Control-M Reviews

We use Control-M for orchestration.

The best feature of Control-M is its orchestration capabilities for any orchestration that's required. Control-M has positively impacted my organization by helping with orchestrating complex tasks.

The Alerting and Notification system is quite sufficient. It does what it's required to do.

The ability to deploy Control-M both in the cloud and on-premises is very important because the organization has a hybrid strategy, so Control-M helps in scenarios of moving files between on-prem and clouds.

Control-M could be improved on the reporting side. There can be better reporting on tasks and better dashboard capabilities for activities being completed. At the moment, it's a bit cumbersome if you receive an error message. There isn't a central place where you can view all of that.

I have an experience of approximately five years working with Control-M.

The solution is stable.

The on-premise setup of Control-M is not that scalable. As our demands increase, it is almost reaching its bottleneck. If I need to run parallel jobs, let's say double or triple the numbers that I'm currently doing, it will struggle to scale.

I would rate technical support from Control-M as a seven out of ten because the turnaround time was not adequate when running in production.

Neutral

I've made use of Pub/Sub in Google Cloud before using Control-M. I have not used any other solutions in this category. I would normally make use of the native tools in whatever cloud I was utilizing.

It was already set up when I joined, and it was a very intuitive tool to figure out.

There are time savings from a resource aspect with Control-M. There's definitely value there.

I would rate Control-M a seven out of ten.

We predominantly use Control-M SAP R3 jobs. That's our primary batch job load with external vendors and internally on our AWS instance. That's our batch load alongside a few custom integrations. They are not public applications. It's all in-house applications. We have integrations and API integrations for the API hubs, which speak to multiple other applications within our next case.

It isn't the only point of failure, but Control-M handles our business-critical, priority-one applications. We have other options. Control-M runs the SAP side for all batches. The time needed to realize the benefits depends on the scale and complexity. 

One use case was in health care and involved shipment orders. With Control-M controlling the workflow, we could effectively monitor it and forecast any delays. This enabled us to deliver critical products in under four hours across hospitals in the network. 

We can apply the same standards and run the same set of jobs across environments. Once they are tested in the non-production environment, we can move them seamlessly to the production environment. 

We have a nightly process of batch reports. Before Control-M, we spent around 12 hours manually scheduling reports in SAP. After streamlining the process, we reduced manual work to nine and a half hours. The business could update all the processes before midnight.

While it doesn't totally free up IT personnel, it provides visibility into self-service tools where business users can see their pipelines or job streams. It would be read-only access for the business side, but to take action on the job, they still need to contact the IT team. 

Control-M doesn't facilitate collaboration between business and IT users, but It provides a better user experience. Both parties can see what they are talking about, so there's no black zone for any of the parties. Before Control-M, the functional team had a particular nomenclature to relate what they had seen on Control-M. With the self-service tool, they can simply relay the job name. The collaboration starts there, and it builds over with a lot of other parameters.

Control-M provides a centralized view of our enterprise workload. As the owner, I can access my dashboard and see the status of jobs across the enterprise. It is strong at integrating with different applications and creating a pipeline of dependencies across applications on different operating systems. 

When it comes to developments where we have to move across regions or environments, it seamlessly integrates and adapts to different regions. Regarding integration with the DevOps pipeline, it allows us to use a JSON file and promote it across environments easily. 

We use Control-M to deploy workflows for DataOps and DevOps initiatives. It allows us to quickly test workflows or configuration changes without much manual effort. We add the JSON file for the conversation parameters and let the system handle the schedule. Integrating other DevOps tools within the journey gives us the management perspective and approval of multiple pipelines.

I'm currently working on the SaaS version, but I've also worked on the on-prem versions before. There is a handful of features that haven't been added to the SaaS version, and the BMC knows that. It's a matter of time before they prioritize the missing pieces and bring them into the SaaS version. 

I started using Control-M back in 2018.

Control-M has the best stability in the market. They claim 99.99 percent availability. It's hardly four hours of downtime throughout the year.

Control-M is infinitely scalable. We only need to add agents. BMC will take care of it if you need anything on the SaaS side, but we can handle the rest using our agent architecture.

I rate BMC support 10 out of 10. They are stringent about their SLA timelines. They respond on time, and if it's a priority one, they will call immediately. 

Positive

We previously used the SAP Scheduler and adopted Dollar Universe. All our local manual efforts ran in  Windows Scheduler.

