Control-M Reviews

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 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.

I've been with the same company for 22 years. The use case started out truly as a batch processing solution. That was what we originally got it for back in the day to help us automate what was being done manually or being done through homegrown tools or scripts, et cetera. The use cases evolved through the years. Now, we use it to orchestrate workflows that are touching traditional data centers and that are going out to the cloud and bringing it back.

From one spot, we have a single pane of glass. Like many companies, our systems are getting more complex and more diverse, with cloud and edge computing, containerization, et cetera. However, we have one place where we can go and look and see what's going on. If something happens, we can check what happened and where it happened. Today, we're dependent upon a lot of services and cloud technology that sometimes we don't know the ins and outs of.

A big challenge is to make sure that we have certain things run daily or on a periodic basis. That really was the driving use case. We had a lot of manual tasks going on and if someone, for example, left on vacation, something may not get done for two or three days, a week or two weeks. This solution takes all that away.

The main use case was to get away from having to stare at a system or a screen, and just let things run, let the workflows flow, and only be notified if there's something wrong. That was really a big driving use case.

It freed up people to work on exciting work instead of mundane work. No one has to sit around and stare at that screen all day long. No one has to reinvent the wheel for the 50th or 500th time to do tasks like maybe put a file out into an S3 bucket or out into an HDFS Hadoop file store since it's already there. It's already done for them. They just drag, drop, click and they're done. It's freed people up and they can do the exciting work that is really what we should be doing anyway. No one wants to be doing boring work.

I am a big proponent of an automation API and Jobs-as-Code. That is Control-M in the DevOps world. It opens up the tool to a traditional operations tool. Developers can jump right in there now, giving them that ownership, and integrating the existing DevOps tools that they have. That is a huge feature that I just love. 

There's an application integrator. It doesn't matter if you're trying to integrate with on-premises, off-premises, API, container, or serverless functions, it's easy for you to design. You just design that integration and then it's available instantly, and that's a huge time saver. 

It's rather easy to create, integrate and automate data pipelines with Control-M. I can give a broad answer. It can be as easy as drag and drop, or it can be as complex as designing the integrations. If you use customization, you can access a data lake that your organization developed. For the typical user out there, the difference is on a scale of one to five, with one being easy and five being hard, you're probably looking at a two and a half. For most people, it's very easy. It's getting easier as it's all web-based nowadays. Alternatively, it can be all code-based.

I have not explored Python Client too much. I've tinkered with it and that's been the limit of my exploration. Now, with the integrations like AWS, we've made extensive use of it, and it is very easy for anybody to do. Python Client has a lot of great possibilities, especially in the data science arena, however, sadly we have not had an opportunity as of yet to play with it.

The Control-M interface for creating, monitoring, and ensuring delivery of files as parts of your data pipeline has gotten better. It is not perfect. That said, it’s come a long way over the years. Nowadays, most of it is web-driven. A lot of it can be API driven if you so wish. There's still probably some future work to be done there, however, for the average user that's coming in, starting to use it for the first time, they're going to need a little training and handholding at the beginning for maybe the first week or so. Then you can start setting them free to go out and use it on their own.

The orchestration of our data pipelines and workflows has been able to give a single point of view too. Management doesn’t care about the bits and pieces. A workflow or a data pipeline could have 100 or 1,000 components behind it, and management does not care about that. Management cares whether the SLA has been met or not. They want that easy-to-see red light or green light. We can provide them with that. The solution drives self-service and it helps. A manager doesn't have to call somebody in IT and wait around for an answer.

They can immediately get that information for themselves, consume it and be able to understand that, "Hey, you know what, this data pipeline over here, we're going to be 15 minutes off our SLA for today." Then, they can start asking why. I like parts of Control-M like Batch SLA Impact, is they can start doing some of that analysis themselves, for example, “this late due to the fact that maybe the system was down for maintenance for two hours last night." That's really beneficial in today's business world.

The automation of Control-M has sped up everything. We can integrate directly into existing pipelines and the DevOps teams can get anything integrated with their Jenkins deployments. They don't have to wait for traditional operation functions. This is all built-in. It validates and checks. In some cases, it automatically deploys the agents and deploys the configurations. That's something that years ago you'd have to wait for. The speed of delivery has vastly improved.

Nowadays, auditing is as simple as running a report. If this falls under an auditable category, we can just hit a button and the report is done. Control-M audits everything, even if it is not under the regulatory or audit spotlight. Every process, every movement, and every change is logged by the system. If there's ever a question, you’ll be able to find a why and a when. There’s an audit trail.

