue, which isn't very common, they have just taken it, and said, "We will see. We will go to the lab where we will test".

The interface guide and YouTube videos have been somewhat useful. However, there is too much data in there. When you try to search something, you get too many search results that weren't exactly what you were looking for.

I don't think anything has changed that much. We used to have CA-7 before Control-M. Now, Control-M is just kind of taking over. So, not much change happened. It is just a new software to do the old job. 

We have benefited from Control-M. It is much easier to use and a bit more versatile than CA-7. 

I personally don't use CA-7 because it is located on the mainframe, and I'm not a mainframe guy.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup of Control-M.

We are currently in the process of upgrading Control-M into a new version. We have been working closely with BMC's technical people. 

So far, I think it has been good. No one has been talking about getting rid of Control-M. It is more like we are increasing our Control-M usage, if anything.

Control-M has improved our service levels on pretty much any aspect. Now, we can see the Control-M estimates of when a certain job will be completed. They become pretty accurate once a job has been running for a week or two. It can predict quite well when a certain job will be ready. So, if a customer asks us, "When are we going to receive our file?" I can check on Control-M, then say, "Well, I would say around...," whatever time it shows and let them know.

We have the CA-7 on the mainframe, and I have seen it being used along with Control-M. Control-M seems to offer a much better user interface, mainly because it is graphic and not on the black screen of a mainframe session.

I don't think our data analysts are currently using Control-M. We do have Informatica software in use, which is some sort of data analyst software.

Always make sure that you have at least double checked everything, because Control-M does everything you tell it to do and exactly as you tell it. Therefore, make sure you are giving the right orders.

Working with Control-M has been pretty complex, but that has been mainly due to our corporate policies since we are located in Finland and in the banking sector. So, there are hundreds of things that we had to consider. While it has been a complex process, it has been more because of our corporate policies rather than Control-M. Once we decided everything, and everything was approved, just taking Control-M into use has been a pretty straightforward process.

Definitely take the scheduler course provided by BMC. That was hugely helpful for all of us. Trying to learn Control-M on your own will be a tough path to walk.

We have Control-M on the mainframe. As the mainframe will be taken down in a few years time, we have to replace the mainframe scheduling agent with something else. That will be Control-M.

Our dev teams are running their own fields. Once they are ready, they go through systems to store into production, then we can automate it. However, during DevOps and other testing phases, we may not use Control-M at all.

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

In my organization, Control-M supports large services and data management. We are mostly using it to schedule jobs in applications, like Informatica PowerCenter, PeopleSoft, and SAP.

We are using the desktop interface.

We utilize Control-M’s streamlining of our data and analytics projects. We are in the retail industry. We are also into other industries, like gas stations, baby stores, and online stores. When it comes to data, we have a lot coming daily. It can be product, purchase, or business information. Only 70% of the data is being used with Control-M. It can be a data transfer from one location to another location. Or, it can be putting the data into a database, then storing it for the future. Every day, the purchase history and product details are uploaded to the database using a Control-M job. Because of that, our business is able to identify our customer's needs. Using its analytics, we are tracking reports that help us provide more services to our customers. Control-M is definitely playing a vital role, in terms of handling a lot of data.

There are very critical processes that we have automated in Control-M, e.g., order confirmation. This is a service when a customer tries to purchase something from our online stores. Normally, when a customer places an order, it makes updates in the background, puts some things in a database, and performs some actions, then it gives an order confirmation. That has to be done within a short span of seconds. For us, that is a critical service because a customer should receive an order confirmation as soon as they make a purchase. This is one thing that we have automated. Because a lot of things are done in the background when a customer tries to order something, the process is automated. Automation of these processes improved the quality of our service. It has also reduced manual efforts and the time to deliver services has decreased, giving us a time advantage.

The scheduling feature and scheduling tool are the most valuable features. I like the scheduling services that we have in Control-M, which are very beneficial to our organization because they are automating things. There is also less manual work. We can schedule a task without any manual interruptions.

We use the File Transfer feature from BMC. Before File Transfer, we used to have to develop the script, which was always a problem for us. After using File Transfer from BMC, a lot of our issues were resolved. Also, it is ready to use. There are many extra, additional features, which help our day-to-day work requirements. File Transfer is a fantastic feature of BMC.

