Control-M Reviews

We use it for scheduling nightly processing of data.

It has improved our organization a lot. It has helped us control any problems that we have with jobs. We have critical jobs that run and we can tell ahead of time if there's a problem. There are alerts that we can send out. And if a certain job goes down, we can tell what the impact is and which jobs are impacted that are waiting for that job to complete.

We're better able to meet our service level agreements because we do a lot with the Fed. There are certain things we have to have done at a certain time. The automation the product provides means we either meet our or are ahead of our deadlines. In addition, we can tell if a job is running long and if it's going to meet the SLA. And if it's running long we can see why it's running long. That's a benefit for us.

Before, we used to schedule jobs on the servers and we'd have issues with the servers. With Control-M, we can tell if there are any issues coming up because we can run the critical path and see if there are problems before they actually happen. On the server, we couldn't necessarily tell if something wasn't running.

When it comes to creating actionable data, it gives the auditors a very accurate and timely report. Our audit preparation process is much easier. We don't have to do as many manual reports anymore. Previously, it was painful. We had to do everything manually with multiple spreadsheets and it was just ugly. With Control-M, it's all in the database and we just extract the information from the database.

Also, our management team is happy with the orchestration of our data pipelines and workflows. They're happy because they get to see the information through the reports that we create. We're also meeting our service level agreements with the end-users, in terms of getting them their data. And customers are happy because their information is being put into their accounts on time and correctly. 

And for projects, the orchestration of data pipelines is helping because we can go through the testing before we move something into production. That means that when we have a major project or an upgrade coming up, they can run it all through the test, try different scenarios, sign off on it, and then move it into production. It's a very streamlined process. If we didn't have Control-M, our projects would be slower because we'd probably have to be doing a lot of stuff manually.

It's very critical for our business. If we have an outage coming up, for example, if we have to shut down power, we can tell what's going to run and if anything is critical during that time frame. We can manage the data much more easily.

• The reporting facility is very helpful in creating reports for auditing. 
• The FTP function is very easy to use.
• It is simple to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines and to ingest data from different platforms. It integrates well between platforms.
• The Control-M interface is also very easy and very comprehensive. It's pretty simple to navigate through all the different functions.

It's very important for us that Control-M orchestrates all our workflows. And the plugins have enhanced what we already have.

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

I've been using Control-M for 12 years.

It's very stable. We've had no downtime with it. The only time that ever happens is if we have lost the server but that's been very rare.

It's scalable. We use it across multiple states, geographically. We have about 1,600 end-users. 

The technical support is wonderful. I've had no issues with them. Contacting them is very simple, you can do it online. And I usually get a response back within an hour.

We did not really have a previous solution. We just scheduled tasks on the servers. There was no uniformity.

Our return on investment is that we don't have a lot of downtime anymore. The information that we receive and post to our customers' accounts is quick and there are fewer errors. As a result, we don't get as much feedback from the customers compared to what we used to get.

The pricing is reasonable. It's not an exorbitant amount. The licensing is pretty reasonable for the number of jobs that we run.

The plugins will be an additional cost.

The only maintenance required is due to the updates that come out from BMC. Three people manage that part of it.

If someone said to me they're looking for a process automation solution, but they're concerned that Control-M isn't modern enough to work with multiple cloud-based data sources and tools, I would tell them they can test it. They can physically set up a test function and see the product work for themselves. It wouldn't be a full-on PoC, just a snippet, but they could see the functionality and how things interact. It depends on what they're trying to accomplish too.

My advice is "use it." It's very end-user-friendly. It works, depending on what you're trying to do. All the platforms work very well and it doesn't take a lot to get it up and running. And the help is out there if you need help.

Overall, it's very well done. We go through the AMIGO (Assisted Migration Operation) process, and there's a lot of help out there for Control-M. There's a community as well if we have questions. We really have no complaints. The solution has sped up our process execution.

Control-M is a scheduler tool, and we have multiple batch jobs that are currently running in our organization. 

We are currently one version behind the latest one. The latest version is 9.0.19.200, which also has Control-M Python Client, and we are planning to go for the latest version.

We currently have it on-premises on the Windows platform. We are planning to migrate to AWS.

We have multiple technologies, and we have different types of jobs, such as Informatica jobs, SAP jobs, database jobs, web service jobs, etc. In such an environment, from the support perspective, usually, we need to log in to multiple technologies and check if a job is executed or not and if there is any error, which is not easy. Control-M acts as a one-stop shop to check the status of all jobs. The maintenance or support team members can easily log into Control-M and verify the job status.

