Control-M Reviews

The MFT product is for transferring files with external partners, and on-premises as well. We use it in both of these use cases. We're doing file transfer internally on our on-premises network, between sites or servers. Then, we also do that via a secure connection with an external partner or on a separate network. It is basically the same as file transfer over an FTP.

The most valuable feature is the integration with the workload automation solution.

It has a nice dashboard for loading up the file transfers, so it's easy to follow the success or failure rates of the operations. You get notified when transfers fail, which is an important feature.

At this time, you can receive file transfers but it is not possible to send them. Ideally, we also want to be able to send files using this solution.

Scalability is something that needs to be improved.

We have been using BMC Managed File Transfer for about one year. It is a relatively new product. We have been using the larger Control-M workload Automation for close to 15 years.

This is a stable solution.

This solution is not very scalable. It can handle a lot of traffic very easily and I think that small to medium-sized businesses will have no problem with it. However, if you want to set it up in a highly available environment and you need multiple sites then these kinds of options are not yet supported.

In our company, there is only a team of a few people using this product. They are engineers and are responsible for the file transfer functionality.

I have been in contact with BMC technical support, although it was for the workload automation tool and not specifically for the MFT product.

Technical support is responsive and I would rate our overall experience with them as moderate.

Prior to using this solution, we were using Axway B2Bi. We are still currently using it, alongside with the BMC MFT product.

The initial setup is straightforward. It took perhaps a week to deploy.

We did the deployment ourselves.

This product is not feature-rich but it is a solid file-transfer solution. I would say that the features they have now are very good, although the product is not complete because you cannot send files.

I would recommend it but at the same time, I think that everybody needs to test it and see if it meets their needs. The supported features are very good but obviously, if there is a protocol or something else that you need that isn't supported then it will not be suitable.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use this solution for automating workloads across traditional data centers, the cloud, SaaS offerings, and various other Enterprise software packages.

It is allowing developers and product owners to create complex workflows that may encompass several different products or technologies and have it all visible, monitored, and managed from one place.

The Single pane of glass view has helped us to see the big picture.

The auditing and archiving capabilities have helped us maintain compliance and provide for a single place to look for errors, check historical runs, etc.

We have increased efficiency by reducing the number of people needed to watch and react to processing.

The simplified integrations and scheduling across various products was a big win to reduce silos.

The Automation API has opened up a world of possibilities for us, including the ability to create workflows on-demand using traditional DevOps tools.

The most valuable feature is the Automation API - Jobs as Code. This is the future of workload automation. It brings Control-M into the DevOps sphere, and they are focusing a lot of effort with monthly releases of this product.

The Web interface is coming along but still has some missing pieces. Today, you must still rely on the full GUI client to do everything you need. The next major release needs to focus on the lightweight web client.

I'd also like to see more out of the box support for Docker, etc.

We have been using this solution for more than sixteen years.

This solution is highly stable with a good customer support team.

This solution is highly scalable.  We can run one job or a million jobs, with ease. We've never had an issue.

Technical support for this solution is top-notch. Many of the folks that I email have been there for years! That says a lot.

Prior to using this product, we used homemade solutions and we outgrew them.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward, but for new users, I would recommend engaging a third party to help you set up and learn the ropes.

We used a vendor team to assist with the deployment.

Over the years we've saved countless man YEARS. We have also avoided having to buy additional products for scheduling and integration. The list really does go on and on.

Pricing can be steep, but you get what you pay for. If you are just concerned about cost, you are going to miss the big picture because Control-M has features that are light years ahead of the competition. Don't save a nickel to spend $20.

Before choosing this product we looked at Computer Associates (CA Technologies) and Tivoli.

Control-M is light years ahead of any competitor we have looked at.

You can try it without buying it. I would suggest checking out the workbench at: https://jobsascode.io

This is a free version of the Control-M package that is perfect to take for a spin.

Our primary use case of this solution is to keep track of our help desk tickets.

The solution helps us to make sure that help desk tickets don't go unnoticed.

I find it very helpful to be able to keep track of all our help desk tickets.

We don't use the program that much, so it is stable enough for us.

I don't think the solution is very scalable. The version we're currently using is discontinued and I haven't upgraded yet. We don't plan to upgrade soon, because we're working on our other back-office software that's more for our business.

The technical support is okay, because it's an end of life product.

The biggest reason for upgrading what we currently have, is the workforce becoming more mobile and we need to give users easier access to submit help desk tickets. That is why we are looking for a solution that can offer this feature.