The web version is quite new. When compared to the client version, the web version has made a lot of improvements that needed to be done.

Because of the Role-Based Administration feature, we have been able to give autonomy to our users to develop their cycles how they want. Using this Role-Based Administration feature, we are able to give restricted access based on their job roles. 

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.

I have been using Control-M for four years and 10 months. It has been close to five years.

Control-M is 100% stable.

For day-to-day administration of Control-M, normally less than five people are required in our organization.

As per our requirements, it is okay most of the time. We do not need to search for another solution. It is very scalable.

There are currently 700-plus people using Control-M services. Their job roles are software developers and system engineers. 

In 80% to 90% of situations, BMC has provided better solutions. In rare cases, the support was not an asset.

BMC Control-M videos and webinars are being uploaded on YouTube or the BMC website. These are really helping us a lot to solve issues or understanding some things. One thing that BMC needs to continue is giving more webinars and uploading videos.

My company used a couple of applications before using Control-M.

When we migrated Control-M, we tried to use Control-M's Conversation Tool. However, it did not fully satisfy us per our requirements.

Normally, we do upgrades ourselves. However, if we need assistance, then we normally contact BMC by opening a case in Case Management.

Control-M has improved quality levels as well as standards. When it comes to cost and time, we have seen an improvement of approximately 70%.

The use of Role-Based Administration has eliminated the need to submit tickets or requests to the Control-M administrator.

BMC's price is based on the number of jobs.

If it is for scheduling, we only use Control-M in our organization. For non-scheduling solutions, then we probably will look at other solutions that are feasible for us.

DevOps automation toolchains are in our roadmap for next year.

We want to use Centralized Connection Profiles in the future.

I would rate it as nine out of 10.

Most of my customer's jobs now run on Control-M, mainly on the finance side and for data management. Those are the core applications that we are running. We are using it as a scheduling tool. 

We have a few other applications that we are migrating to Control-M. Until about two weeks ago we were running on an older version of Control-M, so not many people were interested in migrating to it. But now we are running on an updated, supported version. So more applications should move to it.

Control-M is deployed on-prem.

Let's say the business wants to run some reports. We give them a console or the Self Service where they can run jobs. That way, they don't have to depend on the IT team: “Hey, can you run this job?" And then they have to open a ticket and the IT personnel have to keep to the SLAs. Instead of that, we give them Self Service where they can run their own jobs and they can see the data instantly.

For each job we have SLAs and, based on the SLA we define which ones are critical. The most important processes for us include the SFTP process. We have a few files that are very important and are generated every day. They have to be delivered to the business before they come into the office. That is a very critical process. We tried various options but after implementing Control-M we had better results. Another of our critical jobs is what we call our master data management, where we have near real-time data. We have a few SLAs where a job has to be completed within 20 or 30 seconds. That means the data has to be delivered within that amount of time. Using Control-M helps us to monitor and deliver critical data to the business.

We used to use a native scheduler, like a cron or MDM scheduler. Those kinds of schedulers were very effective, but there were no cross-platform capabilities. With Control-M, we have both types on a single page, and we can see when a file is available and when it's picked up. If I have two different data centers and Job A is running data center 1 and Job B is running in data center 2, when we used the native schedulers for moving files and getting alerts, there was always a delay of a couple of seconds. We have tight SLAs. With Control-M, we're able to deliver on time. While our earlier and our current schedulers are automated, we have a better solution now.

Control-M has also helped to improve our Service Level Operations performance. If I had to take a wild guess, I would say it has improved SLO performance by 20 percent.

The main reason we came to Control-M was to integrate everything together and have it all in a single platform. We use different applications, and integrating them was not possible previously. With Control-M it is. Apart from integration, the main features are for long-running jobs and SLA alerts. But there is definitely a lot to explore and to work on within Control-M.

The solution provides us with a unified view where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all application workflows and data pipelines. We have a team called pro-mon and they monitor all the jobs for us. A single view makes it easy for them to monitor things. Control-M comes with a documentation section for each job. As an SME, I put in the high-level steps in the job documentation; what to do if a job fails. They can read it and do level-one support. Some jobs are very critical and require an immediate call, but with other jobs they can wait, re-run, or read the documentation to give them some guidance. That really helps all our teams. That single view for the monitoring team, where they can see things in a single application, is important because the business needs all jobs completed within their SLAs. Indirectly, it's helping the business to get its data on time.

