Control-M Reviews

We are using Control-M mainly to schedule our jobs and also for file transfers. We are now in the process of using Control-M to take some workload off our mainframe. 

We use it mainly for job automation and handling large chunks of data automatically.

We have Informatica workflows, which make up about 50% of all our jobs. Then, we have all kinds of software on Windows and Linux servers. The file transfers are another big thing on Control-M. However, we are mainly using it to automate our in-house scripts, like monitoring and whatever needs to be done.

We mainly use desktop clients. Some users are also on the web. Currently, we don't use the mobile interface at all.

We have some batch jobs or Informatica workflows that create the files for file transfers. We have those on Control-M, so it is all automated and happens through the conditions.

Our daily customers' accounts and credit card actions files are processed by Control-M automations every day. That is pretty much part of the core of our business. Other critical components are some monitoring scripts and health checks on our servers, which are run from Control-M. This has made things easier because we have the Batch Impact Manager on Control-M. So, we can use that to send emails, like, "We haven't received the daily-files yet. Or, the daily files are going to be late." Therefore, we have proactive monitoring if things aren't running on schedule.

I don't think it transfers data any faster than before. However, we now have better control and can also send emails to the correct people directly from Control-M, like, "Hey, this transfer is now complete." In terms of data transfers, and if something goes wrong, it is easy to just rerun the file transfer.

If we are using the Batch Impact Manager, it has caught a few times where the job has been running for a while and may not meet the deadline. There may be a loop somewhere, where one job has been stuck for a few hours. So, in this case, the Batch Impact Manager notifies us that it is taking quite long. There are days that this is useful to locate issues.

Multiple scheduling options allow you to do anything you want, whenever you want, and however you want. You can easily be in control when things happen.

Control-M provides us with a unified view where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all our application workflows and data pipelines. This is quite important because I am our Control-M administrator. So, it is pretty important to me personally, but also for the company. It may not yet be quite in the center of our business, but we are clearly using Control-M as our main scheduling program.

Since we are using version 9.0.18, the web interface is a bit outdated and doesn't really support all our needs. However, we are migrating to 9.0.20, which should give us a lot more options, even in the web interface.

The unifying features between Control-M for different platforms needs improvement. The scheduling options on the Control-M mainframe jobs are different than they are on our Linux server. There are a few differences here and there.

There are capability-related issues between versions, but I think the latest fix pack has that covered. BMC has been doing a pretty good job about this.

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

The stability is pretty good. We haven't had any issues with Control-M being unstable in the last two years. They are up and running 24/7.

One person is the minimum needed for day-to-day administration of Control-M. We have three admins, who are also our SFTP and file transfer team. Someone just decided that they should be the Control-M admins, so they made all three of us go through the admin classes. Now, we have three admins. 

Scaling has been pretty simple and a straightforward process. We just recently got the Control-M Workload Change Manager, which is an additional plugin to the main software. That installation was also quite easy. We got it up and running pretty quickly.

We have about 10 people using Control-M actively, who are system specialists and business intelligence specialists. We have three admins, then we have some batch job designers from the mainframe team using Control-M. We have also trained some of our Informatica people so they can monitor their own workflows and create new jobs. They can basically do whatever they need to do by themselves. 

I would rate their technical support as five out of five. They have been really helpful and knowledgeable. Even though there have been some cases where support has originally said, "Well, we don't know for now," they have asked for data and provided us with a solution pretty much every time we have had any issues. 

If they don't have a solution on hand, they take it to the lab. We communicate with them and the lab, then everything works out pretty well. Even if there is a big issue, which isn't very common, they have just taken it, and said, "We will see. We will go to the lab where we will test".

The interface guide and YouTube videos have been somewhat useful. However, there is too much data in there. When you try to search something, you get too many search results that weren't exactly what you were looking for.

I don't think anything has changed that much. We used to have CA-7 before Control-M. Now, Control-M is just kind of taking over. So, not much change happened. It is just a new software to do the old job. 

We have benefited from Control-M. It is much easier to use and a bit more versatile than CA-7. 