We used a consultant for the deployment and the initial setup was pretty straightforward and easy.

We haven't seen a ROI yet.

Licensing costs are around $3000 a year. 

My rating for this solution is five out of ten. It's not bad, but it's not good either. There's a lot of room for improvement and I think it can be more user-friendly. In the next version I would like to see something with integrated mobile device management so that I can keep track of software and devices, having it all in one software for our help desk. I think it would be very useful.

We use this solution for enterprise workload automation in the financial industry. We schedule and monitor hundreds of business-critical processes.

We also leverage the Managed File Transfer capabilities of Control-M to handle our file transfers securely & efficiently. Most of our tasks also deal with databases, and Control-M's purpose-built module for the databases comes in very handy when handling database components. It adds value with its capability to execute tasks natively and bring more information to the output.

The BIM feature is used to monitor the important set of jobs as a service and to proactively alert operations when it sees that some jobs in the critical path are failed or delayed. This helps a lot in maintaining our SLAs efficiently.

Control-M, with its huge integration capabilities, brought most of our scheduling activities under one roof. This adds to ease of use and support. To top that, the visibility it adds to the otherwise hidden information is very useful. In fact, invaluable.

Although we do not use tens of additional plugins available, we can see how they can be valuable to other companies.

BMC has now started concentrating more on APIs, which is a welcome move. This enables us to develop 'job as code'. This supports our efforts to adapt to a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery model. We hope that they make it one hundred percent compatible as early as possible.

Integration capabilities, plugins, support communities, visibility, MFT, Reports, APIs. As mentioned earlier, all these features mean that we don't need to use multiple solutions to do the task. It also makes things a lot easier that way.

MFT changed the way we manage our file transfers. On top of that, all of it is directly visible in the same GUI. All the statistics can be viewed at the click of a button. Although a bit flaky sometimes, it is very helpful.

Experts in the communities need a special mention here. There's a huge number of people who spend their valuable time helping each other, solving others problems. Although the actual BMC support can be slow in response sometimes, the expertise & the helpful nature of people in the BMC Community for Control-M more than make up for it.

MFT needs some more polishing. We ran into problems a few times & struggled to get them sorted in time. But, BMC gave their full support to us at such times.

APIs are not there one hundred percent yet, but BMC just adopted a monthly release mechanism for APIs. I can see that they are on it full time.

Inbuilt integration with Connect Direct could be helpful. A developer sandbox could be very helpful to try out new features or experience them.

Application Integrator can be helpful, although I don't see many templates being built by BMC experts. The hub that is available is mostly user-dependent.

It's stable ninety-nine percent of the time. Even the other one percent could be because of the funky underlying infrastructure/network setup.

Our job footprint is very low, so we never faced any scalability issues. From the documentation, it is my understanding that virtually, there is no limit to its scalability.

It can be slow at times, but you eventually come to an understanding that as long as you provide all of the information they 'might' need as early as possible, there are better chances that you get your answers 'sooner'.

I had used Cron scheduler for a short time, but it can be considered almost zero experience. My understanding is that BMC Control-M is years ahead in terms of usability & visibility.

The initial setup of this solution is very straight forward. BMCs AMIGO program is there to walk you through the process.

It gets a bit technical when you need to setup MFTs, but at the same time, it's not rocket science either.

We performed the deployment in-house with help from BMCs AMIGO program.

Pricing is a tricky area that I don't have much experience in. I can see it getting even trickier with more companies moving to a cloud-based infrastructure.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

I like this solution, and my advice is to go for it :)

We use this solution to automate batch processing, create automated workflows to support various applications, and integrate various endpoints in the workflow to support business processes.

File transfer between our company and partner is critical for us. MFT has provided this solution and we are now using MFT for internal and external file transfers.

With version 9.0.18, which included new features, it has increased the usage of Control-M.

Introduction of Control-M-managed file transfer has increased usage in our organization. BIM is a good tool to monitor SLAs, and being a financial organization, this is a very good feature for us.

The most valuable feature is the Autoedit variable resolution in planning. This feature allows developers to better understand the schedule, and allow them to correct any potential issues in advance.

The MFT dashboard is also a useful tool to track all file transfers. It provides detailed information about both source and destination.

Control-M MFT and Control-M API both need improvement.

The Control-M MFT has to support checksums for FTP transfer between our own Control-M agents.

The Control-M API does not support SQL database-type jobs, where a job has been configured to use the SQL catalog to locate SSIS.