It has been helpful in reducing the burden on our resources during the weekend. It has also been helpful in reducing delays and data mismatches.

It is easy to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines with Control-M. You can drop and drag whatever you want and then provide a time for the scheduler. There are many inbuilt plug-ins, such as the Informatica plug-in and the SAP plug-in. We are using these plugins. It is pretty easy and simple.

It allows us to ingest and process data from different platforms. For example, you can have a flow that starts with a REST call. Once that is processed, the records are picked from the database and sent to SAP. You can easily design a pipeline workflow and schedule jobs. You can also specify the dependencies. For example, you can specify to execute Job B when Job A is completed or execute Job C when Job A and B are completed. There are multiple options in Control-M to ingest and not miss data from any platform.

Testing is easy. You can have multiple environments, such as development environment, testing environment, staging environment, and production environments. You can easily test your workflows, and you can easily promote from one environment to another environment. You can promote from the development environment to the staging and production environment. There is an option called Promote, and you can use that option to promote to whichever environment you want.

We are an enterprise, and when the data moves from one technology to another technology, multiple teams get involved, which requires multiple communication exchanges between the teams. Sometimes, there might also be delays in getting the data from one team. With Control-M, we can create a workflow where we can specify to proceed for job B after job A. There is no need for a team to send emails to another team. There is no delay. Team A doesn't have to inform team B to run a job because otherwise, there will be a delay. Control-M eliminates such issues. It has improved our business service delivery speed.

It has good reporting capabilities. You can get a report of the status of all your jobs. You can see how many jobs are pending and how many are processed. You can also share these reports with the management. There is also a URL that you can give to your management or customers. They can check the job status, and they will have knowledge about the status and any abnormalities.

Automation of Control-M has improved the speed of process execution. No manual intervention is required using Control-M. You don't need to have a resource waiting to do a job at a certain time. You can automatically schedule a job, even over the weekend. It results in faster speed and better utilization of resources. You can also integrate it with other solutions. For example, if a job fails, a ticket can automatically be created in ServiceNow or BMC Remedy and assigned to a specific group so that they can look into it.

I find Control-M for SAP and Control-M for Informatica good. You can connect to the Linux or Windows servers, and you can run multiple jobs. 

Control-M Managed File Transfer is also a very nice feature for transferring multiple files.

It meets our requirements, and it is simple and easy to use. 

They can give more predefined plug-ins so that we don't have to create them. 

The security layer for Control-M MFT can be better. 

We have been using Control-M for the past six years.

Its stability is good.

Its scalability is good. We would like to increase its usage, but its price is a challenge.

Their technical support is very good. They also have a community portal. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We didn't use any other solution previously.

I am responsible for installing and managing Control-M. Its initial setup was straightforward. It took about nine hours to get it installed and up and running. The number of people required for deployment and management of jobs depends on the scope of your operations. If you have 50,000 jobs a day, two people are enough.

Its maintenance is handled by the server team. We have it on-premises, and they take care of the patches and upgrades. If it was on the cloud, the upgrades would be done automatically.

Its pricing is a little bit high. They could provide an enterprise-level license for an unlimited number of jobs. Currently, it is based on the number of jobs, and if you exceed the number of jobs, there are charges. For example, if your license is for 3,000 jobs per day, but you run 3,050 jobs, you will have to pay for the extra 50 jobs. They charge $120 per job. So, it is too costly.

To someone who is looking for a process automation solution but is concerned that Control-M isn’t modern enough to work with multiple cloud-based data sources and tools, I would say that Control-M is the best option even when working with cloud-based data sources. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. Control-M is the best solution to replace any enterprise solution if its price suits you.

I've been with the same company for 22 years. The use case started out truly as a batch processing solution. That was what we originally got it for back in the day to help us automate what was being done manually or being done through homegrown tools or scripts, et cetera. The use cases evolved through the years. Now, we use it to orchestrate workflows that are touching traditional data centers and that are going out to the cloud and bringing it back.

From one spot, we have a single pane of glass. Like many companies, our systems are getting more complex and more diverse, with cloud and edge computing, containerization, et cetera. However, we have one place where we can go and look and see what's going on. If something happens, we can check what happened and where it happened. Today, we're dependent upon a lot of services and cloud technology that sometimes we don't know the ins and outs of.