I personally don't use CA-7 because it is located on the mainframe, and I'm not a mainframe guy.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup of Control-M.

We are currently in the process of upgrading Control-M into a new version. We have been working closely with BMC's technical people. 

So far, I think it has been good. No one has been talking about getting rid of Control-M. It is more like we are increasing our Control-M usage, if anything.

Control-M has improved our service levels on pretty much any aspect. Now, we can see the Control-M estimates of when a certain job will be completed. They become pretty accurate once a job has been running for a week or two. It can predict quite well when a certain job will be ready. So, if a customer asks us, "When are we going to receive our file?" I can check on Control-M, then say, "Well, I would say around...," whatever time it shows and let them know.

We have the CA-7 on the mainframe, and I have seen it being used along with Control-M. Control-M seems to offer a much better user interface, mainly because it is graphic and not on the black screen of a mainframe session.

I don't think our data analysts are currently using Control-M. We do have Informatica software in use, which is some sort of data analyst software.

Always make sure that you have at least double checked everything, because Control-M does everything you tell it to do and exactly as you tell it. Therefore, make sure you are giving the right orders.

Working with Control-M has been pretty complex, but that has been mainly due to our corporate policies since we are located in Finland and in the banking sector. So, there are hundreds of things that we had to consider. While it has been a complex process, it has been more because of our corporate policies rather than Control-M. Once we decided everything, and everything was approved, just taking Control-M into use has been a pretty straightforward process.

Definitely take the scheduler course provided by BMC. That was hugely helpful for all of us. Trying to learn Control-M on your own will be a tough path to walk.

We have Control-M on the mainframe. As the mainframe will be taken down in a few years time, we have to replace the mainframe scheduling agent with something else. That will be Control-M.

Our dev teams are running their own fields. Once they are ready, they go through systems to store into production, then we can automate it. However, during DevOps and other testing phases, we may not use Control-M at all.

I would rate Control-M as a nine out of 10.

We install, configure, and deploy Control-M for customers and make it run on-premises from them. After that, the customers take over.

BMC uses partners. They don't sell directly in the Middle East. So, they don't directly install the product and sell it. Instead, they go through partners, like my company.

We, as a company, don't use Control-M, but we sell Control-M to customers. We go onto a customer site, install the product, and configure it per their requirements. Then, we get their feedback and support related project stuff.

From a services perspective, we actively use BIM, which is the affiliate manager. We use the history to see the forecast. When the customer gets Control-M, the affiliate manager comes along with it. 

It is 100% on-prem, primarily because the Helix part of Control-M is not hosted in the Middle East yet. For many customers, there are regulations since the primary customers are banking, insurance, etc., which all require their data to remain within the country.

My customers are primarily banking customers, so they have their end of day processes that happen at night after the bank closes. These processes would involve AML, banking, and end of month payroll-related stuff across multiple organizations.

We do maintenance, project management, and support. Once a project is done, the customer has a support contract through BMC. That is through us. Customers cannot directly get in touch with BMC to open cases. It has to go through a partner. Therefore, we offer first and second line support to the customer.

There is definitely room for improvement. Version 9.0.20 actually comes with a web-based interface, but there are still a lot of things unavailable with it. There will eventually be more inclusions added into the web interface, but there is still a long way to go. 

There is also the automation API, which is a way to interact with Control-M, but it also needs a lot of improvement for other people to understand how to use it.

The documentation isn't really straightforward for the initial setup. It says, "Follow the on-screen instructions." The reason why people read the documentation is to have a heads up of what to expect and what is coming up. However, when you say, "Follow the on-screen instructions," I believe that is inappropriate.

I have been using it for two or three years.

It is very stable. We hardly get calls in respect to issues on Control-M, particularly on version 9.0.19. 9.0.20 is still pretty new in terms of deployments. However, with version 9.0.18. I have had a couple of problems from customers.

You barely need one person for customer maintenance because the system is pretty stable. Of course, if it is version 9.0.18, the number of support cases that come in are more compared to version 9.0.19. We also get information requests from the customer where they might have audit requests or want to enable certain protocols because of security compliance within their organization. In these cases, they reach out to us. 