It was a greenfield approach, and I was there from day one as a consultant. Deploying Control-M can be easy or difficult, depending on what the business needs. It takes a while to understand the infrastructure setup our business needs and the number of jobs we need to run through this application. 

It took a while to understand the infrastructure setup we require. We had to understand the number of jobs running through this application and how business-critical they are. The documentation BMC provides is top-notch and covers every step we must follow. 

Migrating to Control-M is a bit tricky in terms of preparing the data and having the right tool to convert required parameters into a Control-M-ready job. Control-M has a feature called AMIGO that helps us migrate from the existing source.  Converting a job and loading it into our Control-M format isn't straightforward. We must do some prerecorded checks and setups before. 

There is some maintenance in the form of updating agents and deploying patches on the SAP application. Since it's a SaaS application, BMC handles most of the maintenance on the server side. 

The license model is based on the number of jobs we run on the SaaS application or the number of executions, unlike the on-premise model options. If we have a handful of jobs, it's always good to consider Control-M, but if it's a large number of jobs, Control-M might not be a great option. 

Control-M enables us to consolidate our jobs, and it helps us have a uniform approach and schedule. It helps to have the audit logs available. The scheduler space is nice in terms of control. 

We attempted to leverage ActiveBatch by Redwood and a few other options, but Control-M had all the features we needed. It gives us a 360-degree view of our implementation across silos. The architectural requirements also vary depending on the criticality of the applications. 

Control-M allows us to customize the job templates for any application we need, which covers all our future plans. Its integration speed is excellent because it has templates for every application. 

I rate Control-M 10 out of 10. New users will be fine if they follow the Control-M documentation. There's also a book you can buy on Amazon called "Batch Scheduling" that comprehensively covers batch operations and how BMC has evolved over time. 

Control-M is mainly used for our clients. We use workload automation and batch job automation with Control-M. There are many other BMC products that we use, such as AMI Ops automation, DB2 monitoring, and application infrastructure monitoring.

The user experience with Control-M is good. Users can implement many customizations, and though the licensing is pricey, there are many competitive products available that can provide the same features as BMC. BMC support and some of the customizations are very good. Product support and the ability to manage distributed and mainframe workloads make Control-M an enterprise workload management solution. It is easy to integrate Control-M with technologies for data ops or DevOps processes as things change, and it is not complex compared to other workload automation tools available in the market.

BMC does excellent marketing. Their product narrative is very good. From the functional side, there is no superiority when compared with other products. All products provide the same functionality. If you examine IBM Workload Scheduler, Stonebranch, or Rocket Orchestrator, there are many other products available. These products provide the same functions in one way or another. BMC might provide better user experience and better product support than other products, but there is no clear technical differentiation or value proposition when compared to other products with BMC. They offer essentially the same features.

Control-M has been part of my experience for two to three years.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate BMC's support an eight. They have very good manuals, and they respond to tickets quickly. They provide clear details about issues. From the product support perspective, they always perform well. They continuously evolve rather than letting the product remain static. This is one of the differentiators compared to other products. They quickly evolve with changing technology trends, easily adopt new features, and incorporate them into the product.

Control-M is good so far, other than being somewhat pricey.

The implementation requires significant time and personnel resources, and they are pricey. The migration costs are very high, and the available skills are limited.

I am familiar with other workload automation tools and have used many. Our clients use IBM Workload Scheduler, Rocket Enterprise Orchestrator, CA ESP, and Stonebranch, though I cannot specify why we use BMC instead of those alternatives.

It is difficult to clearly differentiate how Control-M has improved our organization's functions because many other products offer the same functionality. The key factors are how users can easily adapt to the product, the available functions and features in the BMC product, and mainly the product support.

We have several SAP systems such as IBP, S4HANA, SolMan, etc. By implementing Helix Control-M, we wanted a tool that monitors different activities on these platforms and launches jobs.

Each company has a different number of jobs. We have thousands of jobs, but we have selected the most critical jobs of the company that normally run in the early morning. We wanted a platform that allows us to launch the job, for example, from point A until it finishes, and then there is also the possibility of being able to launch another job from another tool, which could be a SaaS tool, such as IBP so that several jobs can be executed and finished in parallel. If there is a failure in the system, we send an email, and for much more important things, generate a ticket in a tool called SolMan so that the support team can attend to the case that has arisen due to the failure of a job.

