Control-M Reviews

Control-M is used to schedule jobs and run them regularly. It helps to automate processes and reduce manual effort, minimizing the risk of errors and enhancing efficiency. Our clients use Control-M for various use cases, especially when there is a need for regular, automated job executions.

Control-M significantly reduces manual errors and enhances automation. It provides better scalability and more efficient data processing, making it a highly reliable solution for daily job operations.

Control-M can cross all platforms and offers integration for container and cloud solutions. This versatility is very helpful for my customers. The job scheduling capabilities are extremely convenient and easy to use, making Control-M a superior solution compared to others in the market.

I have no immediate ideas for improvements. I do not have any specific suggestions for additional features that should be included in the next release.

I have been using Control-M for about a year.

We do not encounter significant stability issues with Control-M. It runs jobs daily with stable performance.

Control-M is highly scalable. It offers complete functionality, making it an excellent choice for handling extensive operations.

Customer support is very responsive and efficient. If you open a case, it can usually be handled within one to two hours, especially for urgent issues. Their support is available in real-time and resolves issues promptly.

The initial setup of Control-M is easy and not difficult.

I always implement Control-M on-premises.

The pricing for Control-M is very expensive. It would be beneficial if the price could be reduced.

If your organization aims to reduce manual errors and enhance automation, Control-M is a suitable choice. It minimizes the risk of operational errors and missing processes, offering better scalability and automation.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

I use BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer for file transfer management, which is its primary function.

What I like best about BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is that it makes transfers more secure and faster. My experience with it is good.

I also like that it has personal dashboards.

I also found the functionality of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer better, plus it has a recovery feature during failed file transfers.

An area for improvement in BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is integration. It should be compatible with more solutions. BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer should have integrations with newer applications as well.

I have fifteen years of experience with BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer, and I'm still using it.

I didn't see any stability issues from BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer.

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer has good scalability.

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer has good technical support, as it has different engineers and consultants who resolve the issues.

My rating for BMC support is nine out of ten.

Positive

I chose BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer over the other solution because I know more about it, and it works better in terms of function.

Setting up BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is easy, so it's a ten out of ten.

As BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is a module, you install, implement, and run it in one day. It could take three weeks if you still need to install the solution that BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is on.

You'll get ROI from BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer after using it a few times rather than once because the initial cost is high. With this module, you can reduce mistakes and not lose money, so you'll see ROI within one year or less from BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer.

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is relatively inexpensive. It has reasonable pricing. What you pay for is the task or job, and as it's a module, it's complimentary, so you save about twenty percent of the job cost. For example, if the job costs $100, BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer will cost $20.

Pricing-wise, the module is an eight out of ten.

I'm a software consultant and implemented BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer for different customers.

I've worked with older versions, from 6.4 to the latest version, 20.2, of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer.

Deploying the module requires two engineers and one project manager who'll check the results of the project execution.

My advice to others looking into using BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is that it's good to implement if you don't want to experience file transfer problems. The module has a tier that lets you transfer many files between different servers, so BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is essential in file transfer and file management projects. You must make sure that you follow the steps on how to use the module.

Overall, BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is a nine out of ten because it's easy to understand and use, plus it has a lot of benefits to customers.

Our primary use case for this solution is the data flow between our locations, between systems, and B2B data flow, which includes the data to the endpoints, the schemes and other lines. We deploy the solution on-premises.

For the IQ operation flow, we have to do a lot of planning with data resources and keeping the resources in front of the system. However, the solution has improved our organization by minimizing software dependency and managing data for our clients and regional schemes.

The file transfer, database, and integration features are the most valuable.

The solution can be improved by upgrading its features to compete with premium software in MFT. Additionally, Math and dollar features, along with product samples and VR functionalities, can be included in the next release.

We have been using the solution for approximately 15 years and are currently using version 20.200.

The solution is scalable. I rate it a nine out of ten.

The customer service and support team are very knowledgeable. I rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup is quite easy and depends on the speed of the background. So basically, if you're in the background, it's an eight out of ten.

We have seen a return on investment. The solution has saved us about 30% to 40% on additional investments in resources.

