Control-M Reviews

Control-M is mostly used for centralized job management of different environments: Windows, Unix, Solaris, and Azure. If you are looking for a solution for centralized job management, especially if you have more than 100, 500, or 1,000 jobs you are maintaining, Control-M is the best solution.

Many sub-companies in my organization have more than 500 jobs, and if you are looking for a solution to make those jobs centralized, more alert-prospective, minimize outage, and minimize manual work, Control-M is the ideal choice.

Control-M has all kinds of job manager features. Azure is there, AWS is there, and SQL jobs are also there. The meaning of centralized is that it is completely used for centralization. All jobs can be managed in a single folder or a single way.

Control-M has improved considerably. It is very helpful because when I see the large amount of jobs coming in, it is very difficult to manage on a single server. It becomes high memory, high CPU; all the difficulties are there on servers. Control-M makes it very easy. We can centralize it, we can monitor it as well, and we can configure alerts for that as well.

The documentation for Control-M could be more clear. The documentation is clear, but in some areas it becomes difficult to manage. Another thing is for cloud-based things. If we could connect directly from Control-M, that would be better. For example, for SQL, we also need to put an agent on a server. For cloud access, we also need to put an agent on a server, and then we need to configure the connection profile and everything. If we could connect directly from Control-M, that would be better. For on-premises or these things, we have to put the agent, but for cloud-based services, we also have to put an agent on the server.

Integrating Control-M for my DevOps and DataOps processes is easy, but agent management is a little difficult. I have not used DevOps. I have configured it for Azure, but it was not completed. The project got lost. Everywhere we need to put the agent where we want to configure the agent server configuration. For Azure, we have to put an agent on some server, and from there, it connects to Azure. If we could directly connect to Azure or SQL from Control-M, that would be better.

My experience with Control-M is approximately two years at this company. At my last company, when I left, it was under the configuration process. I think it was there for approximately six months.

Control-M is very stable. I have not seen any outage.

Control-M is also very scalable. I have not seen any kind of outage or shortage.

The technical support for Control-M is very good. They respond very quickly. Whenever we raise a case, they respond to that case in approximately one hour. The technical response is very quick and fast.

The deployment of Control-M is very easy.

I have not worked with the pricing. It is a management-level thing. I am working as an admin of Control-M.

Control-M is utilized at a large scale. Control-M is very useful and is used by many businesses.

I am a customer. My company bought this project. They are getting the project to onboard it to Control-M. We are supporting that onboarding, agent installation, agent upgradation, and all the things we are managing on the back end.

Deployment of Control-M is both. We have both. Control-M in our environment is on-premises.

Control-M is utilized in an MNC, enterprise-level. My last company was Wipro. Control-M was also being used there. It is also being used at this company.

My relationship with Control-M is work-related, not transactional. My relationship with BMC is information-based.

With Control-M, we configure it when they come with what they are doing manually. What they are currently doing is manual, or they are doing manual things by putting a manual person on it. We are analyzing those. We are thinking that if that can be onboarded to Control-M to automate. If we find that this can be done by Control-M, we get those things onboarded on Control-M in their environment. If it is a vendor or partner, we get one server from them, we configure all the things on their environment, and we run from our side.

If they ask, I will be a reference for the vendor. Our company is a merger of five companies, including Guy Carpenter, Oliver Wyman, Mercer, and Marsh. These all companies are together. They all work on their business. If Mercer has the solution of Control-M and Guy Carpenter needs that, that business comes to us for onboarding their environment. It works this way. I would give Control-M an overall rating of eight out of ten.

I have used Control-M for database, SAP, web services, and file transfers. Additionally, I use it for normal scripts.

We had a customer who was using cron jobs to handle their workflows. With cron jobs, they faced problems related to SLA. When something failed, it took them time to identify issues, and sometimes they missed incidents which resulted in P1 situations in production environments. They transitioned to Control-M based on its features related to SLA and workflow visibility, which significantly helped them.

The GUI is the best feature, along with the file transfer capabilities. These are the two main components I use on a daily basis. Through GUI or CCM, we get control of all the components, which I really appreciate. 

While I cannot specify exact business impact numbers, frequent P1 incidents in the production environment typically indicate monetary losses.

While it can be used for DevOps purposes, we haven't used it for that purpose.