It is not that we are always involved with the customer. It is not an onsite model. If there is an issue with the product, the person calls. We have 20 customers whom we manage at the moment for BMC. That is just done with three people: an onsite resource and two employees, including myself. The onsite employee is with a telecom vendor within the UAE. His job is monitoring and maintaining the system as well as assisting the customer. He does everything in respect to Control-M at the customer site, e.g., defining jobs, monitoring jobs, executing jobs, and making sure that they are done properly. Another of my colleagues and myself deal with all the other customers from a project and support perspective. It is primarily support because once a project is done, then a customer has support with us. We manage those cases, involving ourselves in those cases. We understand what is required. If we have the information already and know how to do it, we will give them the procedure, etc. If we cannot do it, we get in touch with BMC to get the relevant answers.

I have not had an issue with scalability per se. If there is any kind of resource crunch, the customer just needs to add resources. If it is a memory usage, then add memory to the virtual machine and you are good to go. 

You can have jobs at multiple customer sites. For that, there is a different level of scalability altogether from an infrastructure perspective.

BMC support is good. I would give them eight or nine out of 10, most of the time. They reply quickly, even before the actual SLA time. However, in certain worst case scenarios, I would give them a seven out of 10.

Most of the time, the integrated guide immediately opens up the relevant page. You can get the necessary information from that. The videos are really basic. For example, with version 9.0.20, there are videos that come up by default in many places as part of the help page, which is ideal for beginners. Whereas, at my level of implementation, we are looking for more detailed explicit knowledge for a specific scenario. For beginners, the web help is more than enough, if a person is patient enough to go through it.

Personally, I have worked previously with a competitive product: Automic One Automation Platform. I was working with Broadcom earlier, doing a similar profile, where my portfolio was dealing with retail support and projects. So, I was deploying Atomic solutions. After that solution, I made a change and moved to BMC, as a partner. I have been working with Control-M ever since. Therefore, I have exposure with other automation products.

The initial setup is straightforward.

If all the prerequisites are ready, a full-fledged setup for a single system would take 15 to 20 minutes to deploy.

Normally, we deploy with high availability so it has an uninterrupted service, even if a server goes down.

Once the PO is all done for a project, we have a pre-kickoff with our company and the customer. We basically run them through the prerequisites and understand their priorities. For example, some customers are more inclined towards Windows and others are more inclined towards Linux. Most of them would like to have the DR environment in the setup, meaning it would be the primary site with two servers for high availability and a DR site with two servers. All these technicalities for the infrastructure and environment would be run by the customer along with the prerequisites. 

From a project perspective, we ideally implement the process flow. So, we understand their documentation. Then, we have an actual analysis and design phase, where we sit down with the customer stakeholders and get their requirements in terms of the actual process flows early on. Until then, we just know at a high level that these are the number of database jobs that will run on Control-M. We don't have explicit details at the analysis and design phase. We literally sit with them and go through their documentation, understand what they want to implement on Control-M, and how we can make it better or include notifications. After this, we start off with the installation. Based on the outcome of the analysis and design, we implement the process flows.

The annual licensing within BMC Control-M is on a per task basis. Three- and five-year contracts are also offered. The customer usually buys a bundle of tasks, e.g., 5,000 tasks, then my team configures Control-M for their usage. 

It is a good, stable solution. It does depend on what exactly you are implementing, because automation solutions are primarily back-end solutions, e.g., back-end processes and batch processes, which can be executed on Control-M. However, sometimes customers get back-end solutions confused with RPA, which is front-end automation. When customers decide that they want to use some kind of an automation tool, they should really understand what their process flows actually need. There is a handshake that can be given between the front-end and back-end, but there are some customers who come to us wanting to buy Control-M, but they are actually looking for an RPA solution because their operations are front-end.

I would rate Control-M as eight or nine out of 10 in terms of stability and features.