A big challenge is to make sure that we have certain things run daily or on a periodic basis. That really was the driving use case. We had a lot of manual tasks going on and if someone, for example, left on vacation, something may not get done for two or three days, a week or two weeks. This solution takes all that away.

The main use case was to get away from having to stare at a system or a screen, and just let things run, let the workflows flow, and only be notified if there's something wrong. That was really a big driving use case.

It freed up people to work on exciting work instead of mundane work. No one has to sit around and stare at that screen all day long. No one has to reinvent the wheel for the 50th or 500th time to do tasks like maybe put a file out into an S3 bucket or out into an HDFS Hadoop file store since it's already there. It's already done for them. They just drag, drop, click and they're done. It's freed people up and they can do the exciting work that is really what we should be doing anyway. No one wants to be doing boring work.

I am a big proponent of an automation API and Jobs-as-Code. That is Control-M in the DevOps world. It opens up the tool to a traditional operations tool. Developers can jump right in there now, giving them that ownership, and integrating the existing DevOps tools that they have. That is a huge feature that I just love. 

There's an application integrator. It doesn't matter if you're trying to integrate with on-premises, off-premises, API, container, or serverless functions, it's easy for you to design. You just design that integration and then it's available instantly, and that's a huge time saver. 

It's rather easy to create, integrate and automate data pipelines with Control-M. I can give a broad answer. It can be as easy as drag and drop, or it can be as complex as designing the integrations. If you use customization, you can access a data lake that your organization developed. For the typical user out there, the difference is on a scale of one to five, with one being easy and five being hard, you're probably looking at a two and a half. For most people, it's very easy. It's getting easier as it's all web-based nowadays. Alternatively, it can be all code-based.

I have not explored Python Client too much. I've tinkered with it and that's been the limit of my exploration. Now, with the integrations like AWS, we've made extensive use of it, and it is very easy for anybody to do. Python Client has a lot of great possibilities, especially in the data science arena, however, sadly we have not had an opportunity as of yet to play with it.

The Control-M interface for creating, monitoring, and ensuring delivery of files as parts of your data pipeline has gotten better. It is not perfect. That said, it’s come a long way over the years. Nowadays, most of it is web-driven. A lot of it can be API driven if you so wish. There's still probably some future work to be done there, however, for the average user that's coming in, starting to use it for the first time, they're going to need a little training and handholding at the beginning for maybe the first week or so. Then you can start setting them free to go out and use it on their own.

The orchestration of our data pipelines and workflows has been able to give a single point of view too. Management doesn’t care about the bits and pieces. A workflow or a data pipeline could have 100 or 1,000 components behind it, and management does not care about that. Management cares whether the SLA has been met or not. They want that easy-to-see red light or green light. We can provide them with that. The solution drives self-service and it helps. A manager doesn't have to call somebody in IT and wait around for an answer.

They can immediately get that information for themselves, consume it and be able to understand that, "Hey, you know what, this data pipeline over here, we're going to be 15 minutes off our SLA for today." Then, they can start asking why. I like parts of Control-M like Batch SLA Impact, is they can start doing some of that analysis themselves, for example, “this late due to the fact that maybe the system was down for maintenance for two hours last night." That's really beneficial in today's business world.

The automation of Control-M has sped up everything. We can integrate directly into existing pipelines and the DevOps teams can get anything integrated with their Jenkins deployments. They don't have to wait for traditional operation functions. This is all built-in. It validates and checks. In some cases, it automatically deploys the agents and deploys the configurations. That's something that years ago you'd have to wait for. The speed of delivery has vastly improved.

Nowadays, auditing is as simple as running a report. If this falls under an auditable category, we can just hit a button and the report is done. Control-M audits everything, even if it is not under the regulatory or audit spotlight. Every process, every movement, and every change is logged by the system. If there's ever a question, you’ll be able to find a why and a when. There’s an audit trail.

It certainly helped speed processes up. I can eliminate what I call the manual gaps between certain features. I don't have to send an email to somebody to say, "Hey, guess what? That file's ready. Now you can run process X, Y, Z." The system just says "Hey, the file is there, let's go." It's eliminated those gaps between parts of the workflow. It also helped optimize the infrastructure needed as it's like a Tetris Puzzle. I have these ten different workflows that I'm trying to run and before I may have had ten dedicated systems for them. Now I know that I don't need that.

We use this model all the time. We can run those ten processes on three systems and be just fine. That saves money. The solution is not only speedy, but it also saves money.