I rate the pricing a seven out of ten because there is room for improvement.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. The solution is good, but its current functionalities can be upgraded. I recommend the solution to users considering it.

I am using BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer for transferring files.

The most valuable features of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer are the ease of use and the ability to watch the files as they transfer called Watch File Transfer. There is a separate monitoring window that is useful.

Before we transfer files we have to make the connection profile first for MFT. If we did not have to do this and send the transfer files directly, that would be useful.

I have been using BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer for approximately three months.

I rate the stability of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer a seven out of ten.

I rate the scalability of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer a seven out of ten.

The communication from the support is very helpful.

I rate the support from BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer a nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is easy, it took approximately one minute to complete.

I rate the initial setup of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer a nine out of ten.

The implementation of the solution was done in-house.

I would recommend others follow the instructions given by the documentation and use it. That way, it is very simple to use.

I rate BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer a ten out of ten.

We use Control-M to monitor jobs on the endpoints. We monitor throughout the day to see which jobs fail. It helps resolve issues with the programmers. They know if they want to rerun, force complete, or hold a job. We work hand in hand with the programmers who have the final say on what they want to do with a particular job that requires action. Control-M is deployed across multiple locations, but I can't estimate the number of users.

Control-M is a critical part of our operations. We rely on it to do our jobs daily. It helps us automate things that come from the JCL side where you would normally have to do everything manually. It's a little quicker and more automated on the BMC side, which makes things smoother for the end-users. 

The solution allows you to relay your issues to management, who in turn, can communicate them to our customers and programmers. It maintains a dialogue between all parties. It's had an overall positive impact on our process execution. 

We can set up automated email notifications to the programmers or the whole team for a particular job. It helps save time because we're not consistently looking at the job to see if it has ended or failed.

The Control-M interface makes delivering files in our data pipeline a little easier. The integration is so much more seamless, so the transition is a smoother experience.

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

The stability is fairly good. We haven't had any serious issues. 

The response time could be faster when you need a person to answer your questions. There are situations where availability becomes crucial. 

I wasn't involved in the deployment. Maintenance is handled by our unit team. They do updates and patching almost weekly.

I rate Control-M an eight out of ten. It comes down to preference and what you need. There are multiple platforms out there, but I've only used this software.  I recommend doing some research and seeking out a lot of opinions. Talk to other folks who worked with other solutions to get a grip and a better understanding. 

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. 

The major use cases we have are batch processing and MFT. We are heavy users of the MFT plugin.

One of the benefits of Control-M is that it's helping to give business users visibility into and control over their jobs, and freeing up IT personnel to focus on other operations. Here, I'm mainly thinking of MFT. Our MFT end-users did not have access to our prior MFT tools at all, so they couldn't see the jobs. They would just request a job be built and then we would publish job reports so that they could see what was out there. Now, in Control-M, we're able to give them job-control access. We still lock down the building of file transfer jobs, but they now have the ability to see a job and see how it's built. They can run a job and hold a job if they need to.

But even for some of the batch jobs, we've written some orderable services that are allowing them to run jobs on-demand, jobs that they used to have to log in to a server and go through a menu to do. Our business users definitely have much higher capabilities in our product now.

And while we are primarily on virtual servers, we are in the process of standing up some agents in the cloud. We have our first agent in AWS up and we're getting ready to do some testing on it. That's pretty critical. There's a really big push within our organization to move into cloud. A lot of our next-gen apps that are going to be replacing the current ones are being built in the cloud. We have that first agent out there, but I assume there are going to be many more to follow as these new applications are stood up in the public cloud. Today we're on-prem, but I definitely envision us moving the entire Control-M stack to the cloud. Eventually, it will be in the cloud and we'll just have a couple of agents on-prem, versus being on-prem and having just a couple of agents in the cloud.

Control-M has also helped to make it easier to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines across on-premises and cloud technologies. It's due to the ability to orchestrate between workflows that are running in the cloud and workflows that are running on-prem. It gives us the ability to have end-to-end workflows, no matter where they're running.

The automation is one of the most valuable features.

New plugins could be tested better. We've had a lot of problems with the MFT plugin. We've been working through a lot of issues with BMC on it.

