Control-M Reviews

• The GUI interface with the ability to oversee the whole enterprise in a graphical way
• The ability to create filters for applications and groups
• The ability to zoom in and out within applications or the whole enterprise

These make automation and scheduling troubleshooting easier.

Well, I am no longer with that company, but it gave us the tools to see the big picture and work toward more tightly integrating processes that were unnecessarily dependent on each other.

It allowed us to automate responses and or trigger different processes based on different outcomes of the same job or process.

Version 8 introduced a whole new set of features that required more processing power, creating what I call "dead weights" that, if not interpreted in the right way, can cause duplication of processes. I am pretty confident that, knowing their track record, the issue was addressed in later revisions.

I used it for 15-plus years.

I did not encounter any stability issues. The "dead weights" that I referred to above were in the scheduling development side of the product and did not affect the live processes.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Technical support was very good, 8/10.

I had a minor issue with their online interface for opening problem tickets. Their website at the time was horrible. (I hope it has been fixed.) I did let them know it would take you in circles without ever actually opening the ticket. This to the point that you had to eventually call and wait for someone to call you back so that the ticket was established. Then, you would send all the doc explaining the issue. Then, they would ask you to provide a ton of stuff, such as logs. Then, once you sent them that, they would tell you that it was an automated response and that they really did not need all that. In their defense, this only happen occasionally; otherwise I would have given them a 4 out of 10.

I personally did have experience with a few different scheduling packages, but none came close to providing the overall enterprise scale of Control-M.

I did not switch, the switch was on when I joined the company.

While I was not involved in its original implementation from scratch, I did arrive in the early stages and once I had a grip on the functionality and its tools, it was fairly easy. I am sure the installation and first implementation came with challenges.

That part can be tricky as I did not handle it. I do know that it may be expensive in the beginning, but, once you have it implemented and use it to its full or close to its full potential, it will save money in the long run.

I was not involved in the process, but the move was from CA7, and I know that ESP, Jobtrac, and Zeke among others were considered.

Go for it.

Control-M plays a crucial role in our batch process related applications as we use it for all our batch processes, and everything is driven through Control-M itself without manually running any particular application or script. This provides equal opportunity for both the stakeholder who is actually waiting for their reports or any process to be completed and from an application side as well to make sure that when it has run, how it has run, how long it has taken, and to provide accurate information. Control-M helps us in making our life and the stakeholder's life much easier because of the visual representation of the end-to-end detail of how the process has run.

We primarily use on-premises platforms, so we are not immersed in data pipelines from Control-M's perspective, but we do utilize MFT for our file transfers. From a file transferring perspective, Control-M provides significant advantages by enabling us to connect with multiple platforms or vendors and transfer files in real time, automatically sending data through our downstream systems without needing to verify whether the file has arrived or not. As soon as the file comes, Control-M job triggers the necessary flow, saving us a lot of time, making our operations mostly related to file transfer rather than data pipelines.

Currently, we are not using Control-M for AI or ML workloads, but down the line, if that's enabled for us, we plan to enhance our application monitoring logs perspective, allowing us to analyze logs more compactly through Control-M along with available AI capabilities, enhancing our operational excellency that leads to quicker resolution times, as all the time spent on analysis gets expedited through AI.

From an auditing perspective, we run custom scripts through Control-M to ensure all users with access to our internal applications and their corresponding app permissions are correctly managed. These scripts are executed periodically and send reports to our internal compliance team, who review the data for internal compliance auditing reports, which we also provide to our external vendors upon request regarding critical job statuses, failures, runtime, and actions taken, simplifying the information retrieval process from multiple sources to one action in Control-M.

We have established integration with traditional batch processing, which greatly benefits us, particularly from a time perspective, ensuring that all flows have run smoothly. Control-M provides checkpoints or confirmation alerts indicating that the file has been received and processed, ensuring no SLA slippages occur, as SLAs are critical in batch process management due to their financial implications regarding posted received amounts and system interactions.

Control-M's scheduling feature is the best one for us, providing an overall view that gives us end-to-end information of what is planned or scheduled for today, including any special jobs such as end-of-month tasks, which allows us to see any special day. Control-M's alert management part is crucial as well, because anytime an alert pops up, we receive a notification indicating that one of the jobs has failed or something, and then it gives us a chance to quickly jump onto it and see why it has failed from a front-end perspective to take immediate action, preventing any SLA slippage. Additionally, Control-M's planning section allows us to see all the jobs that are already created or configured to identify their schedules and modifications, which are the main features I value from Control-M.

In my opinion, Control-M can be improved by making the SaaS model more feasible from a cost perspective, as we have many cyclic jobs running every minute, and the execution cost limits our transition to a SaaS platform. Even though numerous features are available in the SaaS version, the high cost inhibits our ability to utilize them, and lowering this cost would definitely facilitate our move to SaaS, allowing us to focus more on internal processes rather than job execution costs.

My name is Pavan Shetty, and I work for TCS, but I am internally working for the client Foxtel. At Foxtel, our role is to provide application management of all the call center related applications that they have and the backend billing operations for their customers, so we build the customers, send their invoices, and handle all the batch process management as part of the TCS group. I have been with TCS for the past 14 plus years and out of which I have been with Foxtel for close to 12 plus years, and during that time period, I have been using Control-M for all the duration, so I do have pretty good hands-on experience with Control-M from a day-to-day usage perspective.

Control-M's stability and reliability from our side are very good, as we maintain the on-premises platform and have not encountered any issues with internal patches or testing processes. Even if minor issues arise, we consistently receive excellent support from the BMC team, ensuring that our workflows and SLAs stay on track without slipping.

We have not made significant changes in our usage of Control-M; we continue to add more jobs based on our requirements, but we have not ventured into new areas outside of what we were already using within Control-M.

BMC support has been incredibly helpful for us, especially concerning upgrades and patch versions. We never experience issues or delays in their support, which consistently helps us maintain productivity and upgrade our system software efficiently.

Before Control-M, there were no batch process management or orchestration tools in our system, and since implementing Control-M, it has become our go-to solution and one of the best products I have used throughout my IT career. I find it hard to imagine the future without Control-M being present because it has integrated so much into how our workflows are driven at Foxtel.

I was not involved in the initial deployment, but I participated in subsequent upgrades, and those upgrades were very smooth. We took appropriate steps to minimize downtime, and BMC support was instrumental in coordinating efforts to ensure that we completed the upgrade with the least amount of downtime possible.

From Control-M's side, the primary benefit we realize is in time consumption and accountability perspective when comparing manual processes to the enhanced automated Control-M processes. This major advantage includes that with manual processes, we have to go into each server to execute scripts, which does not reflect accountability, as there is no record of when or how it was run. However, with Control-M, everyone can see who has run it, when it was run, what parameters were used, and how long it took, allowing for accountability. Moreover, it enhances time management because we simply trigger the Control-M job and let it run by itself, and if it fails, we receive an alert, while with manual runs, we have to sit in front of the screen watching it continuously, which is eliminated with Control-M.

I have not recently evaluated other orchestration tools, but I have seen some alternatives. However, I do not see any other company coming close to what BMC offers with Control-M in terms of native integrations and functionality. While other tools may serve different use cases, for our current needs, Control-M stands out as the best tool we are using.

From my personal perspective, I would rate Control-M a 10 without hesitation, as it is among the best tools I have used, providing user-friendly experiences even for IT newcomers. When I started at TCS straight out of university, Control-M gave me insights into how entire systems operate, offering a comprehensive overview that is far superior to what many other tools provide, making it invaluable to our processes. My product rating for Control-M is 10 out of 10.