They are doing a great job with continuing to drive the open-source model of it. Five years ago, if you looked for Control-M anywhere, you would not have found it. Today, that model has changed. They're actively publishing on GitHub.

You can download for free an entire container and run Control-M at home if you want to tinker with it. That was unheard of a few years ago. You can type a query in Google and start to see all sorts of documentation that is now available to the public. The major strides that they have made there are pretty darn good.

If you want to take it and ramp it up to doing some very heavy-duty integrations, you can find yourself at first dealing with a difficult integration. However, once you get that integration going for maybe a month or so, the next person after you will have less difficulty. That's the power. 

They can improve their interface. They're going through huge modernization efforts and they're getting there. They're probably 75% there, however, there's still another 25% to go.

I've been using the solution for 22 years.

Since it supports business, it has to be stable. It's very stable. We have not had major outages or anything. That's always a good thing, however, like with any solution, its stability is going to depend on how you deploy it and what safeguards you put in place, including high availability and disaster recovery, et cetera. All the hooks for that are in the product, however, it's up to you to decide how you're going to use those hooks.

It's highly scalable. You can run five things in it today and easily scale up to run 1,005 things tomorrow. In terms of scalability, there are no issues there.

Technical support tends to be very helpful.

Positive

I used to work for an insurance company and I used Computer Associates. It was called CA-7 and CA-11, which are similar tools.

We tried to use Computer Associates before this, but it didn't support the systems we needed and the integration was next to impossible.

I was involved in the deployment and initial setup of the solution right from the beginning.

We had jobs and workflows running within the first day. That was pretty good. We don't use the Helix model, however, there is a Helix model you can purchase, in which everything's hosted by BMC. You can be up and running literally in hours which is reasonable. There's a learning curve, however, if you do not get some value out of it within two days, you're probably doing something wrong.

At the time, there were only two of us deploying the solution. Today there are only three of us.

It's business-wide. Everything from data to marketing, to finance, even though it probably wouldn't make sense to anybody else, it touches everything. It's deployed across Windows, Linux, containers, VM, cloud, et cetera.

If anybody has a use case or wants to learn more about it, we'll show them. Anybody in our organization can get basic access and can tinker around in an alpha test environment. This includes non-technical people. We have non-IT people that use it.

If they can self-service and maybe design some parts themselves, that's a huge win right there. We have a very open model of deployment.

There are occasional patching and vulnerabilities that come out. Most of the patching nowadays can be automated if you're using the Helix-based solution. A lot of that is handled by BMC.

We did not use an integrator, reseller, or consultant for the deployment.

I can't speak to the exact licensing costs. 

Every few years we go through a reevaluation. We'll go through and look at what's on the market and what companies have come up with or released new versions. We'll go through and we'll say, "Okay, let's compare these, what do we need and what are all the tools offered out there?" We do that roughly every five years and it keeps us on our toes.

The biggest difference as of late is the API and Jobs-as-code. Control-M is light years ahead of others. It is light years ahead of the competitors and what they're offering. Other competitors are starting to get APIs, however, only BMC is working with Job-as-code and is in the lead. To my knowledge, they're really one of the only ones who can define your entire workflow as code.

Control-M is pretty critical to our business as it runs many different business processes every day, and if it wasn't there, we would probably hire many more people, be a lot slower, and be more prone to error.

We use a hybrid deployment. We have parts in the traditional data center. We have parts in the cloud. We sometimes have parts that live on containers. They only exist for two minutes. It is very much a hybrid mix of goodies with our deployment.

I'd advise potential new users to examine it today and not think about what it did ten years ago. Control-M is an old product. It has been around since we all used mainframes, however, just because something's been around for a long time, doesn't mean it's a piece of junk or doesn't work with modern technologies. It has adapted and grown with the times. Control-M did cloud-based work before many of us were even talking about the cloud. It's hard to get rid of negative perceptions sometimes, however, the best thing for people to do is to head out to the internet, look it up, and go out to GitHub.

If you have a technical team, send them out to GitHub. You can download everything in an image or in a container and try it yourself. It doesn't cost you a nickel. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

The biggest advice I can give is to try it out. Don't only believe what the PowerPoints tell you. There's no excuse that you can't have a deployment running clearly within hours. Be willing to think about how it can solve problems in new ways. Sometimes we try to find a new tool as we have a square problem and we get upset as all the tools we're looking at only have round solutions. Sometimes the reason that it only has round solutions is due to the fact that that's the proper way to solve the problem. You have got to be willing to break down whatever you're trying to do, whatever workflow you're trying to automate or integrate, and take it in pieces.