The functionality that has existed for long periods is very stable. But the problems with the MFT plugin specifically, and problems we've had with MFT in general, have unfortunately caused the entire stack to be affected enough that our end-users couldn't even log in to the application. 

I wish we would have known better about how MFT impacts the application as a whole, and I wish they would have done more load testing around that. That seems to be where most of our issues have been. The issues have been so bad sometimes that the entire app goes down, not just MFT.

I've been using Control-M for about two and a half years.

The stability of Control-M has Not been great. A big thing we've been trying to work on with BMC is observability. Modern applications should be observable and resilient, but we're finding that sometimes Control-M is not very resilient and many times Control-M is not very observable. We're working with BMC to try and figure out how we can externally monitor this application. 

We are using Dynatrace because of the problems we've had with Control-M. If we stood up Control-M and never had any problems, we probably wouldn't be too worried about being able to observe the processes and the queues and the communication between processes. But because we've had so many problems, it has forced us to dig in. We can't wait for a problem to happen and wait for a week for support to tell us how to fix it. We can't do that in a production environment. We have to know before a problem happens so that we can be proactive and not reactive. That's been a big struggle that we're continuing to work with BMC on.

It's pretty scalable. You can stand up a ton of agents and you can stand up a ton of servers, if you need scheduling servers. Scheduling and agents are definitely very scalable.

There isn't the ability to really scale the EM (Enterprise Manager) a ton, although the GUI can be scaled somewhat. I don't know how much of a need there is to be able to scale the EM. We don't seem to have issues on the EM side, for the most part.

We're definitely having issues with the gateway between the EM and the scheduling server, but BMC is telling us that it's because we're running too many file transfers on the scheduling server. They say that if we stand up more scheduling servers, that should resolve that issue. We'll see if it does, if we still have any issues after we spread the load of MFT, not only over more agents, but also over more schedulers. If we still have issues after that, I think that would mean you're pretty limited in how you can scale your EM. That is the one thing about which I'm not sure how well it scales.

Technical support is very back-and-forth. That's one of my gripes about the support. We open a case, they ask us for logs, we upload logs, and they come back and ask us for something else. 

At times, there isn't a lot of what I would call working together with them. We do now, but that's because we had a ton of support cases piling up and we started escalating with their internal leadership. Now, there are weekly meetings between our leadership and their leadership and our account managers, as well as weekly meetings with the support team and the dev team, to talk through our cases and any updates on them.

It took a lot of pushing from our end to get them to work with us. Otherwise, they just asked for logs and then we were waiting for a couple of days for them to look through all the logs and get back to us. We can't be doing that, especially if the issue is a production problem. We can't just upload logs every time we open a case and wait around for two weeks to get an answer.

Another gripe is that they're very siloed in what they know. Something that I've been asking for for a long time, from BMC, is somebody who can take a look at our environment as a whole, and not just in pieces. Every time we open a case with support, they want to assign it to a specific area. If it's a problem with the agent, then an agent person will look at it. If it's a problem with the EM, then an EM person will look at it. But nobody is looking at the environment as a whole. That's an issue because a lot of our problems, as I've mentioned, with MFT, are impacting the entire environment. It's not just one component. It's the entire environment and how those components relate and how they communicate that have been impacted. Nobody has really looked at the environment as a whole, in support. I think it would benefit BMC to have more experts on the entire application and not have everybody so siloed.

Neutral

The initial setup was a little complex, due to some of the requirements. It requires that you have C shell as it doesn't work with the regular BASH shell. There are some old mainframe requirements that have carried through the product, even though we don't run it on mainframes. For example, the user that you use to run it has to be under seven characters long. We had to modify the account we use because the name was too long.

We're still really trying to get our environment squared away. We started two and a half years ago, but we've got a laundry list of applications that we're migrating out of and we've only completed one of those migrations. We're having to modify our architecture now because of the load that we are running. I'm working with professional services at BMC to review our existing architecture so that they can give us a BMC-supported design recommendation.