We use the solution to automate our business batches, workload processing, and some elements of our IT and system maintenance procedures and processes. These include sequential clips, programs, and workflows. We automate these and have them scheduled for regular execution. We needed an orchestrator, and Control-M fits our requirements well.

The availability of data and reports is vital, and the solution's capacity for timely processing and build generation improved considerably over time. As our operation grew, so did our use of Control-M, and there has never been a delay in the availability of data and reports, even with very high workloads. Eventually, we could also bring automated control over our back end. Control-M makes workflow orchestration simpler; it can deal with an impressive amount of transactions.

We realized the benefits of the solution a long time ago, and from time to time, there will be a situation that reminds us how valuable it is to us. Control-M is an overwhelmingly stable and steady product, free from issues and frequent disruptions. As is the case for any such tool, there are occasional bugs and fixes, but overall, it's a stable product and a fully integrated part of our operation.

The product has improved dramatically over the years; it offers a lot in terms of features and capabilities and integration with third-party tools. A wide range of models available with the product is critical in reducing manual and mundane work such as custom script writing. This saves significant amounts of time and, by association, money for the organization.

As a Control-M user for over 15 years, I see it as very straightforward to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines. Even in the beginning, when Control-M was more of a data architecture product, it was easy to pick up. I've seen multiple people adapting very well in terms of adapting and enabling the capabilities of the solution for business; it's straightforward. 

Ideally, agent lift modes of connectivity would be established on different platforms. We can get applications integrated directly with Control-M. That's a recent feature. There are ready-made platforms and plugins which allow us to see templates for workflow orchestration in third-party and custom in-house applications. It's a straightforward solution, and this is an area where Control-M excels.  

Our customers are pleased being with Control-M, despite some minor hiccups, which happen with any solution. They have been happy with the product for years, and it's an enterprise-wide batch workflow orchestration tool. That's how it is established in our organization and what our users are satisfied and familiar with. 

The process execution speed is excellent and has constantly improved over the years.

The bottom line is Control-M is a mission-critical solution, it's integral to our organization. 

Regarding product design and R&D, the DevOps pipeline could be improved with better capabilities and automation. API security and authentication is another area that could use improvement; users must have static credential passwords, which is a security concern.

The REST API supports FTP for file transfers, but we would like to see additional, more encrypted protocols and simplified file transfer encryption. Currently, the solution offers PGP encryption, which isn't the most straightforward. 

We have been using the solution for around 15 years. 

The product is stable.

The solution is scalable; we increased our usage over the years and plan to continue that. 

We have multiple teams at multiple geos and deployments; we're an enterprise-sized organization.

Recently, there are some bugs with the product development, which necessitated R&D's involvement, which isn't ideal. We have fully integrated the solution into our production businesses, so any stability issues have a significant impact. There were cases where workarounds weren't provided quickly, with stubborn bugs needing environmental solutions.

Neutral

I've worked with multiple other workload orchestration tools, including IMB Tivoli Workload Scheduler and a CA automation product. Control-M stands above the competitors in terms of stability. CA underwent an acquisition, leading to changes in product strategy and mergers with equivalent products like Automic, so Control-M was the surer option. It is also more robust and has greater system availability than the competitors.

The initial deployment was complex, and this was by necessity. It is important to note that deployment is now more straightforward due to years of knowledge, experience, and newer features.

It took around two weeks to set up the Control-M infrastructure, and the process of bringing in business data and full adoption took place over years. It could be done faster, as in our case, there were other considerations involving budgeting, testing, and timelines. Setup of the initial infrastructure takes a few weeks, and then getting the platform running and configured can be done in a day or two. Further configuration and integration with LDAP and monitoring tools can take a little longer.

The solution can be managed and maintained by two or three staff members, but the number of staff involved in a deployment can vary significantly. It depends on the specific scenario and teams.

I would say we have a return on our investment; we have a vast amount of transactions and business automation implemented on a massive scale. We have adopted Control-M extensively, and it would be challenging to migrate to another solution in a reasonable time. We often look at alternatives but considering factors like timelines, resource availability, and team bandwidth, we keep coming back. The solution provides enormous value to our organization.