It certainly helped speed processes up. I can eliminate what I call the manual gaps between certain features. I don't have to send an email to somebody to say, "Hey, guess what? That file's ready. Now you can run process X, Y, Z." The system just says "Hey, the file is there, let's go." It's eliminated those gaps between parts of the workflow. It also helped optimize the infrastructure needed as it's like a Tetris Puzzle. I have these ten different workflows that I'm trying to run and before I may have had ten dedicated systems for them. Now I know that I don't need that.

We use this model all the time. We can run those ten processes on three systems and be just fine. That saves money. The solution is not only speedy, but it also saves money.

They are doing a great job with continuing to drive the open-source model of it. Five years ago, if you looked for Control-M anywhere, you would not have found it. Today, that model has changed. They're actively publishing on GitHub.

You can download for free an entire container and run Control-M at home if you want to tinker with it. That was unheard of a few years ago. You can type a query in Google and start to see all sorts of documentation that is now available to the public. The major strides that they have made there are pretty darn good.

If you want to take it and ramp it up to doing some very heavy-duty integrations, you can find yourself at first dealing with a difficult integration. However, once you get that integration going for maybe a month or so, the next person after you will have less difficulty. That's the power. 

They can improve their interface. They're going through huge modernization efforts and they're getting there. They're probably 75% there, however, there's still another 25% to go.

I've been using the solution for 22 years.

Since it supports business, it has to be stable. It's very stable. We have not had major outages or anything. That's always a good thing, however, like with any solution, its stability is going to depend on how you deploy it and what safeguards you put in place, including high availability and disaster recovery, et cetera. All the hooks for that are in the product, however, it's up to you to decide how you're going to use those hooks.

It's highly scalable. You can run five things in it today and easily scale up to run 1,005 things tomorrow. In terms of scalability, there are no issues there.

Technical support tends to be very helpful.

Positive

I used to work for an insurance company and I used Computer Associates. It was called CA-7 and CA-11, which are similar tools.

We tried to use Computer Associates before this, but it didn't support the systems we needed and the integration was next to impossible.

I was involved in the deployment and initial setup of the solution right from the beginning.

We had jobs and workflows running within the first day. That was pretty good. We don't use the Helix model, however, there is a Helix model you can purchase, in which everything's hosted by BMC. You can be up and running literally in hours which is reasonable. There's a learning curve, however, if you do not get some value out of it within two days, you're probably doing something wrong.

At the time, there were only two of us deploying the solution. Today there are only three of us.

It's business-wide. Everything from data to marketing, to finance, even though it probably wouldn't make sense to anybody else, it touches everything. It's deployed across Windows, Linux, containers, VM, cloud, et cetera.

If anybody has a use case or wants to learn more about it, we'll show them. Anybody in our organization can get basic access and can tinker around in an alpha test environment. This includes non-technical people. We have non-IT people that use it.

If they can self-service and maybe design some parts themselves, that's a huge win right there. We have a very open model of deployment.

There are occasional patching and vulnerabilities that come out. Most of the patching nowadays can be automated if you're using the Helix-based solution. A lot of that is handled by BMC.

We did not use an integrator, reseller, or consultant for the deployment.

I can't speak to the exact licensing costs. 

Every few years we go through a reevaluation. We'll go through and look at what's on the market and what companies have come up with or released new versions. We'll go through and we'll say, "Okay, let's compare these, what do we need and what are all the tools offered out there?" We do that roughly every five years and it keeps us on our toes.

The biggest difference as of late is the API and Jobs-as-code. Control-M is light years ahead of others. It is light years ahead of the competitors and what they're offering. Other competitors are starting to get APIs, however, only BMC is working with Job-as-code and is in the lead. To my knowledge, they're really one of the only ones who can define your entire workflow as code.

Control-M is pretty critical to our business as it runs many different business processes every day, and if it wasn't there, we would probably hire many more people, be a lot slower, and be more prone to error.

We use a hybrid deployment. We have parts in the traditional data center. We have parts in the cloud. We sometimes have parts that live on containers. They only exist for two minutes. It is very much a hybrid mix of goodies with our deployment.

I'd advise potential new users to examine it today and not think about what it did ten years ago. Control-M is an old product. It has been around since we all used mainframes, however, just because something's been around for a long time, doesn't mean it's a piece of junk or doesn't work with modern technologies. It has adapted and grown with the times. Control-M did cloud-based work before many of us were even talking about the cloud. It's hard to get rid of negative perceptions sometimes, however, the best thing for people to do is to head out to the internet, look it up, and go out to GitHub.