If all you want to do is save yourself a lot of money, use Cron, and use Windows Task Scheduler. However, if you want to take your business to the next level and start to get to the point where you can automate to remediate and audit, that's where tools like Control-M come into play.

We use the solution in Western Mutual Insurance Group's environment for the daily scheduling of around 11,000 jobs. Our number of end-users is in the hundreds, across 18 to 20 teams. We have three different physical locations as a company. Since COVID, we are a partially remote workforce as well, so we have multiple locations.

It's essential that the solution orchestrates our workflows. Regarding processes like file transfers and data workflows, we want one source for that. We want one area where we can check and see how things are progressing, and Control-M is invaluable. Everyone has access in our environment to Control-M, and we all use it heavily. We utilize a ton of plugins in our environment. We started the transition into servers and are seeing what our license allows in that area. We try to take advantage of everything we can.

We use Control-M to replace a lot of our manual logging of job data. It's been very valuable in terms of logs that can output alerts.

I just did an audit earlier this year, and it was a swift process using the product. It took me less than a few hours, and without the solution, it would potentially take a couple of days to a week.

We essentially have a nightly batch cycle. We process data overnight, so it's available for end-users during the day. Using manual execution, instead of Control-M, this nightly batch cycle would transition into a weekly or monthly batch cycle instead.

I recently took over as admin of Control-M about a year ago. Since then, the question has been how we can further utilize Control-M in our environment. We haven't yet found the limits of what Control-M can do. We're finding better ways to apply it every day. From the old days when we manually scheduled jobs to the current paradigm of using an automation tool. This made the process much more manageable.

We define Control-M internally as a "critical business application." I would say that if Control-M were not available, the impact would be catastrophic to our business.

The reporting is top-notch. I haven't found any other applications on the market that can replicate what Control-M offers. The alerting is very good, and I think their service monitoring is the best in the industry. 

The solution is a key part of our system and I have not seen any significant limitations with it. It's very reliable and performs as advertised.

We're just starting our data pipeline journey. Compared to other products in the market, I believe Control-M's is the easiest to use. Theirs came out ahead in terms of ease of use every time. I rate them very highly in that area. We're primarily an Azure corporation. We found that the solution's built-in integrations with Azure are straightforward to use.

We actively build out methods of alerting, for instance, when workflows in Control-M don't complete, as this impacts our end-users and our managers that support the teams attempting to provide data for the end-users. I think Control-M has a ton of built-in integrations that make alerting when that data is unavailable more visible to end-users. I think that's been very useful in our environment.

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

We have been using the solution for around seven years. 

One patch had some issues, but the fix pack was very helpful. Other than that, we haven't had any stability issues with this product. So I'd rate it very highly.

The scalability is excellent, we're looking into options in Azure for scaling up and down in our environment, and Control-M has been essential in accommodating that.

Technical support would be a 10. They're always available. They've been very helpful with any questions I have. There are multiple means of contacting them, and they've always been responsive. The technical account partner, Jake, has been very helpful. The account rep, Chris, has also been very responsive.

Positive

Control-M in our environment predates my time. I believe the company first implemented the solution around 15 years ago.

The initial setup was before my time. We started off as a mainframe exclusive influence of Control-M, and then we transitioned to distributed servers from there. I am a team of one.

The solution's automation has improved our business service delivery speed. Our big push this year has been toil reduction and automation of manual tasks that ultimately take time away from our engineers. Control-M is factored into probably north of 80% of those reductions with its ability to automate tasks. So far this year, we're at about 4,000 hours of toil reduced. I would say Control-M has played a factor in 3000 of those hours.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. Control-M is critical to our business.

There are other solutions like Control-M out on the market, but in every recent market evaluation, Control-M has always come out on top. I think they are becoming more cloud-native as they progress with their Control-M Web Services. They're more reliable than the others on the market right now. 

I would advise anyone to start with a trial version of this product. I think they'll be very impressed with it. 

We don't use Python to a significant degree at all in our environment. We have been looking into that, but nothing solid yet. We don't use AWS but are looking to get into it in 2024.

We primarily use the solution for automation, orchestrating and automating the workloads, and being able to schedule tasks. Prior to Control-M, we were manually running jobs or there was either a scheduled task on Windows, getting Task Scheduler, or we'd have a script laid out that someone would have to run through manually on a daily basis. 