Support is one aspect that they really need to improve. Though we receive support for current versions, the challenge arises when working in large organizations with legacy workflows or applications, typically 10 to 20% of the total. 

When these legacy environments have outdated OS and face production issues from a Control-M perspective, BMC support states it's not supported anymore. Recently, we needed documentation for an old component during a production issue, and their response was that they couldn't help as it wasn't supported. Documentation should be maintained for all versions since they provided the application.

I have a total experience of around 19 years, with approximately 13 or 14 years specifically with Control-M. I started with 6.4.

Control-M is pretty stable. There are occasional issues, yet nothing major, and most issues are not caused by the software itself.

In on-premises environments, scalability features are limited. Planning and resource allocation must be done at the start. If workflows increase from 1,000 to 10,000, redeployment of the application becomes necessary. Database and application node planning must account for anticipated workflow volumes from the beginning.

We have approximately 1,000 users.

Support is an area that requires significant improvement.

Positive

I haven't migrated from other solutions.

I have limited experience with TWS. The TWS version we used was primarily command-line based, and its GUI capabilities were not comparable to Control-M.

The deployment process is straightforward. The environment's complexity affects deployment time rather than the software itself. Basic DB and Linux box installation takes approximately a week. The planning phase for system connectivity and task execution locations requires additional time.

The system requires maintenance with patches released once or twice yearly.

We are implementing this as a customer.

I can provide a general perspective on ROI. Manual tasks require human effort and are prone to errors, which Control-M helps eliminate. However, I cannot provide specific ROI figures.

Control-M is expensive and not cheap at all.

I have conducted technical assessments for several market solutions, though not in great depth. We explored alternative solutions due to Control-M's high cost rather than its technical limitations. My assumption is that all current enterprise-level scheduling or workload automation software provides similar technical functionalities and features.

We're a customer.

I would recommend Control-M for its performance capabilities. While cost-cutting is prevalent everywhere and Control-M's cost is on the higher side, from a technical perspective, it ranks among the top three solutions. 

The review rating for Control-M is nine out of ten.

I lead a team of Control-M schedulers and operators, and I also do some scheduling myself. A specific example of a task or workflow I manage with Control-M is that I have re-engineered a monolithic script. The process I re-engineered was designed for printing invoices, specifically the invoices of EDP clients, which amounts to about eight million invoices per month.

To handle that scale with Control-M, I made changes by decomposing the monolithic script, which was made in shell scripting, into Control-M jobs, getting the complete workflow, a PDF, and transforming it into a Control-M workload. I do a lot of transformation from monolithic scripts or jobs that can be transformed into workloads within Control-M.

The best features Control-M offers include cross-platform dependency management, which is interesting because a job on the mainframe depends on a file arriving from a Unix system that, in turn, depends on a Windows process completing, and Control-M handles that heterogeneous dependency chain natively.

A time when this feature really made a difference for my team was when we had several workloads that are dependent on each other, using different platforms, and that interconnection between those platforms is really relevant to the whole process. There are more features that add value to Control-M, such as the calendar and condition system, which is really powerful to schedule almost to perfection many workloads that are critical for the business, whether in energy, insurance, banking, etc., because it maintains the logic.

Using the conditions allows me to create the re-engineering process that I have mentioned, which depends not only on the conditions but allows everything to run smoothly and on time. Tasks that in the original monolithic script would take about two hours now take at least fifty percent less time because it is more efficiently designed. The time savings were enabled mostly by parallelization, but not only that; I can adjust several aspects.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization because if some condition fails or if a calendar is incorrectly defined, a simple error in a condition can stop a critical workload, stop invoicing, and stop files that should go to the banking system.

Control-M can be improved with better integration with modern DevOps toolchains, as while it has made strides with APIs and the automation API, integration with tools such as JIRA and ServiceNow could be more seamless out of the box.

There is also a knowledge barrier that BMC should be aware of; Control-M has a steep learning curve for deep operational mastery, where basic administration is fairly accessible, but truly understanding the platform takes months to years for a new person, and BMC could invest more in advanced training and certification paths beyond the basics.

I have been using Control-M for more than twenty years, since around 1996.

Control-M is stable in my experience. I have worked with Control-M environments processing tens of thousands of jobs, and currently, we have around six thousand jobs in the energy company.