If you have a technical team, send them out to GitHub. You can download everything in an image or in a container and try it yourself. It doesn't cost you a nickel. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

The biggest advice I can give is to try it out. Don't only believe what the PowerPoints tell you. There's no excuse that you can't have a deployment running clearly within hours. Be willing to think about how it can solve problems in new ways. Sometimes we try to find a new tool as we have a square problem and we get upset as all the tools we're looking at only have round solutions. Sometimes the reason that it only has round solutions is due to the fact that that's the proper way to solve the problem. You have got to be willing to break down whatever you're trying to do, whatever workflow you're trying to automate or integrate, and take it in pieces.

If all you want to do is save yourself a lot of money, use Cron, and use Windows Task Scheduler. However, if you want to take your business to the next level and start to get to the point where you can automate to remediate and audit, that's where tools like Control-M come into play.

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 the solution in Western Mutual Insurance Group's environment for the daily scheduling of around 11,000 jobs. Our number of end-users is in the hundreds, across 18 to 20 teams. We have three different physical locations as a company. Since COVID, we are a partially remote workforce as well, so we have multiple locations.

It's essential that the solution orchestrates our workflows. Regarding processes like file transfers and data workflows, we want one source for that. We want one area where we can check and see how things are progressing, and Control-M is invaluable. Everyone has access in our environment to Control-M, and we all use it heavily. We utilize a ton of plugins in our environment. We started the transition into servers and are seeing what our license allows in that area. We try to take advantage of everything we can.

We use Control-M to replace a lot of our manual logging of job data. It's been very valuable in terms of logs that can output alerts.

I just did an audit earlier this year, and it was a swift process using the product. It took me less than a few hours, and without the solution, it would potentially take a couple of days to a week.

We essentially have a nightly batch cycle. We process data overnight, so it's available for end-users during the day. Using manual execution, instead of Control-M, this nightly batch cycle would transition into a weekly or monthly batch cycle instead.

I recently took over as admin of Control-M about a year ago. Since then, the question has been how we can further utilize Control-M in our environment. We haven't yet found the limits of what Control-M can do. We're finding better ways to apply it every day. From the old days when we manually scheduled jobs to the current paradigm of using an automation tool. This made the process much more manageable.

We define Control-M internally as a "critical business application." I would say that if Control-M were not available, the impact would be catastrophic to our business.

The reporting is top-notch. I haven't found any other applications on the market that can replicate what Control-M offers. The alerting is very good, and I think their service monitoring is the best in the industry. 

The solution is a key part of our system and I have not seen any significant limitations with it. It's very reliable and performs as advertised.

We're just starting our data pipeline journey. Compared to other products in the market, I believe Control-M's is the easiest to use. Theirs came out ahead in terms of ease of use every time. I rate them very highly in that area. We're primarily an Azure corporation. We found that the solution's built-in integrations with Azure are straightforward to use.

We actively build out methods of alerting, for instance, when workflows in Control-M don't complete, as this impacts our end-users and our managers that support the teams attempting to provide data for the end-users. I think Control-M has a ton of built-in integrations that make alerting when that data is unavailable more visible to end-users. I think that's been very useful in our environment.

The stability could be improved. I ran into an issue with a recent Control-M patch. The environment would become unstable if security ports were scanned. This is an area they need to improve on, but ultimately it's a relatively small improvement.

We have been using the solution for around seven years. 

One patch had some issues, but the fix pack was very helpful. Other than that, we haven't had any stability issues with this product. So I'd rate it very highly.

The scalability is excellent, we're looking into options in Azure for scaling up and down in our environment, and Control-M has been essential in accommodating that.

Technical support would be a 10. They're always available. They've been very helpful with any questions I have. There are multiple means of contacting them, and they've always been responsive. The technical account partner, Jake, has been very helpful. The account rep, Chris, has also been very responsive.

Positive

Control-M in our environment predates my time. I believe the company first implemented the solution around 15 years ago.

The initial setup was before my time. We started off as a mainframe exclusive influence of Control-M, and then we transitioned to distributed servers from there. I am a team of one.

The solution's automation has improved our business service delivery speed. Our big push this year has been toil reduction and automation of manual tasks that ultimately take time away from our engineers. Control-M is factored into probably north of 80% of those reductions with its ability to automate tasks. So far this year, we're at about 4,000 hours of toil reduced. I would say Control-M has played a factor in 3000 of those hours.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. Control-M is critical to our business.

There are other solutions like Control-M out on the market, but in every recent market evaluation, Control-M has always come out on top. I think they are becoming more cloud-native as they progress with their Control-M Web Services. They're more reliable than the others on the market right now. 

I would advise anyone to start with a trial version of this product. I think they'll be very impressed with it. 