The solution is not cheap, it comes with quite a hefty price tag. Control-M is the market leader, but we still want the price to be as friendly as possible. 

The solution comes with the base module and an additional one with a few extra plugins, which is helpful. 

We evaluate competitors yearly, but in terms of value for money, we always return to Control-M. We get an excellent return on our investment.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I would advise any organization to do a proof of concept for their scenario before making a decision.

We don't currently use the Python Client, it's something we are planning to look into. We haven't started working on it, but we are in the review process to understand the client, and how it could fit into our operation.

The solution doesn't create new data as such, but it processes on top of the business data. 

We don't currently use the product for analytics, but we do plan to get Control-M data onto other systems for analytics and machine learning tasks.  

If we didn't have Control-M we would use an alternative solution. If there was a better one we would use that, or a product with a favorable cost and value proposition, which is a key factor.  

The tool always positively impacted our business, including our business service delivery speed. Over the years, there were one or two issues, but the vendor supporters could keep up. Some bugs required extensive development, and the support is excellent in this regard. They always have the right staff to assist during major productions or changes. Compared to before we had Control-M, it's as if we were previously traveling by foot, and now we've discovered the wheel. 

Regarding the audit preparation process, features like workload archiving come with an additional cost, which not all organizations can afford. I would instead maintain something locally on the system, but the solution is straightforward in terms of data necessities.

Control-M has to catch up in some areas, but it also offers specific capabilities and customization options. Application integration provides scope for exploration and deployment in custom developments. As a product supplier, BMC could focus on improving in areas indicated by their biggest customers. There is a lot of room for improvement.

File transfer support is Control-M's only significant limitation, as it only supports SSTP and STP transfers. Overall, other tools offer better security and file size in terms of file transfers. Therefore, the solution slows down when dealing with larger file sizes or a high volume of files, but it is sufficient for smaller organizations.

We are mainly scheduling jobs on Linux Windows, SAP, and DataStage environments; a few other application integrations, like Micro Focus, and third-party applications, like Web API.

We are using it for banking and financial services.

We use Control-M as part of our DevOps automation toolchains and leverage its “as-code” interfaces for developers on a few JSON-based script applications. This is in the testing phase, but in production for one or two applications, and rolling out new applications and application updates is much faster. Earlier, we had to go through a lot of processes. We had to raise a change request and work through various approvals, then the scheduling team would do it and there would be a lot of failures. Now, they are directly creating those jobs and submitting them. It is coming in automatically because it is running in Control-M.

Multiple critical processes have been automated. Here are two of those processes:

1. Our critical banking application for end users, especially to check their bank data, e.g., how much is in their account, how much money they have withdrawn, etc. 
2. It is used for ATM withdrawals and runtime data, e.g., SMSes go out with how much has been debited or credited in their account.

Automating these processes provides more visibility to our application team. They can see critical jobs failing and immediately taking action in Batch Impact Manager (BIM) with the help of our team.

The most beneficial features are the Forecast option and Archiving feature, as well as the integration option with other applications and tools to the API. When it comes to the API integration with any third-party tool, we can integrate using the application integrator tool and API interface with web APIs, which is the best part. Control-M has its own Forecast solution. Therefore, we can forecast how many jobs are going to run, on which day, and at what time. Another benefit is the tool's Archiving feature. So, we had a lot of requirements, like when an application or end user team would say that they want to see the log or output of the job from two or three months before. So, the archive solution is very helpful because we can keep at least a year's worth of data for our environment.

It has a very good GUI. We can search for a job very easily. The web interface, user account creation, and access control are very good. From an access control point of view, we can provide access to as many users as we want. A second group of users can be given a certain number of features, according to the requirements. The web interface is very easy for end users to login and use. A lot of features have been added, e.g., adding jobs. They can add jobs to their stuff, whatever they want, then get it validated by the scheduling team and work it into production.