All those human errors that we were facing did not occur again. All these processes are critical for the company. We have implemented 22 processes. One of the processes starts at eleven at night. The process runs in S4HANA. It sends data to IBP, and IBP makes an optimizer and then it becomes a request that specifies the national transfers of the products that are going to be distributed. In other words, these are requests that indicate how many products should be sent from one point to another point for the customer at a national level. At six in the morning, another team, which is the distribution team, waits for this request to assemble the trucks and get them ready to leave. If they do not have this request, the trucks will remain stationary. By having the trucks stopped, there is no distribution, so there can be a loss of sales. There can be a drop in stock. You accumulate inventory in the warehouse because the plant continues producing, but where are you going to put the new products? There are a series of consequences that can cause the process to fail because we did not have immediate action to create that request. This tool has helped us positively impact the company's processes. We could get its benefits immediately after the implementation.

Helix Control-M’s ability to build, schedule, manage, and monitor application and data workflows in production is good. When we went live and throughout the first stage of the project, I thought it was great because we received full support. Now that we have the tool live, I have presented more cases, and I feel that they are a little slower. I have to try harder to get their attention.

Helix Control-M has affected our ability to orchestrate data pipelines in production. It has been a great benefit. Little by little, users' trust is increasing. When there is just one small failure, they usually stop believing in the tool. With a more solid tool like this, we have fewer errors, which means more trust of the users.

Helix Control-M has given our company’s business users visibility and control over their jobs and freed up IT personnel for other tasks. It has freed us up a lot because previously, IT used to coordinate meetings with the company that gave us the manual service. We had to meet and discuss failures and issues, but we no longer have these meetings because that third-party company is no longer there. We replaced them with this solution, and it has freed up a few hours. Being able to free up the company's IT team is important because we have so many issues to deal with. Nowadays, technology and innovation are in full swing, and users are constantly asking for new things, so the more we focus on those things, the better.

Helix Control-M has affected collaboration between IT and our business users. Previously, our business users only complained about process failures, and now they themselves can reprogram. Before Helix Control-M, we had to send emails with the reprogramming. Despite that, they did not do what we had specified in the email, so it was all a waste of time. We wasted time with the business, and we wasted time meeting with this company. In the end, they did not do what we had told them. Nowadays, the user interacts directly with the tool because they have access. They themselves can reprogram those processes. There is less need to have a meeting, and there is also a reduction in the email replies and forwards. We have reduced everything. They directly interact with the tool to launch and relaunch.

First of all, the shift from manual to automation has been valuable. We have a tool that can automate.

The second valuable feature is that there have been many benefits, which we have been utilizing little by little.

The third valuable feature is that there is a good support team. They have solved things that other companies have not done. When it comes to IBP, because it is SaaS, it was not easy for our team, but we received good support. At first, there were also issues regarding the functionality of SolMan. We saw that it was not going to work, so we did not go live with that, but they told us that there was going to be a new version where the ticket would be generated almost automatically. Because they were releasing a technical issue that would allow us to generate a job automatically and generate a ticket in a simpler way, we waited for that upgrade to be released, and it indeed was like that. Such continuous support is very valuable because it is not a tool that does not progress. They are constantly releasing things and allowing it to grow and cover more functionalities.

There can be an improvement in the area of finance.

I contacted the BMC team here in Lima and mentioned the things that can be improved. For example, S4HANA jobs are something with which BMC has already worked in several companies. Whenever I pull an S4HANA job to the Helix Control-M tool, it pulls it naturally with all the steps. A job can have several steps, and in this case, it is very easy to control the steps taken. However, in the case of the SaaS IBP tool, it can pull the job but cannot identify the steps. So, when I want to take an action in a step, I have to split the job. We are having to work longer because we have to split the jobs from, for example, 52 steps to 12, depending on where I want it to have an action. We would like the tool to be able to identify the steps so that we are not continually splitting them as it generates more executions for me.

The other improvement is that in, for example, S4HANA jobs, when the job fails, you have the status of the job. It recognizes them perfectly. In the case of IBP, it also has status but at a more minimal level. Sometimes the step fails, but the job does not fail. It ends with an error in a step without identifying it for me.

Another thing that we have asked to improve is that Helix Control-M can be integrated with more tools such as Odoo. Odoo is a tool for all these companies that are not with SAP. They use it as a small ERP to generate their sales. Odoo integration will help us receive inventory reports.