We don't use Python to a significant degree at all in our environment. We have been looking into that, but nothing solid yet. We don't use AWS but are looking to get into it in 2024.

It is an enterprise tool, and it is a critical one. It is used for scheduling all of our enterprise jobs and monitoring them. We have both cloud and on-premise applications, but Control-M is installed only on-premises. We have high availability as well as load balancing servers in the cloud as well as on-premises.

It is critical for our business. Control-M directly affects our business because all our jobs are integrated into it. Without it, it is very difficult for us to do the monitoring. There is application-level dependency. We have SAP, Logility, and other third-party applications, and then we also have retail applications. We have different types of jobs. SAP handles only SAP-related or ERP-related jobs. In retail, we have stored procedures, and BI has HANA procedures. If Control-M is not there, it would be difficult for application teams to sit in front of the application and wait for a job to finish and then trigger another one. We are a global company, and we have jobs running round the clock. It saves almost half of our time in a day.

It is good in terms of data transfer. We are using the Managed File Transfer plug-in. It is pretty good, and it has good features. In one place, we can see what files have been processed or what jobs have been deleted or failed. We can see everything on the dashboard. If I have to search for a particular file that is missing, I can go there and check. 

It can orchestrate all our workflows, including file transfers, applications, data sources, data pipelines, and infrastructure with a rich library of plug-ins. This functionality is critical from the application point of view.

It has had a positive effect on our organization when creating actionable data. It is pretty good. It is a critical application for us. All our jobs and integration activities are monitored and scheduled through Control-M. We have multiple projects running, and teams are continuously doing the testing in the Control-M. This is the application where they can do all the testing for high-load jobs and other things. It is a critical application for all project teams.

Cost-wise, it is good. It is an enterprise tool that integrates with all the applications in our organization. It has made our life easier because we don't need to wake up at midnight and do monitoring, etc. It does everything. It also sends precautionary alerts. If a job or activity is running for more than the specified time, it alerts the application team. So, our teams do not need to sit in front of a laptop or any open application to watch the jobs. They can do their other regular activities while Control-M takes care of all the jobs. It notifies them when there is job completion, delay, and error.

When we migrated to the SAP ERP application, a lot of jobs got created. We had to do all the things manually and monitor round the clock. Control-M has made our life easier. We can now concentrate on our applications and other tasks.

Since we have got this product in our company, our life has become easier. We don't require much L1 and L2 monitoring and support. We don't have L1 support when it comes to the Control-M application. We do have an L2 team application support, but it is minimal.

We have some plug-ins like BOBJ, and we need a little improvement there. Other than that, it has been pretty good. I haven't seen any issues.

We have been using this solution since 2016.

It has been good so far, and I haven't seen many issues in terms of performance.

Its scalability is good. We have more than 100 end-users of this solution.

I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

I was not there when it was purchased and installed. It was already there when I came here. At that time, it was version 8. From 2017 onwards, I've been doing all the upgrades. Currently, we are on version 9.20.

It is updated in-house. Usually, we submit the AMIGO report to BMC for the initial validation. Once they validate and confirm, we do the upgrade. They know what our environment is like, and if there are any issues at the time of upgrade, they easily find out the cause. We also have support from a third party called VPMA. We can take their help as well for critical issues.

In terms of maintenance, there are OS-level updates every month, which are taken care of by the IT team. Application-wise, we do patch fixes when a particular plug-in needs patching.

Cost-wise, it is good. 

I would definitely recommend this solution. Control-M is the place to go if you want to have workflow automation in place. I have previously also worked with the Remedy tool in another organization, and I found it good.

It is pretty good in terms of creating, integrating, and automating data pipelines. If you have all the information, it is a straightforward activity. If it is new functionality, then before integrating Control-M with a third-party application, you need to do some work in terms of configuration.

It is easy to ingest and process data from different platforms. Its setup takes some time, but once the setup is done, it is pretty easy.

We don't use Control-M to deliver analytics for complex data pipelines. We do have analytics, but we have an SAP analytic application called BOBJ BI. We do have a job set up for that. It runs from Control-M, but analytics are shown in the SAP application.

Our cloud usage is not much. From the S3 bucket, we are using the file transfer part from the application perspective, but there is not much integration with cloud applications. We only have the MFT plug-in to communicate with AWS S3. Other than that, there is not much interaction with the cloud from the Control-M application side.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It has been good so far. I haven't seen any issue. It is easy to use. I still have a lot to learn about this solution.

We use it for our workload automation. We use it as a single pane of automation for our enterprise.

We are currently using three different environments for three different productions. We have production data tasks, and we have multiple different levels spread out. 