One of the competitors we are migrating from is Broadcom/CA. Broadcom bought a couple of products. They own both AutoSys and Automic, and we are migrating out of both of those solutions. AutoSys has been pretty straightforward to migrate into Control-M because the job configuration is pretty simple. However, the Automic workflows are very complex. They utilize certain features that only Automic offers, things that we can't replicate in Control-M. That is causing a lot of issues and has caused us to put that project on hold for the time being, until we can work through some of the problems that are being presented. We've been migrating Broadcom for at least a year now.

Some applications are pretty straightforward. MOVEit is an example of one that's a pretty straightforward conversion. However, another tool we have, Diplomat MFT, has a backup file structure that is not what the conversion tool was expecting. We ended up writing a custom Python script to do that conversion for us. The ease of migration really depends on what application you're migrating out of. It could be very complex or very easy.

The migration process is a very high concern. We selected Control-M due to the ability to migrate everything into it and have everything in one tool. If we can't get our migrations completed, then Control-M will just be another tool on top of all the other ones that we have to support.

We used VPMA for the deployment. Our experience with them went pretty well. They're definitely very knowledgeable about the product

I don't know that they, or really, as I said earlier, even BMC had all the knowledge around how MFT could impact the application as a whole, back when we originally bought this. MFT was very new back then. VPMA did their best and guided us as much as they could, but I just don't think the plugin for MFT, specifically, was very mature yet. There were probably a lot of unknowns there.

We had a pre-sales team from BMC that helped us in the very beginning, before we worked with VPMA. They were nice, but I wouldn't say they were very knowledgeable. They had a very surface-level knowledge of the application. They didn't know anything that was deep. They would have to find out for us and get back to us.

It's not my realm, but I would assume Control-M has not helped us realize any savings on renewal costs after switching from Broadcom. The cost of an agent is significantly higher for Control-M than it is for Automic or AutoSys.

We are paying way more for Control-M than we've paid for any of our other scheduling tools. We have an inside joke that Control-M is sold as the "Bentley" of schedulers, but we feel that we got a "Pontiac" because it's falling apart half of the time.

BMC has two licensing models. One is where you pay by job execution and the other is where you pay by endpoints. I'm sure the specifics vary depending on the customer, but we opted to go with endpoint licensing. I'm not sure if that was the best decision, knowing what we know now.

With endpoint licensing, we pay per server. That means it behooves us to run as many jobs as we can on each of those servers. But we're very much finding that even if we make those servers very large and give them a ton of resources, they're still not able to perform because Control-M doesn't scale very well vertically. If you make the agent bigger, if you double the CPU and RAM, that doesn't necessarily mean you can run twice as many jobs. It's going to choke in other areas. 

We will see if we end up switching our licensing model. I think the endpoint licensing model we chose is quite a bit more expensive than an equivalent model where we would pay per execution. We would definitely have to change a lot about our environment if we were to change our licensing model from endpoint to execution, because today we give all of our end-users the ability to run jobs on-demand. If we were to change our licensing model to be based on executions, we would probably want to restrict that a little. 

The way you license is a very large consideration when moving to Control-M.

We really haven't taken advantage of some of the features that Control-M offers yet. The main thing I'm thinking of is SLA management. We haven't implemented that yet on a lot of our business-critical workflows because we just lifted and shifted everything into Control-M from the old app. As of today, things are pretty much equal until we are able to implement some of those additional features.

There are capabilities that Control-M offers that are good and I can see it being a very good product. BMC, as a company, has some maturing it needs to do in a lot of its processes. They have a very good sales team, but a lot of things after that can use some work.

We definitely haven't bailed on it, but I've heard a little bit, back and forth, from people at BMC that they might not be too upset if they lost us as a customer because we've been having so many problems. We've been on them about helping us get this environment corrected and functioning as we expect it to. But in a year from now, it's possible we could be in a really good place. I'm excited to see where it all goes.

I believe that the API should be upgraded with security control from the DM. There is Currently no security for the app API solution.

I have been using the solution for more than 10 years.

The solution is stable. I can say that in the previous version there was a problem. However, it is a stable solution.

The scalability of this solution is very good.  The current solution is used wide spread in my company, but I don't have any plans to expand.

I rate customer service and support a ten because it is the greatest.