The communication and details related to the upgrades that are going to be happening also need improvement.

The implementation began in 2021 and went live in February 2022.

It is a powerful, stable tool.

I have had a very good impression. I have been to the events where BMC shows its new products. I see that there are more things that are going to help a lot. We will be able to get much more out of it.

Alicorp is at several locations and in several countries. These processes have only been launched here in Lima, Peru. They have been divided into the demand planning, distribution, production, and supply areas by the planning team, but it is only done by a team here in Lima. The result is at the national level, but the configuration made in the system is only done in Lima, Peru. Later, we will surely also move internationally.

We started with a small planning team that is gaining confidence in the tool, and the next stage is to cover more areas of the business because currently, it is a small group with a small number of processes being executed. The idea is to make a massive change in the other areas as well, such as the finance department, and then the analytics department. This requires us to look at this implementation from various angles, so we can optimize the dissemination and execute it massively. Before taking that step, we wanted to be in a solid position with the team that is working on Helix Control-M. We wanted to have confidence in what the tool does, and now that we reached that step, the next step is greater use.

Our first-level support is with the GrupoCONTEXT team. They have the knowledge for all cases. There have only been 2 or 3 times where they did not know about the issue and involved BMC. There have only been 3 complex events. There have not been more complex issues. Normally, there are problems when maintenance and upgrades are carried out because sometimes the system changes.

Positive

We previously executed this process manually. It was a third-party company that had 9 people in the early hours. They manually launched one job and then relaunched the other according to a document that we gave them. The document said what things should be done depending on the case that arose. The problem was that there was a lot of shift rotation. For example, if one job ended at 2:00 a.m., in theory, the other should start at 2:01 a.m., but it started at 2:10 or 2:20 a.m. It took 20 to 30 minutes. This time was wasted because the person was not there all the time monitoring. They either made a mistake in launching another job that was not the one we had indicated, or they simply did not launch, which was much worse. So, because of the shift rotation of people, since they were early morning jobs, we constantly had those problems. We had a loss of time, no precision, and a lot of human error.

I was involved in the process of evaluation and implementation, and now, I am also involved in monitoring the development.

Its implementation is among the simplest I have done. SAP tools are more complex. Helix Control-M was live within a short time. We configured it in 2-3 days. We tested it one day, and the next day, it could go live with a process right away.

Our implementation strategy was to divide the implementation into stages. We did it by area and configured the jobs. That was it. We had workshops to understand what the user wanted, and then we did configuration in the test environment to see that what they requested is actually what is being done and executed in that environment. We then moved that to production, so for each user group, we followed: demand, distribution, supply, and production. It was super simple.

In terms of maintenance, from time to time, they notify us that there are upgrades. We receive notifications about agent upgrades, tool upgrades, and some system maintenance. Because it is a SaaS, they tell us everything. We coordinate internally so that if there is a process that is running at that moment, that program is executed manually.

For the server and agent part, we have outsourced the maintenance to the CJG company. They are in charge of doing that maintenance. On the operations side, there is a person in charge. Every time something happens, he is in charge of the event.

For the integration, we received assistance from GrupoCONTEXT. They were in charge of doing all the configuration and programming.

From GrupoCONTEXT, there were two people with constant support from BMC. On our side, there was an architect and a few other people. All the suppliers were contacted so that they were present during configurations, integrations, and testing.

We have seen an ROI. In theory, this third year, we will recover what we invested. It has helped us replace the cost of human resources.

For this tool, as we made the three-year contract, the cost of the licenses is maintained. If we had to hire people for this work, we would have had to increase their salaries every year.

They are expensive. If we were a small company, it would be complicated because we have to have strong sales and operations to be able to afford a tool of this level. Being a large company, the cost-benefit is covered, but it is not within the level of cheap solutions.

The dilemma for us was whether it is worth paying for a monitoring tool or whether it is better to pay people for the work. Helix Control-M was more beneficial because we had problems with manual monitoring, and these problems were expensive.

I was in charge of evaluating all the tools. Because we already had SAP, I first evaluated the SAP tools, such as SAP PI/PO and SolMan. All the SAP tools do these functions. They do them well, but they have limitations. For example, in SolMan, you can monitor and do all the operations, but when it comes to IBP, which is SaaS, it does not work. It is better to not manipulate the programming settings. It is better to leave the standard programming settings because it is simpler.

