Control-M Reviews

We use it to handle most of our batch processing and all of the transactions that we do on a daily basis. It's a large financial institution which handles quite a bit of processing on an individual basis, and we both mainframe and distribute it.

We are receiving files from another system, then we use the File Watch Utility (because we have no view into the other system and how it works). However, when files arrive on certain servers, we're able to pick them up and trigger further downstream processes from them.

Control-M has improved application reliability and the SLAs in our company by quite a bit. You can see if problems are coming. If we have an SLA in a couple of hours, we know well before that couple hours if processing is behind, and it allows us to take some preventative action.

• The ability to go from one system to another.
• To be able to trigger something off of it, yet we are still on a mainframe for our batch processing. 
• To be able to trigger something from the batch, then distribute that back and forth.
• The solution has always been very streamlined. 
• Ease of use
• The BMC customer service behind the tool has been most valuable.

They have Workload Change Manager, and I would like to see a little more of that. Being in the business that we're in, there's a lot of hesitance. We are very hesitant to change things in the banking industry. It isn't bleeding edge by any means. Getting people to buy into things is sort of the hard part, because everybody wants their money to be handled properly.

The solution is very stable. We have our mainframe as well, which has not been bad at processing, and it's pretty stable. With the application of Control-M, we've seen minimal downtime. If there has been downtime, it hasn't been with the application. It has been with the hardware, and you can't get around that part of it.

It is a good application for scaling. We're able to scale pretty fast, whether we're building a small or large set of jobs. When we have new servers being built, agents are already put on them, and we can work pretty quickly without having to step back to handle it.

The technical support is extremely helpful. You can provide just a basic description of your case. If they need to, they can log onto your system. They can shoot you into the right direction, whether it's a knowledge article, community forums, etc. Overall, it is great technical support. Though, it has been a while since I've had a technical call with them.

Sometimes, with technical support, they will take feedback, but you don't know where that feedback goes or if it proceeds along in the thought process.

They did previously use CA-7 for the mainframe. They switched for the ability to use both distributed and mainframe from one central point.

We did recently migrated to version 9.0. Our organization did use a reseller. Our national IT group manages the application. We are just the user of it, so I wasn't involved in any of that.

It has absolutely saved us time. It has made us more efficient. As far as the processing between systems, we don't have as many people. They have been able to focus on other efforts, because we have been able to automate more stuff with Control-M.

Do the trial demo. Reach out to others via the BMC community forums. I don't believe a license is required. It's just a sign on. There are multiple vendors who are resellers or BMC partners who will provide you with input. All you have to do is ask. Feel free to ask others. The people who I have dealt with have always been forthcoming with information. They will tell you what they see as a plus or minus.

It has helped us streamline some things in IT operations, which is probably a slight improvement. We haven't seen any negative impacts.

I've used it in different forms and versions for about 20 years now. I'm pretty familiar with it from an operations standpoint. The tool itself is a ten, and the customer service behind it has made that even more so.

It's worked pretty well. I haven't been able to take a lot of advantage of some of the new features, so I haven't been able to expand on those. For what we do now, it chugs along pretty well.

Our primary use cases for Control-M are scheduling, jobs, monitoring, and acting on job scheduling.

We value Control-M mainly for the ability to control multiple nodes in a coordinated manner. Control-M has the ability to really coordinate across a lot of nodes. That's the most valuable thing. 

Control-M is a mature tool with many features. It's pretty stable and very easy to learn. You can become an expert in it within a short time.

We would recommend modernizing the look and feel of Control-M. They also need to move towards more self-service and development in their environment. It's very antiquated. Opening up to more open source tools and switching the connectivity to additional tools would also be improvements. 

Most of the tools that are available with Control-M are antiquated. The self-service is currently not as function-rich as competitors. Control-M is not the best.

It is stable.

Control-M is very scalable.

Comtrol-M technical support is done through a local agent. We are in Israel, so the agent in Israel is the one giving it. It's adequate, not perfect. It's okay.

Previously we used some collection of ad hoc tools. It was a consolidated solution, i.e. a single solution that was used across the board.

The setup of Control-M is okay. It was done before my time by the vendor or a vendor agent. A third party authorized by the company itself helped with our implementation.

This is the first time for us implementing the solutions using Control-M.

We use Control-M with two administrators on average, sometimes three. With self-service, it's about 15 people who use the self-service option of it for end users, if not more.

I would like to suggest that Control-M implement a more modern way of using new tools. They should look at what they implement to determine if it is a legacy type or a batch type, then it would work better.

If they intend on moving to more modernized tools, then this approach might not be best for them. Control-M is really good for legacy, corporate enterprise but less optimal for modern, open source environments.

Overall, the main great improvements needed in Control-M is for better self-service. Give it more functionality for this self-service. The tool itself needs better out of the box connectivity to additional standard market tools.