Another reason we use Control-M is to integrate file transfers within our application workflows. We have cross-business functionalities, where one business generates something and another business wants to use those files. We use a lot of MFT and AFT functionalities. As a result, Control-M has definitely improved our timelines and SLAs. We have an easy-to-monitor solution now. Before Control-M, each application team had to monitor its own jobs. Sometimes they would miss something and they wouldn't know that there is a mistake in a job. But once Control-M came into the picture and we had a dedicated team to monitor everything, we were able to provide timely files to the business. The business is very appreciative of the improvements after implementing Control-M. It has improved things a lot when it comes to providing files to the business on time.

With my current customer we have been using Control-M since 2017. I started using it over the last four or five years.

Now that we are using the supported version, we can leverage a lot of the features. Going forward, it's going to be very actively used by all our business teams, including all the applications teams. We don't have many jobs at the moment, around 200 or 300 jobs, but down the line, in the next six months or year, we are going to double that count.

It's a good tool, and they're coming up with a lot of new features and a lot of improvements on the scalability side. Version 20 might have come up with more features and more performance-related things.

Control-M is running multiple applications for us, including SFTP, MFT, Arkin, Informatica, and Java. There are also a lot of BA jobs and a few OS jobs. We have also integrated some of our reports with Control-M and I'm running them on my local machines. We are planning on expanding Control-M to other applications in the future. That's one of our next steps, to go to applications at the organization level. We are working on it.

We are not heavily dependent on Control-M as of now, but we are slowly migrating to it. Our users of Control-M are developers and application owners, which puts our number of users in the double digits. There are some business users as well. But it's more the application side and the team leads who are using it. Previously, I worked with a very big financial company where we had thousands of jobs. Everyone was using it there.

Jesse, my account manager, is very prompt and he answers all my questions in a timely manner.

We have hardly reached out to the support team. Whenever we would reach out to them when we were running on the older version, they would always say, “Hey, you have to upgrade in order to troubleshoot.” In my experience, the support has not been excellent but it has met expectations. Since upgrading our version, we haven't reached out to the support team.

With earlier versions, the support was not accurate or delivered in a timely manner. What would happen is that I would be in production mode and I would have an issue and would want to get someone on a call to see what was happening. But they would always say, “Hey, provide the log first and then we'll review and we'll get back to you." I feel that when a customer asks about a production issue, they should jump onto the call to see what is going on, and then collect the logs. At least that would give me hope that the support is there and that they are on top of it. I did not get that kind of support from Control-M.

It could be this was just my experience from a very limited number of tickets. Once or twice we had a production issue and I was expecting that someone would join the call immediately. I know they need a log to see what is going on, but before that they could jump on and see if they can fix it. Sometimes an expert will know what the problem is before seeing the log.

I do work with support from other vendors' applications as well, and I get a different response from those vendors, so this is something BMC might have to improve.

We moved from native schedulers to Control-M.

We have in-house people who are expert enough to implement Control-M, but due to other engagements, they were not able to do so.

The initial setup was straightforward. The vendor implemented it for us. We reached out to our account manager from BMC, and BMC sent a certified vendor, Cetan Corp., to our environment and they implemented it for us. Overall, it was a simple installation, a simple environment. Our initial deployment took about three months, end-to-end.

We recently upgraded and we also used a partner for that, VPMA Global Services. The process took about six months but that was not six months of work every day. The actual working time on it was about one month. The other five months were due to securing hardware, testing things, et cetera.

When we went with VPMA for the upgrade, we gave them our requirements, how we wanted our implementation to be. They came up with an architecture diagram and we had an internal discussion about it. The VPMA team came up with their recommendations, multiple approaches, and we choose the best of them.

Both partners were recommended by our account manager at BMC.

I also definitely check the integrated guides and how-to videos. They are very helpful. Products like this might be using different approaches, but they have the same types of features, so we had an idea of how to implement this. We know there are best practices so we went ahead and searched the integrated guides and YouTube support. We got a lot out of them. They're very helpful for our new people. They can search and go through the how-to videos.

We don't require many people for day-to-day administration of Control-M. We spend around one to two hours on Control-M most days. The monitoring team is always monitoring all the jobs on the screen. But the application owners, who are the admins, hardly spend two to three hours on it per day, unless there is an alert.