We are currently using its most recent version. In terms of deployment models, they have both models. They have an on-prem solution, and they also have a SaaS solution. It just depends on what your company needs. They can take care of you.

Over the past so many years, I have learned that one of the most important features is giving everybody one tool that can do many different types of automation and workflows. That's been invaluable. Instead of having multiple tools for different teams and different platforms, Control-M has become the one-stop-shop for a lot of these automations.

It is very easy to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines with Control-M. It allows us to ingest and process data from different platforms. It could take us anywhere from a day to a week to get a new integration in place. We've taken it upon ourselves to try to introduce that to all of our internal customers as well.

It can orchestrate all our workflows, including file transfers, applications, data sources, data pipelines, and infrastructure with a rich library of plug-ins, which is very important for us. We try to utilize all new plugins that come out. If our company uses it, we try to use that plugin at least somewhere in our infrastructure.

In terms of creating, monitoring, and ensuring delivery of files as part of our data pipeline, it is a recent project, and it is something I've been learning about recently. However, having the ability to set up a job, set up a connection, deploy that job, and automatically have the feedback on where your files are when they've been moved has made life five times easier.

It has had an effect on our organization when creating actionable data. It has decreased the time to resolve dramatically. Everywhere I've worked, having Control-M orchestrate those alerts has been invaluable.

Our internal customers and management really appreciate the ability to be proactive before things really devolve into a problem or a high-severity incident. We're trying to incorporate analytics and proactive notifications as much as possible to decrease our downtime dramatically.

It impacts our business service delivery speed. Within the past few years, we have taken projects that normally would have taken multiple months, but the duration came down to a couple of weeks. So, we've increased our productivity tenfold.

Its impact on the speed of our audit preparation process has been great. With some of the built-in tools and some of the built-in reporting, being able to pull that data at any given moment has aided audit and probably increased our personal response time tenfold. We're able to get reports and audit out to the requesters within a week, if not sooner. Without Control-M, it would typically take us at least a month or so to get that out.

It has dramatically improved our execution times. We're able to get solutions out the door much quicker. A lot of our automations have been built around that, and we're able to get valuable output relatively quickly. When developing a new solution, without having Control-M, we would spin our wheels trying to come up with something that could only do a fraction of what Control-M can do at this point. Especially for a new solution or a new execution, we would be looking at a couple of weeks if not a couple of a month or two to come up with something deliverable. With Control-M, we're able to get that down to a week or two.

Our ability to integrate with many different solutions has been invaluable. The new approach of the automation API and jobs-as-code is also valuable.

The biggest improvement they could have is better QA testing before releases come out the door.

I have been using this solution for about 10 years.

I love it. It is rock solid. It is very stable.

There are no limits. You can easily scale up depending on your workload or whatever you need in a very short time. You can pretty much automate it at that point.

It is being used extensively in the organization. We do have multiple locations, but because we're using a web client, it is hard to say exactly how many end users are using it at this point. It is a company-wide solution. So, we probably have a couple of hundred users at this point.

They're very responsive. I'd rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

I personally have always used Control-M as my primary. I do know that other companies have experimented in the past, but I've always come back to Control-M.

I wasn't involved in the deployment. I always came on a little afterward.

In terms of maintenance, it is relatively maintenance-free besides the patches that come out. They come out pretty and frequently, but when they do, they're pretty comprehensive. Other than that, maintenance is pretty minimal. Because it is low maintenance, our engineering team does the maintenance when required.

We have absolutely seen an ROI. Over the last five years, I've heard we've done price analysis, especially with other tools. We always come out on top with Control-M. It always has the best price-to-performance ratio.

It is critical to our business. I don't know the facts and figures, but from anecdotes and talking to other management and up levels, I can say that it is considered a priceless solution in our environment.

If we no longer had Control-M, a lot of our most important pipelines would fall apart. Workflows would go unnoticed. The automation is so deeply integrated at this point that there's no telling what would break at this point. There may be things that we're not even thinking of.

For the tooling that you get, the licensing is acceptable. It has competitive pricing, especially with all the value that you get out of it.

There are additional costs with some of the additional modules, but they are all electives. Out of the box, you get the standard Control-M experience and the standard license. They're not forcing some of the modules on you. If you decide that you do need them, you can always purchase those separately.

I would advise working with the engineers, reading the documentation, and going into it expecting to set up high availability.

Control-M has been around a while. They're very quick to market, and they're very quick to adapt. At this point, they do have offerings, either on the way or recently released, that can support multiple cloud environments.

We are currently not using the Python Client, but that is on our board, and I do intend on investigating. We are utilizing some parts of the AWS integration.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10.