Control-M is used quite extensively; we execute around six thousand jobs a day, serving around seventy to eighty applications, and it is always growing, also serving many DevOps teams.

BMC support is generally competent for standard issues.

Positive

Before choosing Control-M, I always worked with it and know alternatives such as TWS, Autosys, and other platforms similar to Control-M, but I have never worked with them.

The ROI of Control-M in critical infrastructure is less about percentage savings and more about what does not fail, such as when a national payment system opens every morning on time, or when millions of transactions are processed without a missed dependency.

Control-M has premium pricing, which is justified for enterprise-scale operations, as we are paying for a platform with decades of maturity, proven reliability, and the capacity to handle complex orchestration scenarios that simpler tools cannot manage.

I have always worked with Control-M, first on banking systems and then on energy systems, and though I worked with other systems, Control-M was always present. We have many users in many different roles; there are maybe four or five administration roles along with operation roles.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Control-M is that it makes your life easier in dealing with batch processing, whether on mainframe or distributed servers, allowing you to define everything the way you want. I advise others looking into using Control-M to invest in people, not just the tool, emphasizing that a well-configured Control-M environment with experienced operators is essential for reliability.

Integrating Control-M with technologies for our data ops and DevOps processes can be difficult as technologies change. I would rate this review nine out of ten overall.

My main use case for Control-M is to control the batch for the day by scheduling the jobs, ensuring that all jobs run on time, and verifying that all conditions are met. Sometimes I force complete the jobs or rerun failed jobs by fixing the JCLs, and I ensure all batches are completed on time and all SLAs are met.

A specific example of a batch process I manage with Control-M is a weekly job which runs from Monday to Friday on all working days, and I ensure the job is completed on time. I also verify that if any files are pending to process which that job needs, the file is available so that the job can run once the file is available. Such scenarios are common in my work.

Regarding my main use case, I work on automation and ensure that there are no human errors. Everything we use is up to date, and we make sure to follow the SOPs perfectly.

Control-M offers several best features, including its user-friendliness. Compared to TWS and CA 7, Control-M is a tool wherein if you get training for 10 to 12 days, you can learn almost everything, and it is very good and simple to use.

What makes Control-M user-friendly for me is that we connect through the client interface, which is easy to log in to, and there is no downtime for it. Control-M is only recycled weekly. It is straightforward to define and monitor the jobs and to get insights from the zoom panel. The coloring shows us in yellow if a job is executing, red if it has failed, and other colors for different conditions, making it simple.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization, especially when new team members join as their first assignment. It is a tool we can explain quickly, giving them a few sessions to work in production or development environments faster compared to other tools like CA 7 or TWS.

In our organization, we work for a banking client where we handle 10,000 jobs running on Control-M daily. Managing those jobs would be difficult with other tools due to visibility issues. With Control-M, it is easier to manage workloads and handle abends, and the chances of missing things are significantly less compared to command-based tools like CA 7.

Control-M can be improved in several areas. Last week when creating a job, I found that the option for global conditions could be more streamlined, as well as the in and out conditions, which are a bit complicated. Integrating more AI options, such as automatically marking jobs that are known to fail as complete, would be beneficial.

I have been using Control-M for the last 16 years.

Control-M is 100% stable.

Regarding scalability, I would say it is good and there are always possibilities for scalability.

Customer support from BMC, who owns Control-M, is excellent. They provide good support for critical issues, and I would rate it 99% out of 100.

Positive

I have experience working on CA 7 and TWS. While CA 7 is a good tool, Control-M is better due to its simplicity and less complicated nature.

To deploy Control-M, I would say two resources would be sufficient for proper installation and defining architecture, security levels, and access control.

In our team, approximately 24 users utilize Control-M, with 15 members working 24/7 for batch operations and nine members focusing on scheduling tasks during business hours.

Regarding return on investment, training a resource on Control-M allows them to handle two or three clients at the same time, thus saving costs for the company and making it easier to train.

Those things are managed by the sales team. I do not have much visibility regarding pricing, setup cost, or licensing.

We evaluated Jobtrac, CA 7, and TWS before making our decision.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Control-M is time management, reliability, and the tool's availability, which makes our work easier.

