Control-M Reviews

The GUI interface is exceptional, beating any of the competitors’ products I have used. Also, the range of job types and integration with other products such as Hadoop, SAS, databases, etc. is very useful.

With the release of V9, we have been able to better use the features of the Hadoop product, allowing developers to use native Oozie workflows from within the product.

It is probably one of the most expensive solutions available and many of the extra functionality, such as Self-Service and BIM, are chargeable extras. It would be great if these were thrown in for free.

I have used it for 18 years.

Initially, we encountered stability issues with the V9 install, but this could be more to do with the VM infrastructure and networks than Control-M.

We did not really encounter any scalability issues; it is very scalable, especially with agentless technology.

Support has been very good in my experience.

I have used other products in other contracts, but the only experience I have of switching products was removing Control-M in favour of OPC, as it was a lot cheaper.

It is a complex product but for the most part, setup is reasonably straightforward. Some add-ins such as the BPI module can be quite challenging.

I have little experience with the licensing but I know it is expensive!

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options. As a contractor who specialises in Control-M, I tend to work for companies who already use it.

Use it. It’s the best out there from my experience.

• Job scheduling in general
• Self-service
• Workload archiving

We rely on Control-M in our production environment. The automated notification in a case of an error has helped us a lot in reducing downtime and erasing errors.

Support for Z/OS output.

The company has used Control-M since the late 90s.

I did not encounter any issues with deployment.

The GUI had some problems in the early stages, but those seemed to have been solved.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would give customer service a rating of 8/10. They are very good.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10. They are very good.

We did not use a previous solution.

The setup was straightforward.

We implemented via a vendor team and in-house. The vendor teams we had were excellent.

Ask for packages and bundles, so you might get more plugins for one price.

We did not evaluate any other options.

• AFT
• Job scheduling with various platforms
• Blending options for module compatibility

Although I work with various modules for Control-M, i.e., SAP, Informatica, DB, OS, and Windows. We can't do AFT with either Windows scheduler nor with Linux cron jobs. Control-M is the center for all of the applications, where it acts as the mediator between the application and the servers. Not only is it secure, but there are various major applications we can work on.

All tasks related to Windows scheduler and Unix (linux) cron jobs are converted with BMC Control-M scheduling.

Version compatibility is one of the very few areas with room for improvement, but it is a big issue with minimum support. When we need to upgrade the product, we have to follow the exact Control-M prerequisites.

For plenty of applications, there are limits. Control-M uses options for configuring items such as the remote host for servers in the DMZ.

I have used it for 4+ years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Currently technical support is awesome, 100%.

I did not previously use a different solution, such as Autosys and IBM Tivoli.

Initial setup is easy to understand for any end user who does not have any prior knowledge of the product.

Pricing and licensing depends on the infrastructure and the jobs they can purchase.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

It is an awesome product in the automation area, very robust and user friendly.

• The GUI interface with the ability to oversee the whole enterprise in a graphical way
• The ability to create filters for applications and groups
• The ability to zoom in and out within applications or the whole enterprise

These make automation and scheduling troubleshooting easier.

Well, I am no longer with that company, but it gave us the tools to see the big picture and work toward more tightly integrating processes that were unnecessarily dependent on each other.

It allowed us to automate responses and or trigger different processes based on different outcomes of the same job or process.

Version 8 introduced a whole new set of features that required more processing power, creating what I call "dead weights" that, if not interpreted in the right way, can cause duplication of processes. I am pretty confident that, knowing their track record, the issue was addressed in later revisions.

I used it for 15-plus years.

I did not encounter any stability issues. The "dead weights" that I referred to above were in the scheduling development side of the product and did not affect the live processes.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Technical support was very good, 8/10.

I had a minor issue with their online interface for opening problem tickets. Their website at the time was horrible. (I hope it has been fixed.) I did let them know it would take you in circles without ever actually opening the ticket. This to the point that you had to eventually call and wait for someone to call you back so that the ticket was established. Then, you would send all the doc explaining the issue. Then, they would ask you to provide a ton of stuff, such as logs. Then, once you sent them that, they would tell you that it was an automated response and that they really did not need all that. In their defense, this only happen occasionally; otherwise I would have given them a 4 out of 10.

I personally did have experience with a few different scheduling packages, but none came close to providing the overall enterprise scale of Control-M.

I did not switch, the switch was on when I joined the company.

While I was not involved in its original implementation from scratch, I did arrive in the early stages and once I had a grip on the functionality and its tools, it was fairly easy. I am sure the installation and first implementation came with challenges.

That part can be tricky as I did not handle it. I do know that it may be expensive in the beginning, but, once you have it implemented and use it to its full or close to its full potential, it will save money in the long run.

I was not involved in the process, but the move was from CA7, and I know that ESP, Jobtrac, and Zeke among others were considered.

Go for it.

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.

I think the administration part is much more valuable than any other feature. I don’t really remember the commands though, but working on the server is better than the GUI.

The project that I am working on is a banking project and a valuable customer to my organization; we get high revenue from it, hence the environment is very critical.

BMC keeps on improving this solution; there are many levels of improvement, customers can actually try the free trial version and provide feedback accordingly.

I have been using Control-M for the past four and a half years.

The product is stable, but in our environment, due to the huge amount of data, the product is a little slow.

We did encounter a few scalability issues. Sometimes, there are too many jobs in our environment on different servers, but that’s not the tool issue, we can simply increase the FS size. However, that requires bank cost; hence the scalability issue.

The technical support is good, I would rate it a three out of five.

Previously, I have used network and server monitoring for one and a half years; it was migrating to a different tool so I switched.

The setup was straightforward, i.e, in terms of CA NSM.

It’s a good, easy to use, and automated product. It is already used in every organization.

The GUI for operators.

Scheduling has changed from basic to more complex as our developers get acquainted with the ability and flexibility of the product.

Report builder is cumbersome. Not all interfaces work out-of-the-box and there are a lot of adjustments to the product and configurations after installation.

We have used this solution for three years.

Connectivity to agents is a constant challenge due to security and Firewalls.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues.

Customer support is good. The support site, searching, and accessing knowledge modules, and accessing product downloads is very slow.

Technical support is excellent.

We were a manual shop, where operators ran selected routines through menus.

We had do perform several install configurations until we finally achieved the stability we required.

We work with a vendor group and they were very good. The BMC support contributions for design were flawed and we had to make several adjustments.

I am not sure.

There are various methods available for licensing, and we use the task/day load process.

We evaluated Compugen, CA, and Cisco.

• User friendly interface
• Self-service portal
• Support for AS400 and mainframes
• many more.

Not all central scheduler tools have agents for iSeries, z/OS and UNISYS 2000. These are valuable features because I don't have to use many tools and I have one central tool for all platforms.

Reduces cost, failure, and human error.

I would like to see a decrease is the licensing price.

We have been using this for eight years. (Versions 6.4, 7, and 8.)

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability

Technical support has a very weak first line of support, but a very good developer team in Israel.

I didn’t use a previous solution, but I saw and compared it with OpsWise, TWS and AutoSys.

It's like comparing iPhones (Control-M) with other phones (OpsWise, TWS and AutoSys).

Control-M has the best and most user friendly interface. It's very easy to use when you are just beginning your journey with central schedulers.

There are many features like modules for VMware, Hadoop, BladeLogic, databases, PeopleSoft, SAP and many more.

The installation was quite simple. There was very good documentation.

The licensing is quite expensive.

We evaluated OpsWise, TWS, and AutoSys.

Make sure you plan well when you begin automating jobs in Control-M.