Positive

I used a different solution called Computer Associates. I switched because my client switched to that solution. I never went against the solution or suggested to switch over again, because I like BMC.

The solution is complex, but it is very easy to administrate all the components from this solution.

The administration is currently done by two people. 

It pays for itself. In the last two years, I switched for mainframe to distribute systems. 

I switched to this solution within the last year. I switched from the servers payment package to the job payment package, and it is very expensive. 

I rate BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer nine out of ten.

The solution is mostly used for scheduling batches and file transfers.

The GUI is good if I'm comparing it to other scheduling products. All the add-ons are very useful, including the MFT databases, SAP plugins, and so on.

The cost of the license could be improved. 

I'd like to see MFT included as part of the overall product and not a cost add-on as AFT used to be included and they stopped supporting that and now have come up with MFT and you now have to pay for it separately.

I've been using the solution since 1998. It's been a while. 

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

I've used the solution in small sites and sites that run hundreds of thousands of jobs a day. It's pretty scalable. We have about 50 users, including developers and platform engineers, using this current iteration. The client is planning to increase the usage and the new licenses will be scaled accordingly.

Technical support has been very good. We are satisfied with the level of support.

Positive

I've worked with different clients and used different solutions. 

In terms of the ease of the initial setup, I'd say it depends on the use case, however, it can be quite complex, especially the on-prem version.

I'd rate the process a four out of five in terms of complexity.

We were able to deploy it within a month.

I am a consultant, so I can handle the initial setup myself.

The solution is a bit expensive. My understanding is that they offer yearly licenses, however, as a consultant, I don't directly deal with pricing. 

While the solution is currently on-premise, we are moving to the Helix Control-M on the cloud.

It's an excellent product. It's the best scheduling system out there, so I would recommend it.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution is workload automation in a batch environment, in clients' environments. This tool extends support to a number of applications and can be integrated with plugins like PeopleSoft and Informatica. It's a centralized monitoring system, so from the controlling client, you can monitor the entire batch environment of your client. It can also be used for disaster recovery. 

This solution is deployed both on-prem and on the cloud. We are using the latest version. 

This solution has a vast amount of features and with every new release, there are lots of new features introduced. The application has high availability—we have multiple customers and it's highly available. On an application level, if something goes down with the primary, then the application goes over to the secondary, so it's very, very easy to do disaster recovery. 

From an application integration point of view, it has a lot of APIs, rich APIs. Every month, they are releasing new APIs and new updates, like Java, but more than that. Now they are introducing a couple more APIs, which you can use to integrate your controlling environment with any applications you want. 

The only improvement I would suggest is the license pricing should be a little reduced. Apart from that, I don't see anything else as a major concern with the tool right now. 

I have been using this solution for more than 11 years now. 

This is a stable product. 

This solution is scalable. We have more than 200 clients using Control-M.

I've been working in the production environment for more than 11 years, but we created a high priority ticket for BMC when we first introduced it. They went all the way to resolve it and help us find a solution. Not only that, but they also helped us identify and analyze the root cause. In terms of customer support, BMC is at the top, in my rating. 

I have raised seven tickets and, within 15 minutes, we would get a call from their technical support. They never leave us in the middle of an issue, they go all the way to help us resolve it. Their support is the best. 

The installation is pretty straightforward. Anybody who has just two or three years of experience in this tool can do the installation. Their documentation is really nice. If you have a little experience in these tools and installation, then you can easily install Control-M. The installation took 10-15 minutes, maximum, and you can do it yourself. 

I implemented this solution myself. 

The licensing is a bit more expensive than other tools, so if a client is focused on the cost, that would be something to consider. The licensing should be cheaper. 

I don't have experience in AutoSys, but my team also operates in AutoSys. 

I rate BMC Control-M a nine out of ten, because of the stability and the customer support. The only reason I wouldn't rate it a ten out of ten is because their licensing is a bit expensive. Otherwise, BMC Control-M is the best tool I have ever worked on. 

I would absolutely recommend this solution to new clients. Lots of new clients are converting to this Control-M tool because of the stability and the support model. So I wouldn't only recommend it externally, but, internally, we also recommend it to our clients. If they can compromise on cost a little, then this is the best tool to go with.