We learned about Control-M and felt that it could take over that process and have it automated, while also providing some monitoring and notifications so that if something did fail, we could easily be notified and keep track of it.

It provides a holistic view of jobs that are scheduled to run. We haven't done full production on it yet. Hopefully, we'll be in production by July or August this year. That said, so far from what we can see, it's going to free up some time for certain staff that has been running these tasks manually overnight. Now, if someone gets notified of an issue, then they can address the issue. In the long run, it'll free up some time and resources to focus on other tasks. 

I like the interface, including how I can see everything and how I can put the jobs together. Depending on the experience, I can either use the GUI or I can use the command line to create jobs based on JSON scripts. It provides that flexibility for someone who has no experience of using Control-M as well as with someone who's a full-blown developer that can get very complex with creating these jobs. Generally, it provides a good interface for everyone with different levels of experience.

Control-M doesn't really process data as far as I can tell. It orchestrates other scripts. From what I understand, Control-M doesn't really ingest or analyze any data. It's a tool to help with the processing of data on different platforms. I can tell it to run a script on one server, to send the data over to another SQL server, or a different platform, Power BI for example, and run a script on Power BI so that it can ingest the data when it gets there and do what it needs to do. Once that's finished, I can send it to another platform to put a dashboard together based on when that data is available.

Once one understands the process of how it functions, it's pretty simple and straightforward to create, integrate, and automate the pipelines. There is a learning curve to understand how it all works, all the components, and all the requirements for parameters and different options. However, it's pretty simple once someone has a basic understanding of how it all works.

The Control-M interface is good for creating, monitoring, and ensuring the delivery of files as part of our data pipeline. There's a wealth of information in both the full client, as well as the web interface that they have. Both are very easy to use and provide all the necessary material to understand how to do various tasks. The help feature is very useful and informative and everything is very easy to understand.

It’s great that Control-M orchestrates all our workflows, including file transfers, applications, data sources, data pipelines, and infrastructure with plugins. There are a lot of plugins and we haven't used all of them yet. Primarily, we've only used the file transfer plugin, the Azure file service, and Azure functions. Primarily, the developers have used that to put the various tasks and workloads in place. While we haven't fully utilized everything in Control-M yet, we're learning how to use the various functionalities and transitioning from our legacy scripts and data sources. 

Some of the documentation could use some improvement, however, it gets you from point A to point B pretty quickly to get the solution in place.

I've been using the solution for almost a year. 

It seems stable. I haven't rolled the solution out to a very large environment yet. The solution we're working on right now seems to be working fine. All the issues we've seen have to do with us figuring out connectivity between Control-M and the cloud services, however, I haven't had any experiences with issues around stability with Control-M.

Right now, it's a small deployment and we have it in four environments. We have it in our dev, QA, UAT, and production environments. Right now, there are two application teams that are using Control-M, however, we have another two or three teams that are looking to get onboarded.

It's pretty scalable. I haven't done a deep dive look into it the scalability, and we haven't identified a need yet to scale out. It seems pretty scalable, yet I'm not sure as I can't speak from personal experience. I don't have experience with it yet.

It was a challenge to get the direction on how Control-M should be implemented. As we learned about new requirements from the customer, implementing those with help from the engineers at BMC was hard. The third-party contractors were one issue, however, when I escalated it to our customer representative, he was able to get me in touch with a dedicated BMC engineer and she was able to give me the information I needed and provided the context and direction on the best approaches. I wasn't able to use the third-party engineer that was assigned to us, however, the internal resource was a great partnership to help move this along.

Neutral

We were using Microsoft and internal tools. We used the basic Windows tools that were built in.

We went with this product to centralize the deployment and to centralize the management of all of the workloads.

Some of the installation components were really complex. I'm more on the infrastructure-based side of Control-M, I deploy it and then get it ready for functional use so that the application developers, script developers, and workload developers could easily access it. It took me three weeks to figure out the requirements for getting the SSL certificates as the documentation wasn't really clear on what those requirements were. Once we figured it out, it was simple, however, the support staff couldn't give me the right information to understand what was required.

It seemed like there was a gap in expectations on what was required for certificates. In terms of the installation overall, it wasn't clear what each variable or what each configuration point was referring to until we were well versed with how everything functioned. Then we were able to say, "Oh, this is what that field meant and this is what was required here." However, during the installation process, there was very limited information on what was being asked at each configuration point.

