Control-M Reviews

The GUI interface is exceptional, beating any of the competitors’ products I have used. Also, the range of job types and integration with other products such as Hadoop, SAS, databases, etc. is very useful.

With the release of V9, we have been able to better use the features of the Hadoop product, allowing developers to use native Oozie workflows from within the product.

It is probably one of the most expensive solutions available and many of the extra functionality, such as Self-Service and BIM, are chargeable extras. It would be great if these were thrown in for free.

I have used it for 18 years.

Initially, we encountered stability issues with the V9 install, but this could be more to do with the VM infrastructure and networks than Control-M.

We did not really encounter any scalability issues; it is very scalable, especially with agentless technology.

Support has been very good in my experience.

I have used other products in other contracts, but the only experience I have of switching products was removing Control-M in favour of OPC, as it was a lot cheaper.

It is a complex product but for the most part, setup is reasonably straightforward. Some add-ins such as the BPI module can be quite challenging.

I have little experience with the licensing but I know it is expensive!

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options. As a contractor who specialises in Control-M, I tend to work for companies who already use it.

Use it. It’s the best out there from my experience.

With version 9, there is out-of-the-box automatic failover (high availability), as well as the new agent deployment tool.

Automatic failover allows for active-passive high availability. If the Control-M Application were to fail on one server, it would automatically start up and continue processing on the backup (failover) server.

The agent deployment tool allows for upgrading or patching agents directly from the configuration manager (CCM) instead of logging into each agent one by one. A big time saver.

N/A – We are a consulting company that implements this application for clients.

I would like to see the Mainframe Control-M IN/OUT Condition feature of Relative ODAT added to the Distributed Control-M.

I have used it since 1996.

I have only encountered stability issues with the base installation; their product development team supplies fix packs for bugs.

I have not encountered any scalability issues; the product is scalable.

Technical support is 10 out of 10; support is available around the clock, 24/7.

N/A – We replace different solutions for clients usually due to high costs, lack of support or functionality of the legacy product.

Initial setup is quite easy; a wizard-based installation process.

I am on the technical services side and am not involved in pricing.

N/A – We only work with Control-M.

Do a proof of concept to see if it meets your needs.

It provides a single point of control for the entire organization’s batch processing, helping to shorten the batch processing window and achieve a “manage by exception” operation environment. At my current organization, our batch processing requirement is too technically diversified and has to be supported 24/7. With Control-M, we are able to handle the customer demand and execute 30k-plus jobs through a single window.

I have been using the solution for 10 years, including earlier versions.

I have encountered very few stability issues; it’s highly stable.

Scalability is good.

I find technical support to be knowledgeable and willing to provide assistance for any and all queries.

I did not previously use a different solution at my current organization. However, I have experience working CA Autosys.

The installation is panel-driven and can be used by a relatively inexperienced technician to install it successfully.

It’s well suited for anywhere and anyone, but it comes with a cost; it is quite pricey.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

Control-M is very stable. It is rare to have any issues with the application. Nonetheless, the bigger the workload, the more a tool like Control-M is needed or else it’s too pricey.

Scheduling of the workflows: We had to run a few thousand scripts on a daily, weekly, monthly, semiannual, and annual basis. Without this tool, scheduling would have been really difficult. This tool also helps in documenting the runs, which would further enable us to check for defects.

It has made execution of workflows simple, especially batch runs.

We had to migrate from an E2 to an E3 framework, where we manually had to change the name of more than 1,000 instances in a batch. This could have been easy if it was automated, such as searching for a keyword and replacing it with the desired name. In BMC Control-M, this facility is only available for the file path and connection.

I have used it for two years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 7/10. I faced an issue in which the connection was lost in the middle of a run. It was a small batch, so I managed it by rerunning it. I contacted tech support on a weekend, because I had to run a weekly batch. I didn’t see much of an immediate response from them, but they were able to sort out the issue a little later.

I have used this since I joined my current company.

Initial setup was straightforward.

It is worth the price.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

It is definitely a good tool in the business intelligence domain, which can be used for small or big batch runs.

There are many valuable features, including its ability to interface with so many applications and allowing complex scheduling to be done easily.

BMC provides control modules that interface with third-party applications such as SAP, DB, VMware, FileWatcher, AFT and many more. These are valuable features that allow jobs with those applications to be easily scheduled.

We are able to automate a lot of scheduling, and integrate the scheduler with many applications to automate business cycles.