I advise that if you have banking or insurance requirements or operate in a small industry, you can definitely consider Control-M as your first option.

I provided this review with an overall rating of 10 out of 10.

Control-M is our primary workload scheduling software, and we aim to utilize it for linking applications, hardware, and data transfers. Ideally, it should be the core component of our architecture. While we have started to expand its use over the past couple of years, we are not fully there yet.

A significant portion of our incoming files is handled through Managed File Transfer (MFT) Enterprise, which is an extension of Control-M. We have been utilizing this solution increasingly for both external and internal file transfers. Additionally, we rely on Control-M to schedule SAP jobs, which is one of its key functionalities. We also schedule a substantial portion of our data warehouse production using Control-M. 

As a health insurance company, we have a main internal application that heavily depends on Control-M. For instance, many incoming files need to be decoded and processed for our internal application, followed by a job that transfers the data into our databases. We have recently begun to use Control-M for the maintenance of various databases, such as SAP HANA, Oracle, and Postgres. This aspect of our usage is constantly growing.

Another significant aspect of our workflow involves creating customized job types for our clients. For example, some files we receive are encoded and zipped, for which there is no default Control-M job. To address this, we frequently use the Application Integrator to provide additional functionalities not currently available in Control-M. This allows us to automate tasks that would otherwise require manual intervention, such as extracting contents from ZIP files.

We are also standardizing processes with Control-M, providing standard job types for all our customers. This includes file renaming, combining files, or separating them based on specific application types. For instance, we receive files that contain multiple text files, which we may need to split or combine into a certain format when sending them out.

In summary, we are dedicated to making Control-M our primary workload automation and orchestration software. Recently, we've begun integrating Control-M with Ansible to manage patch routines for our Linux and Windows servers. The challenge has been linking these patch routines with our application jobs. We've started this integration so that whenever there is a patch, our applications automatically halt until we receive confirmation from Ansible. We frequently use the Control-M API for this purpose, enabling seamless coordination between Ansible and Control-M. Overall, these are the main use cases we are currently implementing with Control-M, and we continually seek to expand its applications across our operations.

The application integrator provides a toolbox that makes integration easy. We use it to mask Python scripts that handle various routines, such as ZIP solutions, while the application integrator manages drop-down menus. Sometimes the integrations that Control-M provides are not suitable for our specific use cases. For instance, with S3 storage from Amazon, Control-M's integration only uses a small percentage of available S3 functionalities, so we had to create our own solution. When using BMC tools such as the application integrator, Control-M provides an easy path to integrate many features.

One thing we have criticized is the MFTE capabilities, particularly regarding high availability. BMC hasn't provided a setup with multiple fallbacks for error situations. We've experienced main problems with MFTE where having one setup means when an error occurs, the entire service goes down. We have requested BMC to provide a high availability solution for MFTE. While there are other minor issues, this remains our main concern.

I started using the z/OS parts in 2007-2008 for one to two years. After switching companies, I have been using it in its current form since 2013, totaling twelve years of experience.

It is usually very stable, except for the MFT solution where an error leads to an outage. This has occurred several times in the last two to three years. We are in direct contact with their lab development regarding these issues. While the system is stable 99% of the time, when issues occur, they are significant.

The scalability is very good with numerous configuration options available. Though we sometimes use load balancers in front of Control-M, the available functions offer good options for configuration. Our license doesn't limit our ability to configure Control-M as needed, allowing us to easily create new agents or environments.

I don’t contact the BMC support every day, but we are in constant communication with them. They are currently migrating many features to their web interface, which means some functionalities that were available on their desktop solution are now missing. As a result, we are creating a lot of tickets regarding this issue. At least once a week, one of my colleagues reaches out to BMC support.

Regarding the quality and speed of their responses, it really depends on the representative and the topic at hand. There are certain areas where they have more experienced experts, while in other cases, the support staff tends to rely on standard procedures. Generally, their answers are acceptable; I would rate them around a seven out of ten. Many times, their assistance is more like a nine or ten, but there are occasions when a representative provides standard responses without understanding the specific issue. In these situations, I often have to clarify the problem multiple times because they start with standard solutions that don’t apply to my case. Overall, I would rate their support around a solid seven out of ten.