Whatever we have spent has definitely been worth it. At every renewal we evaluate it internally. As a Control-M SME, I have to provide some stats in terms of man-hours, the amount that we spent on it, the stability, and SLAs. Based on these, we have always had a good impression. We have to justify it that it's worth the cost, and it is.

Initially, our licensing model was based on the number of jobs per day. That caused some issues because we were restricted to a number. So at our renewal time we said, “We want to convert from number of jobs to number of endpoints.” That cost us extra money but it gave us additional capabilities, without worrying about the number of jobs.

At first we had the standard edition and later on needed some additional features and we paid extra for those.

Control-M helps us to proactively monitor things and see what is coming up and what is happening. Based on that, we can take steps for resolution. But I don't think Control-M itself has the ability to proactively fix issues.

Overall, it's a good automation tool. And it gives us a single view of the customer. I would advise going with something like it. I'm not going to advise about any particular solution. All these tools are very powerful and give you a single view.

Because of security issues that we have, we are a private and public enterprise. Our main area is the lottery in Portugal. This is the most important business that we have. Also, because the money comes from the game, we need to invest it in social, health, and real estate areas.

For my current organization, it is a new tool. We are implementing the tool right now. We have a lot of impact jobs running every day and night, but in a skeletal matter. So, these jobs are running at one o'clock in the morning. With historical run jobs that we needed, we know it took six or seven hours to finish. Then, we have another cron job in another system at eight o'clock. With Control-M, we can reduce a lot of this time. Because when this job is finished, it will immediately start the job in another system. At this moment, we do this manually with an operator. Sometimes, they have errors because it is manual. It is not robots who do the job. Also, it takes a long time. We are losing time between jobs, if it is not automatic.

Our operator guys mostly use the web interface. As a client, we are more using the UI for the planning of the jobs. However, if we want only to do monitoring, then we only use the web interface. As we continue to work from home, there are a small number of operators who are still at our work. For security purposes, it is important to have the web interface in place because we don't like to install it on our clients because we don't have administration of the PCs. We cannot install on laptops without authorization. Access to Control-M only with a browser is really important and makes our job easier to do. We can access Control-M with a laptop, app, or mobile.

Before Control-M, we didn't have a centralized view and could not view what happened in the past to determine what will happen in the future. The Gantt view that we have in Control-M is like a project view. It is nice because we sometimes have some application maintenance that we need to do. So, in a single console, we can hold the jobs for the next hour or two. We can release that job when it is finished. This is a really nice feature that we didn't have before. It is something really simple, but we didn't previously have a console where we could say, "For the next two hours, what are the jobs that we will run? And, hold these jobs not to run." This is really important.

We use the Conversion Tool for audit purposes. We have had things working for a long time, but not documented. The Conversion Tool is nice because it helps us understand our jobs, whether they should be in Control-M or not. 

The most valuable feature for us is Managed File Transfer. We have a lot of file transfers in-house. Every FTP was being done by hand. Managed File Transfer is simply the best thing for us. This is the most used feature.

The credentials vault is really important. Before Control-M, every user's operator needed to know the username and password to access a system. With Control-M, we don't need to share passwords anymore. We write down the username and password one time, then we use it without knowing the password. 

The amount of integration that Control-M already has. We use the web services. We are using the SQL and Oracle integrations because we have a huge environment and a lot of applications in-house. Because we have integrations with all these tools, we don't need to give access to the operators. Now, we have everything in a single pane of glass. The operators can see all night what is happening, where, and if they need manual intervention.

One of our most used features is Control-M's library of plugins for orchestrating and monitoring work flows and data. We have a lot of different applications, plugins, and API automation, which are really important for us. We are migrating a tool from Apache, which is Java code. So, we can schedule the Java code with the API automation plugin that Control-M delivers for us. We are now starting to operate this way.

We use the Control-M Role-Based Administration feature. It is integrated with our Active Directory. We have groups in Active Directory, who are administrators and operators. Then, we map this role-base directly in Control-M. Role-Based Administration empowers us to decentralize product teams to manage their own application workflow orchestration environments with full autonomy. We divided this by environment: production, non-production, and demo environments. For each of these environments, we have different roles in Microsoft Active Directory. These roles are implemented by Control-M Role-Based Administration.