I was also told to evaluate external tools, so I evaluated Helix Control-M and the IBM solution. Helix Control-M won there. It is the first time that we have used a tool for this type of control. Previously, this work was done manually by a team of people. We used the tools only when monitoring a single platform. For example, for S4HANA, we only used SolMan, but we wanted to integrate several systems and find a solution that does all the activities efficiently and safely.

I would advise you to challenge it. We made an assessment to challenge it to see that it covers all of our use cases and we can trust it. It is a solid tool. Go for it if you can afford it.

The most important lesson that I have learned from using this solution is to not be afraid of automation. Sometimes, because you have been working manually for many years, migrating everything to automatic processes is risky, but I learned to not be afraid of doing this.

In terms of the measurable business impact of Helix Control-M, we are working on that. I just had a meeting with the commercial team on the subject of the month-closing report process. Currently, the month closing process is 5 days, and they want to reduce it to 3, for example. What they have told me is that if orchestrated right, Helix Control-M could help reduce the process time. We are in the middle of the evaluation process to precisely take care of its business impacts. With the finance department, we are evaluating the possibility of reducing time.

Overall, I would rate Helix Control-M a 9 out of 10.

I am using Control-M for cloud infrastructure and automation-related tasks. As a cloud engineer, my work involves scheduling, deploying, managing, and monitoring processes for infrastructure and workflows. It is integrated with a CI/CD toolchain as part of our DevOps culture.

I am using the cloud version. I am using Helix Control-M.

Control-M has good integration capability. It integrates well with all the solutions. It also has good reporting capabilities.

Control-M has improved our organization's functions by supporting high availability and integrating with CI/CD workflows. It helps maintain high availability and manage workflows across the production environment, increasing our productivity.

Additionally, Control-M has offered broad-level exposure that has increased our efficiency. Our workflows run smoothly. Everything is easy. We have had very positive feedback.

Control-M is fine to integrate with our DevOps toolchain. It is neither difficult nor easy.

Control-M made it more simple to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines across on-premises and cloud technologies. It is very comprehensive.

Control-M provides workflow orchestration, including scheduling, deploying, managing, and monitoring workflows. It helps us meet our service-level agreements. It is integrated into our CI/CD pipeline. It enhances our operational productivity.

The UI can be challenging for new users due to its learning curve. Additionally, there are some errors during automation. More detailed logs would be helpful.

We would also like enhanced API support. The APIs should be more comprehensive.

I have been using Control-M for almost two and a half years.

Control-M is stable so far, with no issues regarding crashing or lagging.

Control-M is very scalable. It can absorb more workload wherever needed.

We have had occasional response issues with their customer service. They do not always provide timely support.

Neutral

We have used Redwood RunMyJobs and Apache Airflow. Control-M offers more features under one umbrella. It has cloud-native support, real-time analytics, and other features.

The initial setup was challenging due to network setup issues and a lack of timely support from the service team. Its implementation took about a month. We did not have any downtime.

We did the deployment in-house without using an integrator or consultant.

Pricing is generally affordable, though some features cost a bit more.

New users should familiarize themselves with the tools and undergo training. It is essential to understand the necessity of using Control-M in your organization. I would recommend starting with your workflows and gradually integrating it with all the tools.

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

Control-M is a job scheduler. You can schedule FTP jobs or use scripts within Control-M. You can also execute commands when necessary to schedule, or you can just run a script that is hosted on a server. Based on the schedule, you can orchestrate or automate jobs. You can set dependencies between jobs. You can correlate and create a sequence of your jobs and execute them in the order you wish. You can set the variables and options that you like. You can set the prerequisites and post-job activities after the completion, such as reports analysis, emails, etc.

Helix Control-M is critical for us. If we do not have a job scheduler like this, we will have to have people running 366 different jobs on a daily basis and 24 hours a day. These are the jobs that we run from midnight to midnight every single day on a scheduled basis.

I do not use Helix Control-M's Python client or Airflow. I am using the web client. I do not create jobs. I give my users access to create their own jobs. I just maintain the agents and keep the administration going. When they have questions, they come up to me and ask. We just use the web interface to go into the planning mode and create our jobs, folders, dependencies, etc.