In terms of strategy, there was a challenge with the customer. I was the third or fourth resource that was brought onto the project. The first three people that handled it, internally and externally, had trouble figuring out what the expectations were. I was handed the baton at the last moment. I had to tie up loose ends and try to get this up and running for the CIO before he started to send up red flags to BMC.

We had an integrator, however, setting up the timing with the integrator was a challenge. What I got from my company and the general expectations weren't clear. When I did get clarification, I wasn't able to get ahold of the contractor since he required a week or two weeks lead time. We then ran behind based on the lack of information I got. Setting up time and requirements was a challenge.

I'm also a contractor working for a customer. Being a third party, trying to work with another third party with minimal information from the client, was just a challenge all around.

There was another team handling the pricing. I'm not sure of the exact costs. 

Our customer chose this solution. 

We do not use the Control-M Python client and cloud data service integrations with AWS and GCP and we do not use Control-M to deliver analytics for complex data pipelines yet.

We haven't gone into production yet, so we haven't rolled this out to all our customers. We're still testing the features and we'll be starting the UAT in two to three weeks.

Right now, we're still in the early stages of rolling everything out. We've gone through the testing in our development environment and in QA to make sure things are good. Now, we're testing performance in UAT internally, and then we'll have customer validation within a few weeks before we go into production.

The solution will play a very critical role in day-to-day operations. However, it'll be at least two months before it becomes critical. Right now, it's still being implemented and evaluated.

It is pretty flexible on various cloud solutions, working with different cloud technologies and platforms. I would say potential users should take a look at it. It does provide a lot of flexibility, especially with the application and integration component that they have. The developers seem to really be able to get what they need out of the AI or the application into an integrated product or feature set.

Before installing Control-M, have a sit down with the Control-M solutions engineer and make sure you share with them all of the details of what you'd like to accomplish before deploying the solution. My client just said, "We want this" and they didn't give us the details about what they were looking for. We ended up having to redesign a few features, as those items were not clarified as part of the installation. When I was brought on board, the customer didn't mention they wanted HA, so that came later. At that point, we had to reinstall and add more servers.

The person who signed the contract was focused on MFTE, which is the enterprise file transfer tool or managed file transfer tool. However, later, the architecture team decided not to use that and go with another tool. Due to that decision, the client could have gone with a SaaS solution instead of the on-premises solution to Control-M and saved a lot of time, money, and hassle on deploying the on-premises infrastructure. So my advice to others is to make sure that the needs and the functional usage of the tool are identified clearly before purchasing or implementing the tool.

I'd rate this tool ten out of ten. It does what it says it does. 

Our organization has multiple projects that use Control-M, and I support the banking domain. In the past, I have worked on projects for retail organizations and medical companies.

We have approximately 150 applications in our current project. These include Loanpower, erwin, and OpenLink.

With the use of Control-M, our SLAs are met more often. If there is an issue, we identify it in advance, before the problem occurs.

Control-M helps us in terms of automation because it has various scripts in different formats. We can run a Python program or a shell script, and these allow us to automate almost everything.

This product helps to secure our business because we can restrict users.

We have automated several critical processes with Control-M. One is used during patching, where we log in and type one command that will stop and start the services on all of the servers that we have. We have approximately 10 servers in production and five in non-production, so it's a lot of work to restart all of the servers. We also have automation that performs a health check. It runs every day at a scheduled time and will delete all jobs in production that are older than five days. Similarly, we have jobs that check to ensure certain conditions are being met and will check the various alerts that can occur.

Automating these processes has improved our business because every morning, we have to send a status update to show that the components are working. This is something that we used to do manually. We would log into CCM and check everything. Now, we have automated that using a script, wherein it sends the status email automatically to whichever business users request it. It has helped to reduce a lot of manual activity.

Control-M has definitely helped us to resolve issues faster. I estimate that the improvement is between 60% and 70%.

Our service-level operations performance has improved by 80% with the use of Control-M.

The GUI is very user-friendly. It provides us with a single view and we have everything in the same UI. This is very important because we don't spend a lot of time switching tabs or opening Control-M for different purposes. We have a single GUI open and it saves a lot of time.

Two really helpful features are Forecast and Business Impact Manager (BIM).

BIM is helpful because we do not miss any SLAs, as we get to know the issue well in advance. It is the topmost service that has helped us provide better solutions for the business.

Forecast is useful in terms of patching, etc, because whenever we are looking for downtime or any team is looking for downtime, it's easy for us to use Forecast to find it.

Self-service is helpful and our business users appreciate it because they don't have to have Control-M installed on their machine. They can log in using the web portal.