Neutral

I previously used OPC (now TWS) from IBM for z/OS software. We regularly evaluate the market, comparing different vendors with BMC, including Redwood, Stone Branch, and HLC. While we conduct proof of concepts and demonstrations from various vendors, we maintain only one product installation.

Control-M was previously used for both z/OS (mainframe) and distributed environments. However, we have since migrated from the mainframe to a distributed system two years ago, and now Control-M is only implemented on the distributed side. I was responsible for this migration due to my knowledge of mainframe systems. While Control-M was already in place, certain functionalities, like data transfer, were not integrated into Control-M. This integration has been accomplished in the last five years.

The learning curve for me was easy due to my background. It took about a year maximum to transition into an administration role. My experience with both mainframe and distributed systems was beneficial. For new colleagues without z/OS background, the learning curve was steeper. While becoming a scheduler is relatively easy in Control-M, mastering specific features requires more time and learning.

In terms of maintenance, we usually have one or two major releases each year, which is quite a significant process. If there’s one area where BMC could improve, it would be optimizing the maintenance process. The type of maintenance required depends on the range of components included. If we talk specifically about the core Control-M product or its basic components, then currently, there isn’t much maintenance involved. However, when we include the agents, the maintenance requirements increase. Overall, I would classify the maintenance needs as moderate. It could be less demanding, particularly during situations like a major version change, where we would prefer to minimize outages. We are in discussions with BMC about how to enhance this process. To summarize, I would say that the maintenance requirements are not low, but they don’t necessitate weekly attention either. So, I would characterize it as being in the middle range.

Control-M is among the highest-priced solutions in the market. When comparing with other vendors, BMC consistently maintains premium pricing. We hope for more creative pricing solutions from BMC in the future, as currently, the price often remains constant regardless of package customization or feature selection. We would appreciate more pricing flexibility from BMC.

Our relationship with BMC is more in the direction of transformative. We’ve built a solid relationship with BMC over the years. It was a process, but I would classify it as transformative. They support us well. While there are certain functions we wish were available, overall, I think our relationship is transformative.

We have a good relationship with BMC, and that required effort on both sides. Sometimes, there’s a gap between what we need as customers and the direction BMC is heading. However, overall, we’re satisfied with how BMC provides us with solutions. Of course, there are things we feel are missing at times, but I also must say that the experience can vary depending on who you’re speaking with at BMC. The experience with sales representatives can differ from discussions with technical staff. In general, though, I would say the relationship is positive.

 I would overall rate Control-M an eight out of ten.

We are a service provider company using Control-M for implementation for other companies and our customers. We are a partner of BMC and work closely with our SIs, direct customers, and BMC. We operate as a reseller, partner, and service provider, offering both services and professional services.

When we enter the environment of any customer using Control-M, we understand their processes, how they are performing them manually or with other tools they are using. We gain a deep understanding of what processes they are running, what manual interventions are required, and what notifications or automation is needed. Accordingly, from the Control-M perspective, it is very easy to translate these processes into Control-M jobs. Control-M jobs have advanced-level scheduling options available, and we can create multiple dependencies in multiple ways. This makes it very helpful to schedule jobs, configure jobs, and monitor jobs.

From a single control panel in Control-M, we can control all enterprise-level processes. We can administer, monitor, and control all processes, which is the basic feature of Control-M. Beyond that, we have MFT and multiple integrations available. We can control each data pipeline with no limit from the enterprise level and no limit on integrations because BMC continues to add out-of-the-box integrations. If any customized integration is required for any application, we can use the Automation API and create the jobs.

Control-M makes this very easy. Out-of-the-box integrations and Control-M modules are available through which we can connect to DataOps and data pipelines.

Every application in any organization uses multiple applications. In the enterprise-level companies where we work with customers, they are running hundreds of applications. Each application has its own scheduler. For example, MS SQL application has its own scheduler, SAP application has its own scheduler. For normal scripts or processes, you have cron jobs on Linux systems and task scheduler on Windows systems. These schedulers are sufficient to run their processes in themselves, but they operate in silos. Control-M helps in bringing these different silos and platforms onto a single console where we can configure, monitor, and control all enterprise-level applications in a single platform. You do not need to have multiple application schedulers and teams to manage these applications in silos separately. A single Control-M monitoring team can monitor all application operations, which drastically reduces operational cost.