Cost

Provide a little customisation based on needs; the capability for development at the user level should be available. The reporting facility is a GUI with some standard queries. I think the portal needs to allow us to do reports that reflect many possibilities, like selecting fields present in the DB schema and building our own reports using the reporting GUI, rather than using any of the standard templates it offers.

Also, I’d like to be able to build a custom module for some applications that cannot be interfaced, provided we give some standard variables to connect with the application. For example, we are currently using the Axway product for file transfer on a very, very large scale. We are not happy with Axway, and would want to see if BMC can provide us a remedy for it. Or, if we were able to do some customization on the AFT module to incorporate this requirement.

I have used it for 10 years, starting with version 6.1.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I rate technical support 10/10.

I did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was complex. We have integrated Control-M with many applications using some complex scripts for meeting our business needs.

Pricing and license cost is high.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated Redwood, Autosys, and $U (Dollar Universe).

If you are willing to pay for it, the product is excellent.

• No product downtime
• Easy to administrate and use
• A lot of integration tools and control modules

We use the BPI (Java and web services) DB integrator, AFT file transfer, CM for Informatica Control-M modules that easily integrated the non-basic batch jobs with the regular batch jobs. There was no need to script file transfer or SQL query jobs; all of that comes straight from the BMC Control-M box.

The knowledge of the jobs has become transparent and business users can monitor and manage their own jobs through the self-service portal.

The reporting overall should be better; right now, external report tools have to be used. Reporting should be end-user modifiable; and there should not be a need for a separate reporting client. There should be more reporting options, for example, scheduling of the table/jobs, with nice charts.

Crystal Reports based reporting tool, need to be installed in the same box where the EM client resides. Also there has to be control-M agent in the same server to be able to run the reports in batch mode. The better solution would be to run BMC in the house developed reporting and get the date from EM database in the server level (no need to windows Server, unix/Linux is better).

In the current reporting tool, there are predefined templates which are working ok but defining own it’s not easy or impossible. You can get the data out but it’s not usable to export to excel format without heavy modifications in the excel or qlickview for example.

I have used it for about two years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Technical support is the best among the biggest software delivery houses.

Setup was very simple.

It is expensive; the smallest IT service providers can’t implement it.

We evaluated IBM TWS and UC4 before choosing this product.

Plan the hardware setup carefully, favoring *nix OS systems in the CTM-Server engine. Try to follow “best practice” instructions about the database considerations and software setups.

Control-M Virtual Terminal (CTMVT) for AS400: Because most of my customers are in banking, where their core banking processes run on AS400, Control-M Virtual Terminal helps us automate the interactive process on AS400.

This product helps my customers speed up the daily batch processes and also provides early warning if one or more processes are not running normally. For example, before we started using Control-M, one application took three hours to complete its end-of-day processes because many processes were waiting for human interaction. Control-M cut out the time waiting for human interaction.

Improve the capability to analyse the process output by making it more flexible. Actually its current capability is strong enough and I have no problem with Control-M implementation, but it would be great if the output analysis could accommodate functions such as arithmetic operations or regular expressions. Current capability only supports string matching.

Let me explain more technical details for this. For example, I have a job/task that has output:

Jobname : Test A
Result : Completed
Numbers of errors : 0

Currently Control-M has ability analyzing job / task output only with string / pattern matching operation, for example when output has text "Result : Completed" do something. What i mean good for improvement is Control-M has ability to analyze the output with arithmetic operation, for example i want when Numbers of errors greater than 0 do something.

To avoid misunderstanding, this is only for output analyzing, because Control-M itself has function to analyze return code number from the job/task.

I have used it for five years.

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

The technical support is good. I've used them many times for technical issues. So far, their support has been good for resolving all the issues.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

The pricing is fair enough, considering its functionality.

I would recommend that others wanting to implement workload automation tools choose BMC Control-M as their solution.

• 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.

My main use case for Control-M involves numerous automation workflows. For example, if I want to provision any services in Azure or run a job, I use Control-M to orchestrate. For provisioning, I have multiple workflows which come into the picture starting from the request to the approval to the auto-provisioning, where Control-M helps me automate. The second part involves jobs, where a lot of batch jobs we run is where we use Control-M.

In addition to my use cases, the new thing which we are working on as of now is adding an agentic layer with our Control-M workflow. When there is an event or incident triggered, the workflow works along with an agent for triaging the request, and the workflow helps me create a proper governance and escalation path. The triaging agent, which is an AI agent that is part of Control-M, helps me identify the resolution path for the identified incident or issue. For example, if anything has happened on the server, it gives me the steps to help my support engineer resolve it faster and helps me reduce the MTTR, Mean Time to Resolve.