A lot of businesses are using ServiceNow, which is another tool. I would like there to be some integration with ServiceNow or other third-party tools as well as have easily available integrations. Right now, we need to write scripts. Apart from that, if there were some integrations with an ITSM tool, then that would be good. Because at the end of the day, most of our clients are using different ITSM tools. I know that BMC Remedy is easy to integrate with Control-M. However, if there was availability for Jira as well as other ITSM and DevOps tools, that would be a good improvement.

I have been using it for almost 12 years.

It is very stable. If we are using agents, it runs without any issues. I have sometimes found issues when we are running it with an agentless solution. However, with the agent, it does not have many issues. It will have an issue once or twice a year.

It is a very scalable solution. 

Almost all our end user application teams are using it. 

For day-to-day administration, we have two people. For scheduling, we have four people. 

The integrated guides and how-to videos in the solution’s web interface is a good approach. There are a lot of documents and webinars. Also, the support is very good. We receive good responses very quickly.

I would rate the technical support as nine out of 10.

We migrated from Tidal Automation. In Tidal Automation, various options are not there. So, jobs are running mostly using an admin account. When all jobs are running using an admin account, that is a risk. However, in Control-M, we have various options. We can use an admin account as well as a separate account, like a user account, to run jobs. Whereas, these features were missing in our previous tool. 

We switched from Tidal to Control-M because the application team wanted more control. There is a web-based solution for Tidal, but all the data is shown there. For example, if there are 10 applications, then the web applications team can see all 10 applications, though they might only want one application. Even if the backup team wants to view just their backup jobs, they see all the applications that are working. However, in Control-M, we can control whatever applications that we want, limiting what can be seen by each team. 

The initial setup was easy. BMC provided all the documentation before starting. They did it in the development environment and targeted various applications. They showed us what they were doing before they implemented it. So, we were coordinating with them.

Deployment took three months.

I was involved during the initial setup. It was done by BMC's professional services team and I was part of the support.

It is a good investment. I think we are paying the same amount of money for Control-M that we were paying for Tidal and not getting as many features.

Control-M has helped us achieve faster issue resolution. It is 60% to 70% faster than what was happening before.

Service Level Operations have improved in the sense that fewer team members are required as compared to before. So, we had a bigger team, and that has been reduced because of Control-M's latest features, like development. Therefore, a lot of things are now being done by the application team instead of having a separate scheduling team, which has now been reduced. The application team is currently being trained to handle more things on their own. They also have visibility on what jobs are running and what jobs are failing.

In our environment, pricing depends on the total number of maximum jobs that can run, which is fine. Therefore, if the number of jobs increases, then the licensing fees will increase.

I have hands-on experience with Redwood and ActiveBatch solutions. If there are a lot of Windows requirements with Windows jobs, then definitely ActiveBatch is the best solution. If we see there are a lot of SAP-based requirements, then Redwood is the best solution and either Redwood RunMyJob or Redwood CPS work for this. If we see Unix or any other application with jobs, then Control M is the best solution.

While we do use Control-M to streamline our data, we don't use it much to view our data and analytics project since there are various third-party applications of the bank where jobs are running. The major work that we do is creating and adding those jobs to the tool.

We are not using file transfer at all because we are a US-based financial company. They have a lot of restrictions for file transfer between third-parties, so Control-M is not used for file transfers.

It is one of the best scheduling tools in the market for batch job automation and DevOps.

I would rate Control-M as nine out of 10.

Overall, we have a great visual of all of our key business processes, and it gives us a secure way of transferring everything in and out of the business so that if anything were to be intercepted, it would be secure and not compromised.

We transfer financial files between Google cloud. We use it for the I series. We have a lot of automated jobs, around 3,000 jobs per day, that we load that range between just regular commands for our planning allocations, finance, or data warehouse along with Google cloud. We're starting to implement a lot of that, but a lot of it has been automated and it allows us to process everything in a timely manner.

We are in the process of implementing the managed file transfer which gives us the dashboard, but we are still fine-tuning that. Overall, it does give us a great picture and helps everything. If there's something delayed, it gives us the opportunity to send out a notification to a team to say that their process is delayed. We get tickets created and have everything sorted in a timely manner.