In one project where we migrated from JAMS Workload Automation to Control-M SaaS, I saw that application had a workflow designer on the left panel where you could drag and drop each logic piece and it would be created in their system. That feature is something I would like to see in Control-M.

Control-M is on the costlier side. When we try to sell it, it should be to a large enterprise company where they have a budget for automation. Otherwise, small companies use their in-house automation scripts to run their small jobs and do not want to invest in this costly product. It depends on the volume of jobs and the size and scale of the organization. Control-M is only applicable when it is suitable for them.

I have been using Control-M for almost ten years.

I rate the stability of Control-M as nine. I am leaving one point just for the scope of improvement. Otherwise, I have never seen any instability in the platform in my ten years.

Scalability with Control-M is again nine. I am leaving one point just for the scope of improvement. Otherwise, I have never seen any instability in the platform in my ten years.

I rate the technical support of Control-M as seven out of ten.

Whenever we contact BMC support for Control-M, they ask for logs and then take their own time to analyze them. They have software that does the analysis for logs and provides the output, but the time they take to analyze these things can be painful when trying to close open issues. We are working in the customer environment and the customer expects issues to be closed as early as possible. Sometimes it depends on BMC and it takes time. The turnaround time should be minimized.

Control-M has a simple setup. You just need to understand the process. It is based on the logic of the process which is running in the back end. If you understand the logic, then it is very easy to create in Control-M.

The ease of setup depends on the team working on it. If you have the expertise, it is easy; otherwise it will be complex.

We have a team of twenty people working on BMC products including Control-M.

Our relationship with BMC is both transformative and transactional. For the transactional purpose, we work as a reseller selling their licenses. From the transformation perspective, we provide services for consultation and implementation, and we conduct POCs for them.

I will absolutely recommend Control-M. I rate Control-M as nine out of ten from a product perspective, and I give this review an overall rating of nine.

My main use case for Control-M is serving as a Control-M admin user where I manage Control-M, schedule jobs in it, and maintain the execution and troubleshooting of the jobs.

A specific example of a job I schedule with Control-M includes scheduling SAP jobs, MFT jobs, FT jobs, OS jobs, and Informatica jobs. I schedule many jobs on Control-M for different asset teams.

I have automated many things that were running on Jenkins to Control-M and deployed many automation parts for the scheduling team and admin team into the Control-M domain.

The best features that Control-M offers in my experience include a very easy scheduling component, a highly interactive GUI interface, and a variety of job types that I had never seen in different tools, including competitor tools of Control-M, such as AutoSys, TWS, Tivoli, or Dollar Universe. Control-M is a very easy tool, and it is easy to learn and easy to deploy.

While the scheduling is easy and the GUI is interactive, I find that the setting of jobs and setting up a feature is very easy, and the deployment and promotion of jobs is very straightforward in Control-M.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization by helping us automate many manual things specific to the development team.

The main positive impact of Control-M includes time savings; we have automated many manual things that usually take six to seven hours, and now it is taking less than thirty minutes to one hour. We have reduced our time by almost fifty percent to eighty percent.

Control-M can be improved with a dashboard that should show the job execution time, output, and execution time, including start time and end time, for at least a year, so we could monitor everything on a single dashboard, similar to what can be created on Power BI, which could be integrated with Control-M.

While the functionality of Control-M is very easy already, there is not much to do in the feature part, but the dashboard part showing the Control-M backend could be improved.

I have been using Control-M for ten years.

In my experience, Control-M is very stable.

Control-M's scalability has been good, as it has met my organization's needs as we have grown; the load balancer and load scheduling are very fine.

The customer support for Control-M is very efficient and very fast.

Previously, we were using AutoSys, but we switched to Control-M because AutoSys is more difficult than Control-M, primarily because the GUI is very interactive in Control-M.

I have seen a return on investment from Control-M, which includes it being a money-saver and a time-saver.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Control-M has shown that compared to different scheduling tools, Control-M is definitely a cheaper option, and the licensing part is actually very convenient compared to other tools.

Before choosing Control-M, we evaluated other options including Dollar Universe, TWS Tivoli, and AutoSys, and then we decided to move to Control-M.

Around one thousand users are using Control-M in my organization, with most of them coming from asset teams or different application teams, while around one hundred are from scheduling, operations, and administration.