In my organization, Control-M is deployed in a hybrid cloud configuration, and in my current role, I also sell Control-M to customers where I have to monitor and manage their hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments.

I manage integration and sequencing of data processing across diverse data platforms and cloud environments by using Control-M, a workflow orchestrator.

While we are currently not using Control-M for AI or ML workloads, we are in discussions about using it in the near future.

Regarding integrating Kubernetes or cloud-native workflows with traditional batch processing, I design solutions using Control-M to orchestrate across different environments and heterogeneous applications, and I propose and design this for multiple organizations or customers as well.

To address compliance requirements like SOX, audit trails, or regulatory reporting, we have very stringent audit and security requirements as a company with 230,000 employees, using Control-M vigorously across all phases.

Control-M allows all the necessary data for ISO to SOX compliance to be available. During audits, we turn to Control-M to gather all data, and the information is readily available and is easy to customize as per our needs.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization in several ways. I am a solution architect where I solution the operations transformation for any deals with customers who want multi-cloud and hybrid cloud operations management, using Control-M as the core engine for my end-to-end operations management, starting from incident management to operations to knowledge management to SLA management, reporting, and workflow management.

This solution has helped me secure a lot of new wins, and currently, I am managing many customers using Control-M. Monitoring, management, and IT operations and support is a core part of our business and a major revenue earner for us. All customer environments I manage better lead to many benefits in terms of positive responses from customers. We are proactively able to resolve issues, which makes my customers happy, and in this way, I add much more revenue to my business.

My SLA has reduced, and my Mean Time to Resolve has reduced, allowing me to aggressively support customers by committing to a shorter resolution time for P1 incidents. I'm able to take one to two hours to resolve incidents based on the requirement, and the beautiful features that enable me to commit to smaller SLAs to my customers are possible because of Control-M.

The best features Control-M offers, which stand out for me, include the workflow, the orchestrator, and the inbuilt automation, plus the ability to schedule tasks. Some processes which run based on events and triggers are core features, and I can schedule it, orchestrate it, and integrate it with any of the workflows, whether it's SAP workload, cloud infrastructure, or processes running on a messaging queue or service bus.

If I want to do anything on the workflow, such as verification and validation, which is one of my cases for my banking customer where there was a fraud detection use case added, the workflow was able to initiate a process that checks on the validity of the content and the document before processing the loans. The new features which are adding a lot of agent-based, AI-based capabilities are really exciting.

Regarding Control-M's AI capabilities, the most important aspect is governance. We discuss governance with almost all customers, and this is where BMC stands out. Governance and reporting are crucial, and we have seen detailed audits and logs generated by Control-M, which allow me to assure my customers that all incidents, records, logs, and resolutions are thoroughly documented in a knowledge repository. This enhances security, helps secure access, and provides the audits and everything necessary for customers' requests.

Regarding features, one thing I have requested the team is that there is huge data lying with BMC based on learning from their past experiences on different platforms, such as data centers, cloud, SAP, application support or workflow management.

BMC has billions of records on incidents that have happened and the resolution paths taken. I have requested them to create an ML model, train it using this data, create a dummy part, and create a trained engine which will come as a default attachment or addition to the current BMC offering. For monitoring and managing an environment, I should get a lot of intelligence generated from BMC's own capability because there is a lot of data inside which BMC has.

BMC has been a leader for a long time, so they have immense learning that should come in a model and should prompt my engineer to help him resolve issues faster to improve the SLA, which is the core of my business as I have a stringent SLA signed with my customer. BMC can play a very big role by adding that intelligence layer, agent-based or model-based intelligence that runs continuously to proactively help my engineer and my support staff resolve issues faster.

Regarding improvements for Control-M, I want to request BMC to consider a lighter version, especially when some customers have cost constraints. I understand the SaaS model exists, but a lighter version with simplified features for small and medium enterprises would help penetrate a huge market base, especially with small infrastructure setups of 100 VMs or 200 VMs.

With respect to Control-M's AI capabilities, I have utilized some features in our demo environment, not all, and I am still exploring it. I see it as promising and recognize improvements in place based on the feedback I provided. There are a lot of new features we need to add, including new agents that need to be default features in Control-M.

I have been using Control-M for proposing it to a lot of my customers, and we have our own environment where we use Control-M for more than two or two and a half years. We have been using it consistently.

Control-M is quite stable, and my engineers are satisfied with using it.