We use Control-M's web. It makes it very easy for us to show them what they need to see and what they don't need to see. They mainly can just view the tasks that they have, but it's pretty divvied up permission-wise.

Control-M integrates file transfers within our application workflows. It has made everything a lot quicker. We've been able to get files transferred to vendors and we've been able to retrieve files from vendors rapidly and securely.

It also streamlines our data and analytics project. Mainly developers will create either different types of processes that we will implement within Control-M to make it automated and that definitely, I would imagine, helps streamline and format certain projects and reports that we send out to executives that helps out a lot. I don't know the exact extent of it, but I would imagine that it has helped our business service delivery. 

It has helped to achieve faster issue resolution. With the shouts and notifications that we get, we're able to create tickets as soon as a problem surfaces. So as soon as we do get a job failure, we get an email notification that prompts us to create a ticket, page out the team, and get it resolved in a matter of our terms of our SLA.

The most valuable features are the Advanced File Transfer and the managed file transfer. They make transferring files securely seamless. It's very easy to set up, get deployed, and have it transferred to and from vendors. As long as we can get our firewall rules implemented at a decent time, it's very easy and seamless to get important files transferred in a secure manner.

Control-M has automated critical processes. We run a lot of our backups through Control-M, daily sales reporting, and warehouse initiatives with shipping and planning. There are a bunch of finance processes that go through here that are time-critical. It's made everything more streamlined and secure and it comes through much quicker than doing it manually.

We have had a few small bugs with the configuration of the different types of jobs where it is the order of operations if it's doing a statement, we've noticed that if you try and do a little bit of both, it may cause one of them not to work. 

We've also had a few database bugs within our organization. I think we are migrating to OpenJDK rather than just regular Java and that has since shown some issues with our Control-M instance, timing out and causing our jobs to stop running. We are still working with BMC to fine-tune that and get that resolved.

I believe the file transfer process does everything that it needs to do. I don't believe that there's anything that would need to be changed there with all the features that it has, it's pretty robust. But overall I don't really see many changes that we would need.

I have been using Control-M for three to four years. 

Other than the database connections that we've had and as of, I believe when we upgraded or moved away from Java using OpenJDK, it's been hit or miss. I know that we've had a few instances where our jobs just stopped processing, but we're not sure if that's related to the application itself or if that's something in our environment, but overall I am personally okay with the way that it runs.

We run it on windows as well as Linux, and we are still trying to work on getting it to our DR site. But, I believe we are able to process quite a bit through there.

We use it for our I series AS 400. We also use it for Google Cloud, Cognos, ADP, many custom applications that we run as well, but we do a lot of I series.

I do not plan to expand it to other applications in the future.

My department consists of eight people, and we are mainly data center analysts. I'm their manager. We also have developers with a select few developers that are able to get in and view it, but they cannot actually create anything. They can just view and see what is running.

Between five to 10 users are responsible for the day-to-day administration of Control-M.

I've never used Control-M before, prior to being here and all I had to use were the help guides from the web, as well as the user interface that we have. The help administration guide has been the only way that we are able to get questions resolved and to go through support.

Their support is hit or miss. We have had successful sessions with them. And then we have other ones where there are fingers being pointed and it doesn't really solve anything. We have a rep that my manager goes through, but we seem to usually get issues resolved in a timely manner.

We have seen ROI. We were able to have fewer people manually running tasks. We're able to put them right into here and we're able to scale and move a lot of file transfers through here.

It is a little bit expensive. I believe that however we are set up, it might be per job that we load or the highest number of jobs that are loaded monthly and I believe it is quite expensive.

My advice would be to try and utilize as many features as you can. Don't get overly creative with things because that can just confuse other people. If there are other users getting in there, you want to definitely have a standard workflow on how jobs should be created, organized, and make sure that you keep track of what's being changed so that if something were to fail it's easily trackable.

It's a very robust application and there is a lot that can be sent to it and sent out of it and you do not want it to get into the wrong hands because you can do quite a bit with it.