I require about ten to fifteen staff specifically for the deployment and maintenance of Control-M, and their roles include consultant, scheduler, or administrator.

Control-M is currently used very extensively in my organization, and we do have plans to bring different asset teams onboard on Control-M, as we are helping them with ideas and features of Control-M.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Control-M is that automation is very easy, and we can deploy almost anything into Control-M.

Integrating Control-M with technologies for my DataOps and DevOps processes has been easy, particularly with AWS and different Linux platforms.

It has not been a specific challenge to integrate Control-M with those different Linux platforms or other technologies, as Control-M already has a feature to integrate multiple types of jobs, making it easy.

My advice to others looking into using Control-M is that I would definitely suggest it because its features are very good.

I have given Control-M an overall rating of eight out of ten.

My main use case for Control-M is scheduling jobs and maintaining the EM server and the Control-M server, along with giving support to the asset team on troubleshooting of job failures.

We typically schedule OS jobs and AFT jobs in Control-M, and we also have SAP jobs and Informatica jobs running on Control-M.

Regarding my main use cases with Control-M, we are scheduling jobs for the asset team and maintaining the architecture of Control-M.

Control-M offers several great features, with scheduling jobs being a very good feature, while the GUI feature is user-friendly and makes scheduling jobs very easy, saving a lot of time compared to other scheduling tools.

The GUI helps my team day-to-day by making job scheduling very easy, as we can use planning tabs or the back-end of the job through drag and drop, and after adding a few job details, we are ready to proceed. The monitoring tab is also very useful for monitoring daily or scheduled jobs, and the forecast feature is excellent for predicting how jobs will execute in the future.

The reporting feature serves us well for extracting reports on job executions and past executions.

Control-M has positively impacted our organization as we have saved a lot of time and money by utilizing its features, which we found to be very convenient compared to other workload automation tools.

We are saving a lot of time as earlier we had numerous manual activities that usually took four to five hours to perform, and since automating those tasks in Control-M, we now execute them within two hours, effectively saving two hours per batch execution.

The reporting feature has limitations with job execution, and I believe there should be integration with Power BI or any visualization tool to provide a detailed summary of each job instance on a single dashboard.

Control-M could have more types of jobs that could be integrated with it, but for now, the features are adequate.

I have been using Control-M for the last eight years.

Control-M is stable in both production and non-production environments.

Control-M's scalability is convenient, easy to use, and flexible with various integrations.

The customer support for Control-M is convenient, providing us with 24/7 assistance for architecture and job execution issues.

Previously, we were using AutoSys, but we found AutoSys not user-friendly based on feedback from the asset team, prompting us to switch to Control-M, which is better suited for our organization.

Control-M is deployed in my organization on a private cloud.

We use AWS as our cloud provider.

We require around five to six staff for the deployment and maintenance of Control-M, all of whom are Control-M admins assisting in deploying Control-M for various asset teams and maintaining their services.

We have seen a return on investment due to money and time saved as we automate tasks in Control-M, allowing us to reduce staff numbers as well.

The pricing for Control-M is genuinely fair compared to other workload automation tools in the market, and its features add value, making us satisfied with its pricing structure.

We evaluated AutoSys before choosing Control-M as our solution.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Control-M is that automation is very convenient, with workload automation and job scheduling being easy and maintaining jobs in Control-M being very manageable.

My advice for others considering Control-M is that it is definitely a reliable option since it is convenient, flexible, and stable.

Control-M is extensively used as we have deployed it for many asset teams, and we plan to increase its usage as we are in discussions with different teams to migrate their manual activities into Control-M.

I would rate this review as a nine out of ten.

My use case with Control-M is for job automation and job scheduling. Instead of making 10 different technologies where we need to run jobs, automation allows us to reduce the number of people needed. Cost-cutting is significant; instead of 10 people, we can handle the work with only one or two people.

The best features in Control-M that I like the most are job scheduling and monitoring.

Earlier, I worked for many clients, and currently I am working for Zurich, Japan. There, we used different vendors such as Infosys, Cognizant, DXC Technologies, and two others. The project operates 24/7 as an insurance project where transactions happen during daytime, so we need to run jobs during nighttime as well to upload data, take backups, and complete other necessary tasks. Instead of managing this manually, I have automated everything related to job scheduling and job configuration.