Control-M has helped to give business users visibility and control over their jobs. Both Control-M and Helix Control-M allow me to give users control over their own set of jobs. They can log in and orchestrate their jobs as they want. They can also troubleshoot them on their own. It makes that easy. I just have to be hands-off and stand by in case they need assistance, but once the tool is deployed and every agent is up and running, it is easy. The people who have the jobs running or the job scheduled know about their own jobs. They know their own demands. They have control over the decision of when they are going to run it and how they are going to run it. It makes it very simple, and it helps.

You can set up your users and define whether they have admin privileges or they can just affect a set of jobs.

The fact that it is all centralized in the web browser makes it easily accessible from everywhere. All my users are IT people. They do different things. They do databases. They do informatics. They do development and things of that nature. To business users, such as board members of the company, we can give them reports on, for example, how the business closed and how much profits were there, or if all the transactions were submitted to the bank on time. If not, what were they missing? We can provide all things of that nature. We can pull it all up in a report and then schedule it on a daily basis or weekly basis. It is simple.

There have been cost savings with Helix Control-M. The license that the company was paying for Control-M, including support, was three grand more expensive than Helix Control-M. With Control-M, we also had to have an administrator dedicated to maintaining Control-M on-premises. That cost of having a person dedicated to doing just Control-M jobs is gone after we moved to the cloud. We are not only getting more money in savings; we are also making a better distribution and use of our time. By not having a dedicated person, we are saving a couple of grand. We are saving on the license and, of course, resources. We do not have to have dedicated resources such as servers. We do it virtually. We do not need to have resources reserved for the server and database. I just have to deploy the agent, which can run multiple instances in my cluster. They can share resources, which is another saving there.

In Helix Control-M, we have the automation API that allows us to customize and do integrations easily in any script, such as Java or Python. It is all integrated within the integration API.

Every year, they add another set of automation or compatibility with different applications. They are capable of integrating with Informatica, AWS, etc. You can schedule queries directly from Control-M on databases without having a server or agent. You can do scan jobs or queries directly. Every other month, they are doing releases, and they have tons of new integrations, which makes it compatible with more and more applications around the cloud.

They have a department that handles requests for enhancements. I talked to Control-M guys back in October or November when they had a gathering here in Atlanta. We talked about not being able to go back in history in Helix Control-M for more than two weeks. We submitted a request for enhancement. They told us that they are working on it, and they are thinking of expanding that to 30 days. We would like to see it expand to 90 days, but they are working on it. In Control-M, we were able to go back 180 days, but that was on-prem. The storage of that data was on our own servers. We know that storage is money, and we do not expect them to store that much of the data, but at least 30 to 60 days seem proper.

Community Loans of America has been using Control-M since version 6. It has been at least 10 years.

I have not had any downtime with Helix Control-M. All the upgrades are scheduled, and they give us a time window when they think they are going to schedule them, and we adjust. I have not seen anybody notice it. The jobs get held before the update, and they start automatically after the update. If anybody noticed it, that was because I had to tell them that a maintenance window was coming up and to be aware of it.

I contacted their support a couple of times to ask them about an error that I did not understand. They have three guys who are pretty handy. When you ask questions, you, of course, have to wait at least 24 hours for someone to respond. They are pretty fast. Most of my queries were responded to within the same day, which is great. I would, for sure, rate their support a solid 10 out of 10.

Positive

We were just using Control-M. We did not have any other scheduler. We migrated from Control-M to Helix Control-M. 

Control-M is on-premises, and it requires a dedicated administrator. Control-M has three major pieces. It has a Control-M server. It has a main agent, and it has a database. If you have HA, you will have the same things at a secondary location, so you will have to manage the cluster and make sure that all the pieces are working together. If, for some reason, one side fails, HA tries to recover in the second location. The management or the administration side of things is a challenge. It requires a dedicated person. Our main Control-M guy left us six years ago. Every time we had an issue with Control-M, it took us three or four hours to put it back where it should be. By migrating to Helix Control-M, our biggest success was getting away from the administration. Having Helix Control-M, which is a cloud product, allows us to use all the advantages of the job scheduler without handling the administration of our own servers.

If I compare Helix Control-M with what I had to do on Control-M on-prem, the process is very similar. The calendar has changed though. There was an advantage with Control-M that you could specify when was your new day load. Our new day load was every day at 9 AM in the morning. With Helix Control-M, we have to have only midnight as a new load because of the change of the date. It was a big challenge because we had to reorchestrate all the jobs to suit the new day load being moved from 9 AM to midnight. 