The use of Role-Based Administration eliminates the need to submit tickets or requests to the Control-M administrator. They don't open tickets and are autonomous when doing their job. From a security posture standpoint, it is important for us because we know that only the people who have credentials can access these environments, doing the job that they have to do.

We use Control-M Centralized Connection Profiles. We create the connections for the user and password. After that, we don't need to share passwords anymore, which is important for us.

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 have been working with Control-M for more than 10 years. First, I was working in a consulting company, as a consultant, where we implemented Control-M. Now, in the last year, I have been a customer in a huge organization in Portugal. 

We can work with jobs that should run daily because of it. When we need to do an upgrade, it is really important for us not to have any downtime.

We are always afraid to install the latest version. However, with Control-M, it is really comfortable to move onto the latest version because of the stability. When I worked as a consultant, I never had any problems. Even when we had Control-M in two data centers, if one goes down, then we can run Control-M in another data center. Few software solutions have the stability of Control-M. 

We have different areas: real estate, games, social activities, and healthcare. The scalability for us is really important because we have different agents installed by business area. We don't mix it. Also, we have to always buy our VM servers per business area, so we can upscale how we want, which is really nice to have in Control-M. Critical jobs can run from different servers if something is not working.

BMC support is an eight out of 10. Everyone has centralized outsourcing for the first line of their service desk. They always ask some of their normal questions. After a while, once those guys know our workflow and understand that we already have some knowledge in Control-M, it is really fast to solve the problem.

We really needed a job scheduling tool. At the end of the day, we bought BMC Control-M. It is for a distributed environment where we have a lot of different working systems, operating systems, and applications. Control-M is the application and tool that meets our expectations.

The initial setup was straightforward. It is really easy to understand the architecture, and even install it. Based on some internal rules that we have in-house, Control-M fits well with our architecture.

It took a day to install and a week to implement. After one week, we had some jobs working and were able to get the users to see, control, and monitor the jobs. We had it deployed and working in less than a week for Windows, Linux, and HP-UX operating systems as well as VMS.

My principal difficulty implementing in-house was that people didn't understand what the job scheduling tool can do for us. It was long hours, and a lot of days, saying to our internal colleagues that this is the right tool. With this tool, we didn't need to have a lot of consoles anymore, i.e., working 24/7 to try and open every console to understand what is happening. We can have a single tool for all the jobs, applications, and operating systems. We can monitor and schedule all the jobs. They thought this is rocket science and doesn't exist. This solution has existed for a long time and is really important. 

The use of Centralized Connection Profiles has helped lower our total cost of ownership. Before BMC Control-M, we had different environments with the same users. We saw before that even the passwords for the different environments are the same. Before Control-M, we had passwords in emails and chats. Sometimes, the password would expire. With Control-M, we changed that. Every environment has an administrator who needs to write a password. We give them access to write the password directly into Control-M. The person configuring the job only needs to know who the user is, not the password.  With this functionality, the time that it takes has been reduced.

It reduces the duration for a lot of our jobs. We no longer have a window for maintenance applications at night.

This is an area where it is a little difficult to work with BMC. They want to do licenses by job, which is what we have. For example, the simplest is to license by job, but they can also license by nodes. While the licensing is simple to use, it might not be the correct licensing model for the customer. It is okay because we want to license by job, which is something measurable. At the end of the day, licensing by job is the most important.

We evaluated other vendors, like CA, but CA was bought by another company, and we have been a little afraid. Our organization always buys with a tender. Our tender had a lot of requirements on it and only Control-M could meet them all. It was a public tender, so we didn't really choose Control-M. We had a huge list of requirements that we really needed for job scaling. Only BMC could do it. IBM Tivoli tried to answer, but it didn't meet all our requirements.

Most tools have a huge GUI. You need to open five to seven windows to go to the parameters. Sometimes you don't have all the parameters in the GUI. With Control-M, it is three clicks and we have all the information that we need. We can see that in Control-M, we can see that all the perimeters are there for one job, like Managed File Transfer. It is very intuitive, and we can understand where to find the parameters to configure.

I think that every single company should have Control-M installed, because it is really important and useful for everyone.

I would rate this solution as a 10 out of 10.