I am very satisfied with Control-M's scalability. Our Azure environment is growing every month, and Control-M has been able to scale accordingly without any issues, automatically recognizing and monitoring any new VMs we provision.

Customer support is satisfactory.

Previously, we had a relationship with ServiceNow, utilizing their ITOM operations suite. However, based on the lucrative offer we received from BMC, we decided to switch to Control-M.

I have certainly seen a return on investment from using Control-M. It saves a lot of money in terms of effort, time to resolve incidents, triaging, workflow, and approvals. Within one and a half years, I have seen an ROI concerning the cost incurred to set up and start managing complex multi-cloud and hybrid environments, and that is why we have had significant success in selling BMC to our customers.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing includes providing feedback that I need a lighter version with more attractive pricing and setup. There's professional support we leverage a lot, and I look forward to automating and reducing costs going ahead because I have requested Control-M to create a standard SOP and a no-code, low-code integration model, which will expedite my processes and help reduce my costs.

We evaluated ServiceNow and ManageEngine among others before selecting Control-M.

The reason I choose nine out of ten for Control-M is that it stands out in terms of flexibility and support I receive from BMC when proposing it to any customer, along with the professional support during implementation, which I find to be the most beautiful part of it. The only point missing from a perfect 10 is on the cost front, where I would like BMC to help me reduce it further for medium to large customers with a VM base of 300 to 500. A lighter SaaS version would assist me a lot.

We have a strong partnership with Control-M. Our company and Control-M have been partners for years. We procure it directly from Control-M or BMC rather than through any other channel.

The advice I would give to others looking into using Control-M is that the beautiful part of Control-M is the orchestrator, the automation engine, and the ability to manage AI and other workloads as well.

My main use case for Control-M is building a data platform that brings data from multiple sources from disparate systems. I use Control-M as a data orchestration tool for data monitoring and scheduling jobs for observability purposes, with a focus on AI-powered data observability and job monitoring.

I manage the integration and sequencing of data processing across diverse data platforms and cloud environments by setting up the predecessors and successors in the workflows.

My organization is already using Control-M to support AI acceleration by bringing data from disparate sources into our data platform. Control-M has facilitated the integration of Kubernetes and cloud-native workflows with traditional batch processing by utilizing DevOps for CI/CD, which is effective during deployment and production migration.

For compliance requirements such as SOX and audit trails, I implement role-based access control as part of our data governance with Control-M.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization as it stands out as one of the best tools compared to competitors in the market, particularly in terms of cost-effectiveness, reliability, and ease of maintenance, along with a user-friendly interface.

I have noticed significant time saved, particularly with mean time to rectify issues since using Control-M.

The best features Control-M offers for me are an easy way of scheduling jobs and monitoring, setting up predecessors and successors, and providing good control to the user who is monitoring for the data engineer.

Out of those features, I rely most on setting up predecessors and successors and maintaining the graph of which job has failed and how to rectify it as the most significant aspect of my workflow.

The observability features are very good, especially the job monitoring feature.

Control-M can be improved by enhancing data flow monitoring capabilities and addressing some data engineering needs.

I would also like to see improvements in user experience via mobile and support for iOS and Android with a nice UI interface.

Regarding Control-M's AI capabilities, I think implementing a role-based access mechanism for governance and security would be perfect.

One improvement I need is to introduce an AI-powered agent, which would make Control-M unique compared to others in the digital world.

I have been using Control-M for around seven years.

Control-M is stable.

Control-M's scalability is very good; adding nodes and servers is easy on the fly.

Customer support for Control-M is excellent. If I face any issues, I can easily reach the support team and get resolutions within the defined timelines set at the initial purchasing time. I would rate customer support a nine, definitely.

Prior to Control-M, I used a different solution, AWS Workflows.

I have seen a huge return on investment with significant time savings by investing in AI-powered solutions and integrating with the cloud.

My experience with Control-M's pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been positive, as I find it a good product with excellent features that add value for customers, and the cost is reasonable compared to others.

Before choosing Control-M, I evaluated options such as Ansys and cron.

On a scale of one to ten, I would definitely give Control-M a ten because it is a very good tool from BMC. I rate it a ten because it is such a reliable data pipeline monitoring tool that I have seen in the market. The quality of data, particularly in setting up predecessor and successor jobs in the pipelines, makes a significant difference in any data pipeline's success. My advice for others looking into using Control-M is that it is one of the best reliable products in the market for on-premise, private cloud, and public cloud deployments.