Essentially, scheduling a job or creating a new job requires the same effort in both applications. The advantage of Helix Control-M is that I do not depend on a single agent to pull FTP profiles. All of them are centralized. It does not matter which agent I am using. I have access to the whole list. In Control-M, FTP profiles had to be added to the agents that were being used. Helix Control-M has made it easy to orchestrate data pipelines in production because now, I do not have to worry about the whole backend of Control-M. I am sure that it is up to date, and I can log in reliably, load jobs, and orchestrate them as I need.

I once tried to migrate Control-M to something else called RunMyJobs. Compared to RunMyJobs, I would definitely go for Helix Control-M.

In terms of our environment, we are a mixed shop. The majority of our products are on-prem. We have a Nutanix cluster in our data center, and that is where we host the majority of our things. We have maybe one or two devices on AWS. For Azure, I know that we have a license because it comes with our enterprise Microsoft 365 license, but I do not recall having any hosting there.

For migration, they have a migration tool that makes it very easy. You can run this migration tool, and it will export all your current jobs in a JSON file. It will try to import them on the tenant in the cloud on Helix Control-M. We faced a few challenges here and there because at the time we did it, some features were missing in Helix Control-M or were not supported, but they were supported in Control-M. We used to have dual endpoint profiles for the MSP file transfer or the ASP. FTP jobs have profiles where the server address, user password, or key gets stored. In Control-M, you could have a single profile with two endpoints. You could have Host A and Host B in a single profile. That was not supported with Helix Control-M at the time we decided to migrate, so we had the challenge of converting all those dual endpoint profiles into single endpoint profiles to be able to be imported. I know for a fact now that it is no longer an issue because they now allow you to create dual endpoint profiles in Helix Control-M, but it was a challenge at the time.

Fixing things here and there and making it compatible took about six months. Those six months were not just because of how hard it was to migrate. It was a combination of the challenges of migration and other tasks that we have not been doing because we could not afford to have a person dedicated entirely only to Control-M. Effectively, the time dedicated exclusively to the migration was two and a half months, but the migration was distributed in a six-month calendar because of other duties and tasks that I had to perform.

We got help from VPMA. VPMA is our reseller. We purchased a license of Control-M through VPMA, and they have support and all that. We get help from them. They helped us to run the Orchestrator or the migration tool from BMC. They told us where the odd points were, and then we went to do it on our own. We came back and reviewed them again and kept fixing them.

Overall, we had three people. We had one person from VPMA, and then there was me and one of my technicians to assist me.

It is not bad. The company can afford it, and it pays for itself. We have those jobs running automatically.

I would rate Helix Control-M a 10 out of 10. I like Helix Control-M. 

We are using it for job scheduling, shift scheduling, etc. It is pretty much orchestrating all the job shifts for the IT team or core team.

We specialize in security, which means 24/7 your system or team needs to be ready for anything or anybody in the world, independent of even time differences. If you are managing your client's services from Europe, or anywhere else in the world, Control-M makes it easier to do scheduling, saving people time.

Since we have different satellite offices in Toronto and Ottawa, we use different role accessibility in different locations. That is why we are using it on-premise. However, in the next six months or so, we are planning to go to a hybrid cloud environment on Control-M since we are adding two or more satellite offices. We think that it will be more manageable if we implement it in a hybrid cloud environment.

The solution is innovative. Specifically for the overseas and time differences, you can feel the efficiency of Batch Impact Manager on jobs, batch processing, and impact management. It works the best on these kinds of issues. It saves us time and money, which is important. We save a lot using Control-M.

The most important thing is it is easy to manage conversions and stuff. It is easy to convert different systems, like AWS, which saves time.

We are working with vendors, partners, and clients to manage GDPR and data privacy. This solution is good with data privacy because BMC is GDPR compliant. That is very important, especially for overseas clients and businesses.

Overall, Control-M is quite critical for our business. I would rate this as nine out of 10.

• The monitoring
• Workflows
• Production
• Scheduling the shifts
• Timeframes for specific roles and management

Time differences are important because we have some overseas clients. That is why we are using Batch Impact Manager for the Control-M, which is very helpful for us. It detects potential blocks in advance, delays, and errors. That helps us to optimize the scheduling, then the batch workload processing as well. 