I would rate Control-M at a seven or eight out of ten because it fits legacy stuff but once you're stepping into modern environments then you find yourself struggling. Control-M is a workhorse, but it's not 100% perfect.

We have used Control-M mostly as a file transfer and in conjunction with Hadoop.

We have many feeds coming in from different companies which are used by the business for various reasons and we must collectively have a central point to gather the files and feeds. We also use Control-M for encryption, decryption, and sending data across to different business users that begin at a point of time and making sure that we are not missing unnecessarily. It's a real help what we are getting. The example for us is we have a lot of business which depends on feeds which, if not properly processed, affect the stock exchange. So Control-M acts as a mediator in between that and provides it in a very efficient way. This has reduced a lot of manual intervention required as a business.

The feature we use most in Control-M is related to the file transfer module. It is quite advanced compared to other tools like Automate, etc. The new version which has come of same MFT has a lot of advanced features which makes it very easy to work with. There is less need for written programs and more GUI-based stuff.

One feature I would like to include is in the middle of the monitoring domain. In the monitoring domain, if I have to update a number of jobs, the only way to do it is by manually clicking on each job. I would like a feature that allows me to do a mass update in the jobs, which I feel is still lacking.

This version has done an amazing change, compared to version 7 and the versions after that. I'm not sure what they should change at this stage. One recent feature they have come up with is if we can upgrade Control-M agents from a central location. I would still prefer a solution where I can do an installation of the controller module from a remote distance. That's something they don't have. I know why it has still not come up, but it could be a great feature if we could include that somehow. To push out these sort of installation setup files onto another machine and get it in installed. It is not there for now, though.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten. The reason for this rating is because of the scope of implementation. It will have an ultimately upper hand to the other tools in the market. They can show what most other controls don't have. Nevertheless, these features would really help as well. I would like to see more of them.

It is a very stable solution and BMC, the parent company, really comes up with tech packs and upgrades, which add new features and also resolve issues. Also, their knowledge base is quite full, which helps a lot to find the solution easily from the website.

I rate them nine out of ten for scalability.

On average, the control team consists of around fifteen people. This ranges from the elements of both which is the monitoring team and the L2 support which is for the scheduling team. Then there is also L3, who is the administrator. Apart from that, we have certain business users that will use the help service module often.

If we are looking at a 24 path sell and support, we would need close to seven members on a daily basis. That's the same for L1, L2, and L3 teams to each do daily support. L1 would be for monitoring, L2 for scheduling, and L3 is administrative.

We do have certain programs to increase usage down the line, which we're considering. I would say close to 60 to 65 percent of the company is using Control-M right now.

The technical support is great and I would give it a ten.

My main experience is with this as the central unit, but I have used other tools. The main reason I chose Control-M was firstly that it is user-friendly. Secondly, the market is wide open for Control-M, and a lot of other organizations use it. So it gives Control-M the upper hand in the market to work on something like this.

It was quite simple since Control-M has a very user-friendly GUI. That made it fairly easy to relate with the business and convert it into something which looks familiar.

We kind of started from scratch, so I think it took two to three months for us to set everything up at the initial stage. The strategy was to tackle one business at a time so that we don't complicate stuff because not everything is automated. We started to target one business/application at a time and converted them each into something which Control-M can work with.

We did the deployment on our own based on our experience. We had previously deployed it for certain clients basically so we were primarily the consultant for that.

I may not be able to convert it into a value in this way, but it does more in terms of reducing manual intervention. This, in turn, means less human resources are being used. For instance, if there are three people in a team and controlling certain work, they could probably put more on one resource. So that reduces the cost of resources in the whole organization.

We have account based licensing. There are two or three types of licensing. One of them is based on the number of jobs, so we a license close to 4,000 jobs per day.

The cost is based on the different modules, which we buy from them. If we a buy a hardware module, which we are presently using and integrating, that is an additional cost, but I'm not sure of the amount. Each module comes with a different cost.

I have experience with alternates like IBM Tivoli and another software called JAMS. These are the ones that I have worked on and the features and user-friendliness of both of them is fine. It's such a different level compared to this, so that's the reason I'm sticking to Control-M.

For those who want to implement, there are a few cons. Cost-wise it is not very simple for every business to implement it. So they should really plan if they are going to use it extensively. If not, they should think twice about it. 

If they are thinking of implementing, though, they should analyze the business and check which controller modules will really help them enhance their work and ultimately transform their work into an automated solution, which in turn will reduce their cost. 

I would really suggest someone who is planning to use Control-M or wants to deploy is first to check which modules are really required and also what kind of licensing makes sense for their business. If its a very large enterprise then it would be great to use a premium based license. If not, it's better to use a job count based license. So that is a point which they should check before implementing.

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.