BIM needs further improvement to include any dynamic-type jobs with the workflow.

The support and bug fix timeline need improvement.

Technical support for this solution needs to be improved.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

We use it to control job submission.

This product works with all the platforms that we use today. We're able to centralize our managing of job flows for all our platforms. That's how it really helps us.

It has also improved our SLAs.

In addition, it has definitely helped development. Now we have multiple developers running their jobs and it gives them a lot of flexibility.

The most valuable features are 

• the managing of file transfers
• the product keeping up with technology.

It's also very user-friendly and easy to manage job flow.

I would like to see the ease of upgrades improved, although they may have addressed that. We're still at an early version, but we plan to get to the latest and greatest very soon, where we can take advantage of easy upgrades.

Their technicians should be more involved when we're applying new technology to Control-M, such as cloud. We're working with cloud right now, with AWS, and getting the attention of a technician, sometimes, can take some time. It would be nice if they had somebody assigned to it. Dedicated support.

It's very stable. It's continuously running - we're a 24/7 shop. The only problem that may come up is applying it to new servers with new technologies. There can be little startup problems, but they're usually ironed out. Overall, the stability of the product is awesome.

It's very scalable. The product does technically work with any other hardware, using its agents, so it's very scalable.

Technical support is very good. They're very helpful. The only downside is getting their attention and fixing a problem in a timely fashion. But a lot of it is development. If it comes to an urgent problem, they usually respond fairly quickly. And I must say, there really haven't been that many urgent problems.

Upgrades are pretty straightforward. There's not really that much mystery to them.

We did use a consultant when we went to a new release from a very old release. But going forward, we're doing our own upgrades. Our experience with the consultant was very good. I forget which consultant we used, it was about eight years ago, but they were very good. They handled everything.

My advice would be to go ahead with Control-M. Get a lot of input from their technicians. Work with them. They're very good, and very helpful.

I've learned a lot because I came from the mainframe area, personally, where now I'm working with all this Windows and agent technology I never knew before.

We do not have Managed File Transfer yet, but we do want to get to it. We like what it offers, above advanced file transfer. We're looking forward to implementing that.

I'm going to give it an eight, only because I don't have anything else to compare it with.

I've never worked in a company where we weren't using it, so it's hard to say how it improves our organization. Our Oracle Database backup teams used to do this all themselves via cron. They've automated what was done by cron with Control-M. Other than that, everybody's using it.

It saves us time. Instead of 800 applications internally doing their own thing, we centralize it into one location where there are notifications. Taking the power of economies of scale into one point of focus, it saves us money for sure. We turned a company of mom-and-pop little fiefdoms all over the place into a company where things are centralized in one location.

Monitoring is a valuable aspect of it. The monitoring tool is very good. It's very easy for expert and entry-level users to use on short notice. Also, the usability is good.

The reporting tool needs a major-league upgrade.

I also would like not to have to reach out to a third-party application company to do automated notifications. Right now, we still have people manually calling people and emailing people. There's a company called xMatters - and there are others - that has an API through Control-M that can automate any aspect of failure management. I'd like to see it build right into the product. I'd like to see a better notification product.

In some parts of Control-M the stability is good, in some parts it's not so good.

We're going to see the scalability soon when we upgrade. 

Most of the time we don't get the answers we're looking for. That's why we use a consultant company.

It works on task-based licensing.

Procurement may have looked at other products. But from our perspective, they probably would have scared the living heck out of us if they had told us they were looking at other things.

You have to talk about it more in terms of how Control-M fits into the scale of other products which BMC offers for what you're doing. It's got Helix, cloud management, ITSM, etc. BMC offers the whole scale - everything. We don't choose to use it all. But from another prospective, it's a real positive that they have this scope, that they can handle everything a corporation could throw at it.

I would like to see us use more things such as Helix. From that perspective, I would recommend it because of all the product offerings and because a lot of the approved vendors, which work directly through BMC, really make the experience a lot better.

We learn things every day about the product and the availabilities. We work in an IT environment with inquisitive people. There are millions of options available, parameter-wise, within the system and I learn something new every day, by working around smart people and intuitive people.

In terms of how the solution affects business modernization initiatives, this is all somewhat new for us. We're starting to go into a little bit of the DevOps and the Workload Change Manager, and the cloud chat-box. We're just starting to get into things like that with BMC Control-M.