It is pretty easy to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines. It is user-friendly, not rocket science. That is what I like about the Control-M, and specifically Batch Impact Manager. You will need some orientation and need to know what you are doing if you are integrating your system, and this solution makes it easier.

We use Control-M Python Client and cloud data service integrations with GCP, which is pretty hassle-free. There aren't any problems or compliance issues. It is pretty easy to retrieve the data, do conversions, etc. They are on-time, and there is not much of a delay. 

The engineers on our team say that it is pretty easy to build, test and promote data workflows with the data coding language integrated into Control-M through the Control-M automation API. The ease of integration is eight out of 10. Python is the main language that our database managers and data engineers are using along with some other languages. 

The Control-M interface is user-friendly and easy to use. Orientation-wise, it is easy for data engineers to adapt.

Ingesting and processing data from different platforms can be a challenge. Control-M does allow integration for this with other systems to make this easier. For example, we integrate Control-M with an in-house system to do this.

I am unsure if Control-M is compliant with Microsoft Azure environment integrations. We have some clients in Azure environments. Specifically, in Canada, government agencies and nonprofits mostly use Microsoft Azure.

I have been using it for almost a year and a half.

The stability is very good. My impressions of the stability are very positive.

I would rate the scalability as nine out of 10.

The technical support is near perfect. I would rate them as nine and a half out of 10.

Positive

We were previously using an in-house solution, but we weren't improving it much, which is why we switched to Control-M.

Control-M creates cost-efficiencies, saves time on scheduling and data efficiency, and provides better data management. We use the managed services as well because we partner with some clients at MSPs and MSSPs. This solution is also good for their environment because it is easy to access, retrieve, and work with actionable data as well as all the procedures and processes. It is good and works. I would rate it as eight out of 10. 

The total cost of ownership is impacted by the Control-M pricing as well as the overall cost of the procedures and daily batch processing. We can easily see that at the end of the year, in terms of big time and money savings.

The pricing and licensing could be better. However, when I compare Control-M pricing with JAMS, Control-M is still better priced than JAMS enterprise.

We also evaluated JAMS Scheduler, which is also a workload automation solution. The pricing for Control-M was better and has good predictive maintenance that is better than JAMS. Control-M is also more integrated with Google for different solutions.

Control-M is better for the cloud. Specifically, the hybrid cloud is the best. On-premise is still okay, but it depends. Its hybrid cloud environment works better and is optimized in a better way to save money and time. Its implementation is easy from the cloud GCP and AWS. Microsoft Azure is not there yet, but otherwise, it is perfect.

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10.

We use Control-M for batch automation. Previously, all of our batch work was manual, but now Control-M has significantly reduced the need for manual intervention. As a result, our batch processes are now 99% automated.

It's so easy to navigate, and especially for new hires, it's very straightforward to show them around the client because it is user-friendly. It's very easy to use. Compared to other softwares, Control-M has significantly simplified our monthly release process, making it easier to move things forward.

We're upgrading Control-M, and the process is very long. There are numerous boxes to tick and things to check to ensure everything is in order before the upgrade happens. We run three instances of Control-M, and making various changes for each is challenging.

I have been using Control-M for five years.

You might experience a brief connection issue, but it usually resolves within a few minutes. The problem is related to the web server.

Scalability is excellent. We utilize only about 20% of Control-M's capabilities. 

Support is helpful, and the online community is very good. There's the community forum, which I use regularly to find answers to questions. BMC has been very helpful in that space. They were extremely fast and solved a difficult problem our in-house team couldn't solve in a matter of minutes. 

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. We used to use in-house software.

We have three different environments where people can work. People can use our development instance of Control-M to work on their batch processes before they go live, allowing them to experiment and refine until they get it right.

It's much simpler now. Everything was a manual batch job. Using the features of Control-M every day makes our batch processing so much easier.

It makes our lives so much easier. For our operations team, which runs our daily batch overnight, viewing everything as it happens has been an absolute lifesaver, especially if things go wrong overnight. It's great to have that visibility. It has also sped up our process, reducing overhead and weekend overtime. Batch processing is much quicker now, resulting in fewer manual errors.

Control-M has so much functionality that even if you initially purchase it to handle a specific part of your batch work, it can offer much more. We've progressed beyond traditional batch processing to include MFT, which has been incredibly useful. Our file watchers and other automation features have significantly simplified our workflows and made our lives much easier.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.