The areas that have room for improvement are the GUI to make it more user-friendly. The interface is very easy, very good, and secure. Currently, I have not found any significant improvements needed. Every year the versions improve, and everything is progressing well.

I have been working with Control-M for almost 16 years.

Control-M is a stable product, and I would rate it 10 as a stable product.

The scalability is an eight out of 10. It is easy to upscale or downscale.

I can give the technical support a nine out of 10.

Positive

With Control-M, I compare the solution with other solutions I have worked on such as TWS (Tivoli Workload Scheduler), CA7, AutoSys, Tivoli DC (Tivoli Workload Dynamic Schedule), and Job Scheduling Console. I find that Control-M is more secure compared with the firewall system.

Deployment is very easy with no issues.

For the clients, they have to buy licenses, which are reasonable.

With Control-M, I would recommend implementing this product. It is a more secure solution.

The solution requires easy maintenance because most of the time we take care of it on weekends like Saturday and Sunday, or during public holidays.

There is nothing difficult about integration. It is very easy to integrate technologies for data ops and DevOps processes.

Currently, I am taking care of almost 10,000 jobs in an insurance company.

I would assess the BMC service team for helping map out migration as effective. For migrations, we perform them in development first. We configure the jobs in development, then move to SAT testing, UAT testing, and ST testing, and then to pre-production and production. If there are more jobs, we do migrations on weekends, on Saturday and Sunday, or at midnight one day before.

Deployment takes approximately one or two days and depends on the job types. Installing Control-M can take up to one or two days maximum. For scheduling, we need to configure different agents in different vendor systems such as UNIX systems, Informatica systems, or Tandem systems. For these configurations, we need to install the agents and define them in Control-M.

To make the solution a 10, there could be more automation. I would rate this review overall as a 9.

My main use case for Control-M is scheduling jobs, monitoring the jobs, and monitoring application scripts that are working fine or not through Control-M, along with doing some automation. File transfer is the core focus of my main use case, while we have some other SAP jobs that trigger the job at a certain time frame from a SAP point of view.

The best features Control-M offers are ease of use, with everything very clear, including the agent-less scenarios, the Control-M Configuration Manager which provides a detailed view, and a very user-friendly scheduling system.

Ease of use in Control-M means we have everything on the GUI, so we do not have to jump to different locations to find out the issue or problem; we can find everything on a single screen and for scheduling, it has all the options needed, you just need to know the basics to figure out anything you want to do.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization greatly as we are running more than 5,000 jobs, including around 5,000 MFT jobs that transfer files from SharePoint to another server or between servers, helping us automate manual processes and reduce timeframes. Previously, while doing file transfers, we had to check for at least a two-hour timeline, but now through Control-M, we do it automatically with no manual intervention, reducing it to 45 minutes.

I believe Control-M can be improved as there is news about shutting down its GUI; I believe the GUI is more impactful than the web version, so continuing to use the GUI would be more useful. In addition to the GUI changes, introducing more types of jobs, such as for cloud usage, would be more helpful and versatile.

I have been using Control-M for more than six years now.

Control-M is stable.

Control-M's scalability is good; it was a very easy process and did not require much work.

The customer support for Control-M is great.

Positive

Previously, we used Cisco Tidal but switched to Control-M due to limitations with Tidal, such as agent-less scenarios not working properly and missing functionalities.

We have two teams using Control-M: L1, which monitors job failures and takes requests from application teams to run certain jobs, and L2, which is responsible for scheduling jobs and configuring agents from Control-M, along with L3, which creates the environments.

We require an L3 team of three people for deployment and maintenance; they mainly take care of deployments and maintenance without taking much time due to the guidelines provided by BMC, with roles including SMEs and Control-M administration experts.

I have seen a return on investment, as the MFT jobs reduce the time frame from two hours to 45 minutes, allowing us to utilize that time for other platforms, technologies, or automation processes.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing of Control-M is that it is very minimal and optimal, making the cost good.

My advice to others looking into using Control-M is to go for it without any hesitation or questions, as you will not regret it due to the many options for automation and the time frame reduction along with reduced manual efforts. I would rate this review at 9 out of 10.