Control-M Reviews

Relatively small setup for ETL jobs only. We do not use Control-M for enterprise-wide scheduling and automation.

• Job scheduling for our ETL batch jobs has become streamlined and more efficient. 
• We are now able to deliver data to our data warehouses and dashboards promptly.

• There is a wide range of connectors. 
• Ability to handle files remotely through the advanced file transfer feature.

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

It is primarily for batch job automation. It's working just fine.

It has certainly evolved over time. The latest versions have much better dashboarding and we can see what's happening. That is a significant improvement.

The automation of the batch jobs.

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

It's very stable.

It's as scalable as we've required. We haven't seen any problem.

Your process, standards, and control libraries: It's really important to have an advanced strategy around how development is going to take place. If each team is doing their own thing, it's hard to manage it.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor, in this case, since it's a mature product, would be ease of migration and, obviously, reduction in cost.

I rate it a nine out of 10. What would make it a 10 would be a reduction in the cost and, even more so, the intelligent automation. The ability to do some machine learning and dynamically reduce the amount of time that the automation is taking is more important than cost at this point.

Primary use case is automation, and it has performed fine.

I don't think it has actually maybe improved anything. It's a generic product. It just has some nice features. We could use a normal scheduler, like DOS, for the type of work we are doing but that would prevent self-service from users in the business, so that's why we are using BMC.

You can let users access the system and manage jobs: self-service.

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

It's just like anything else in that league. It's very stable. We are not experiencing instability or crashes. These are mature products.

The scalability is excellent.

Technical support is excellent. We called them two times in a year and there was a reply within 30 minutes, so that's good.

The only thing we would object to are the license costs. That is what we are probably most annoyed with. We are paying something like €1,000,000 over three years for having 4,000 jobs running. That's expensive.

If you can afford it, it's good. If you do have an unlimited budget, or budget is not the main concern, and you want stability then I would say go for this. It's easy to use, it's easy to install, it's easy to run, it's easy to operate. I have a student assistant who had six hours of e-learning and she can run the system. That's good. Yes, you need the right student assistant but she doesn't have any IT background. It's very easy to use but also an expensive product.

In terms of criteria when selecting a vendor, if I am to decide the vendor, it would be the biggest bang for the buck and then it would be quality, stability, and support. That is my job as manager of the IT department and therefore I have to ensure that we are getting the most value for the money.

The only reason I am rating it eight out of 10 is simply the cost. From a technical point of view, we could actually make the same jobs run from the DOS prompt, with the same stability. I think that we are paying a lot for having self-service, for having nice monitoring. I think we're paying a lot for that.

• We use it to run batches in SAP, Teradata, WMS, Manhattan, and a wide array of applications. 
• We use it for mainframe, AS/400, Linux, Unix, and \Windows servers.

When we first started using Control-M, we had multiple scheduling solutions across several platforms. Going to Control-M consolidated all of them and allowed us reactivity across all of them based on the completion of processing.

• Maintaining and monitoring of workloads have been and continue to be the most valuable feature in our environment. 
• There is a batch monitoring tool called Batch Impact Manager, which proactively warns when processing is behind and SLAs are in jeopardy of being missed. 
• Their forecasting tool is very handy. 
• They also have an API interface, although I cannot speak to it as we have not amassed enough experience to provide a fair assessment.

BMC Control-M has a slight issue with daylight savings time while advancing the clock in the Spring. It is not catastrophic, but it does requires some manual intervention to be issue free.

We implemented Control-M to replace our mainframe only scheduler and the other disparate group of schedulers that we had used in lieu of a cross platform solution. That was nearly five years ago, and it has had a huge impact on the speed in which we can implement new solutions. 

Cross platform scheduling has transformed how we run our estate workload. It is just so much more efficient now as we can tie together all the workloads across the estate and make the whole process reactive to events. 

• Cross platform scheduling
• Built-in file transfer
• Batch impact management
• Self-service 

They are all such valuable tools. Though, the ability to dynamically predict batch run time is so valuable. 

It is a very strong product, but the reporting could be better. I know BMC is working on this feature and hope to see some improvements in future releases.

Main use: Control of batch processing for many subprocesses on the servers in our datacenters for many of our customers.

Speeds up processes and automated tasks. BMC has taken the control of batch processing very far.

Unlike the batch controls of other solutions, BMC includes a graphical user interface (GUI). It is comprehensive and a little daunting, but there are many options you can pick.

Consider adding a mobile application for remote management or expand the integration with My IT.

Enterprise workload automation across mainframe and mid-range environments for a medium-size financial institution.

Control-M has enabled true enterprise batch automation, which combined with the other BMC Control products on our mainframe platform, allows us to run a 24/7 site with the lights out.

Most valuable feature would be the ability to detect and notify when a process has not completed successfully.

The main area that could be improved would be documentation, just like every other software product out there!

I have used Control-M for batch recovery and job processing providing automation solutions for in-house IT teams and dependent businesses.

The flexibility to schedule the jobs on various OS level platforms. It works on agent-level architecture, hence the usability is enhanced. 

Control-M has been there on back of all automated work lists by providing consistency, timely execution, and removing chances of human errors. 

Currently, I am not using this tool due to change of my role duties. Hence, it is difficult for me to comment over this. Though the tool is very resource intensive and has a few levels of performance issues when compared with VM and physical servers. 

No.

No.

Technical support was not required much as we had total in-house solution consultants. Though, in times of need, BMC had their regular support SLAs to support us. 

Yes, considering our then and there needs setup was bit complex and time consuming. As it was quite obvious due to the huge organizational size.  

It was an all in-house IT setup.