I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. We've had massive growth in the last year to two years because of company acquisitions. We've added a lot of big-data processing and a lot of other processing and it's handled it quite well. We really haven't had any serious outages in quite a long time, even through the large growth we've had. We've doubled the work and it's handled it seamlessly. It's just that the reporting aspects are poor, because management always wants to know things. It's hard to get at tangible numbers without doing a lot of additional work outside of the system.

We use it to schedule nightly batch jobs. We also have jobs that run during the day on a cyclic basis to provide up-to-date, real-time information for the company.

I'm also pretty much focused on keeping things going. I'm the only scheduler at the company. We have about 4000 jobs in the daily schedule with around 42,000 iterations of jobs.

Everything that we schedule is run through Control-M. It supplies and provides what is needed, whether it is nighttime processing or cyclic job streams that are needed for the company to do what it needs to do.

The whole Control-M scheduling package is valuable. 

The most important features are that it is easy to use and graphical, since I'm a graphical person. This allows me to see it on the screen. I've used other scheduling tools, and the information wasn't there. Being able to see the jobs that connect to another job is real important to me.

It can do anything that I need. We do real-time jobs. We also do jobs that have to run at certain times. I have not been presented with a scheduling need that I was not able to do. It is very flexible and dynamic.

I learned it intuitively, and it's easy to use. I speak to operators who sometimes have limited technical knowledge and they are able to pick it up with my help. They're able to pick it up pretty easily and do the functions that they need to do. 

I'm not sure how the solution fits together with our business modernization initiatives, as there are things outside of my area, even though Control-M is the scheduling tool of the company. They may use other things, e.g., Big Data.

It always works. There is never a problem with Control-M. If there is a problem it is either with the server Control-M runs on or a scheduling error that was made. 

Control-M is always running and never breaking. I always tease server people about rebooting, since my application is always running.

We were on version 6 and went to version 8 about four years ago. Everything worked just like it used to, but it was more streamlined. When we went to version 9 last year, it was even more streamlined. Things just looked more up-to-date, and it was more web-based. 

Sometimes, I don't think of what can happen next, but I see the new version, and think, "Oh wow, that was a great idea!"

We keep growing in number of jobs. We have more jobs every year, and it is never a problem. Everything still runs like it is supposed to. It works quite well, and there is never an issue with the job count getting bigger.

Compared to large companies, we are small as far as our Control-M footprint.

The technical support is great. On their website, they have a knowledge base, where a lot of times, I find the answer to my problem. If not, whether it is a question or technical problem, I open a case online, and I get responses very quickly. If it is a high level problem, I will get a call back right away. They have follow-the-sun support, so I always have access to someone to talk to. If production is down, I will get someone on the phone right away, and I've never had a problem. They always answer my questions, which is very helpful. They never say, "Hey, you could have looked this up over here." They give me great answers back, which have helped quite a bit.

When I got there, we had Robot Schedule. With this solution, I couldn't see the job connecting, which was sort of frustrating. It was like, "Hey, where does this one go?" 

I know Robot Schedule has advanced. However, we had Robot Schedule and Control-M, and we migrated off of Robot Schedule and moved everything to Control-M. and I was part of that process. I just felt so much better after we phased off Robot Schedule.

The upgrade process is great. They have a whole department with their AMIGO program, where you can have someone walk you through it. We have upgraded to 9.18. When we go to 9.19, it will be real quick. It should be almost hands off from what I understand, and that is what I am attending this BMC event to find out about: the upgrade process. When we did the last one, it was real easy. I understand it will be even easier going forward, so I'm happy with that.

This product saves hours in a day based on my experience working here versus other companies with manual operations.

The solution has helped reduce IT operations costs. Years ago, I would get many calls in operations. I get zero calls now. I may get an email or two about a question operations has, but everything runs. It doesn't break and works like it is supposed to.

I have been exposed to a little bit looking online. We talked to someone through our rep. They were looking at Control-M and some other source scheduler. They went with the other scheduler for some reason. I looked at it online, and thought "Wow, this looks really weird."

Do your due diligence. Look around at what is out there. However, I would 100 percent be behind Control-M. It's a great company. Their support is good. The product is great. It's a good investment. It will keep growing and cover any needs that we have. This product can do everything I need and can help me do anything I need to do to schedule for real time information, supplying things, and batch jobs at night.

We are automating more things. I sometimes hear an application team say, "We are running this manually, and we want to make it automated." I will make a few jobs to save them from doing what they are doing manually and automate it. I am always looking for more things to automate.

The people who are in development of this product seem like they are very forward thinking, and always thinking, "What can we do next?" I think that is great.