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

I have been using Control-M for 11 years and my company has been using it for longer than that.

This is a pretty stable solution. We have not had any downtime.

A couple of times, the agent has gone down unexpectedly. However, in terms of the EM and server, it's pretty stable.

Our organization is pretty big, with approximately 250,000 employees, and we have multiple projects that use Control-M. We have approximately 150 applications in our current project, and there are about 175 employees that are actively using Control-M. That is across three different countries.

It is easy to scale. It can handle a lot of job flows and it's easy to create multiple jobs to run at the same time. We are expanding in terms of jobs for the same application because they have a lot of upgrades going on at the application level. 

We are not planning to expand the number of applications in our project as of now. We do have requests, but it's a slow process. We can add perhaps five or six applications a year.

Overall, we have no problems in terms of scalability. 

When we can't find a solution to an issue, we reach out to BMC customer support and they respond almost immediately. Overall, the technical support team is very good and I would rate them a nine or ten out of ten.

We did not migrate to Control-M from a competing solution. Some of our clients, although not my current project, migrated to Control-M from different products. The reasons for changing products are the additional features available in Control-M, as well as the ease of use. Also, some people are more confident in the security that Control-M provides, compared to other tools on the market.

Personally, I started my career with Control-M and have been using it ever since.

In the company, we have a couple of clients who use IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler (TWS), AutoSys, and Stonebranch. However, the majority of our clients use Control-M. The choice of solution stems from requirements and input from the client.

One of the reasons that some clients are not using Control-M is because of the cost. For a client with 5,000 or more jobs, they definitely implement Control-M. However, if they are running only 200 or 300 jobs in a small environment, there are other native tools available.

I was not part of the implementation at my company but I have implemented several Control-M projects. The initial setup is straightforward.

First, we download the files from the BMC site and then start the installation. This involves running the setup files and if there is any error, you have knowledge base articles and you also have AMIGO support if you enroll in it.

The deployment can be completed in a day or two, including the Enterprise Manager (EM), servers, and agents. There are also conversion tools that are available to assist with creating jobs.

Our implementation strategy began with installing the Enterprise Manager first, and then the server, and then the agents. We would raise a support ticket so that whenever we had any issues, we could reach out to them.

I did not look at the interactive guides or videos that Control-M provides for reducing time to full productivity. I had all of the documentation handy but I did not refer to any of the videos.

Our in-house team is responsible for deployment.

Control-M is priced accordingly for larger environments. It is expensive for smaller environments with only a few hundred jobs running.

There are two different types of licenses available. The first is based on the number of jobs that we run per day, and the other is based on the number of agents that we install. My current project has a contract for five years. During the first two years, we are allowed to run any number of jobs using any number of agents. However, in the last three years, we have to stick to whatever is defined in the contract.

In past versions, BIM and Forecast were separate components that were available at an additional cost. Since version 9, however, everything is included and there are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

For my current project, the client has always used Control-M.

The latest version of Control-M is 9.20 but we are working with 9.18 because our client has certain servers where the OS is not compatible with 9.20. It is running on Linux machines and at this point, our client hasn't given us approval for the OS upgrade.

Our business users don't typically use Control-M. They have access to it but only use it when a critical chain is stuck and they want to check it themselves. They can use self-service for this, although most of the time, they don't.

An example of why they would use self-service is when a critical batch has failed and is stuck for a long time, and they want to see the approximate time that it will be completed. Also, during an audit, they can use self-service to see which users have certain access, such as production access or write permissions.

The Control-M users in our company have different roles. We have administrators, and we have people who specialize in migration. We also have people who look into scheduling and we have a team that just takes care of monitoring.

The number of people that we require for the day-to-day administration depends on the size of the project. In my current project, we have approximately 8,000 jobs actively running. We have approximately 17,000 configured. In our L1 team, we have eleven people, and we have eight members for each of our L2 and L3 teams.

We do not use the Control-M integrated file transfer capability in our workflows, although we do use the File Watcher feature. We have a tool from Axway called SecureTransport, where they handle the file transfer, but we can define this as part of a Control-M job.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Control-M is that anything can be automated. You can control various applications and it is simple to schedule jobs for products like SAP and databases.

My advice for anybody who is considering Control-M is that it has a wide variety of features compared to other tools. It is flexible, easy to use, and the web portal makes it simple for business users or application teams to access it without having to install it on a Windows server or a Citrix platform. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stability is very good. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The scalability of Control-M is very good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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