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

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.

Most of my work goes through Control-M, e.g., all my development work. When it goes to production, it moves to batches. This will be either daily or monthly batches.

There are many applications running in Control-M, e.g., a quantitative risk management ALM application.

Most of our production jobs at the organization level are fixed through Control-M, running as either mainframe jobs, Informatica jobs, or QRM software-related jobs. Also, file sharing through FTP jobs and dependency setups between different software patches all run through Control-M.

We use file transfer jobs in our workflows. For example, if I want to share reports to end users in the production shared area, where specific users have access, Control-M makes this very easy as soon as a job is complete. The FTP job copies the report to a defined shared area, triggering an email to the user with a link. As soon as users are notified through email, they can open the email and click on the shared link to view the reports.

We have automated critical processes with Control-M. Our report deliveries are now automated. We automated our batch jobs and can check our dependencies through Control-M with minimal manual intervention. This has saved a lot of time and manual mistakes. For example, we used to copy old reports and send them via email, then users would come back to us, saying, "These are not this month's reports. These are old reports." After automating these reports with Control-M, there were no errors at all.

Multiple software can be collaborated through Control-M, then we can seamlessly monitor when it goes into production after a scheduled daily or monthly deployment. Even though we don't have any privileges to change these jobs, we can monitor them with read access and see how they are being executed. We can also verify their dependencies and see the logs. If there are any failures, we can get the logs from Control-M and fix them in the development environment, in the cases that are required to be done as soon as possible. It provides a complete picture about how the batches are running in production.

We have a lot of things that need to be considered. Everything needs to be done one after another in Control-M, where it provides us a pictorial representation of job dependencies, and even a person without technical knowledge can understand it by looking at the pictorial representation of jobs. So, we can provide the exact time when it can start. Then, we can update the users about the expected time for the job's completion. In case of any delays, we can understand them, then provide a new ETA to the users. Without Control-M, it would be difficult to provide these estimates.

We are using the web interface. We are not going through the mobile because we are a bank. Everything we do is through our laptops, not through a mobile. The web interface supports our business initiatives well. Whenever we want to see the updates, we need to connect to Control-M. We know what needs to be monitored and verify them depending on what their dependencies are. If the batch is still running, we can understand the historical information, then calculate and provide an ETA to users.

After we complete FTP jobs, those FTP jobs will be cleared from the Control-M schedule after the noon refresh. So, I struggle to find out where those jobs are saved. Then, we need to request execution of the FTP jobs again. If there could be an option to show the logs, which have been previously completed, that would help us. I can find all other job logs from the server side, but FTP job logs. Maybe I am missing the feature, or if it is not there, it could be added.

When integrating different projects through Control-M, sometimes dependencies cannot be identified. 

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

I have never faced any issues with stability. It is very good.

10 to 20 people are administering it.

I have never faced any issues with its scalability.

500 to 600 people are actively using Control-M. These are business analysts, team leads, managers, developers, and senior developers. Anyone who is touching the development and production would have access. 

Whenever we have issues, they are resolved through our organization's admin.

With the integrated file transfer feature, most things are automated. Previously:

• We used to copy the report, then send manual emails. However, with this feature, we are able to complete tasks with minimal monitoring because they are automated. Users are automatically notified as soon as the reports are complete. 
• We used to work during the daytime and after business hours. We were forced to open and view that the reports were there. Or, we waited until the next day to copy the reports, sharing and sending them by email. With this feature, we are less bothered. We can wait until the morning of the next day. We just go into the office and see if the reports have been shared already, seeing that everything is okay. So, during the night, some reports are generated and emailed to the users. 

The integrated file transfer feature has saved us a lot of time and manual effort, approximately two to three hours a day. Also, users are notified as soon as the reports are complete, where they used to wait until the next morning. They can just verify their email using the office provider mobile. Then, they connect to their laptops and get the reports. So, if they need the reports and are waiting for them, then they are not required to wait until the next morning to receive them, saving about 10 hours of their time.

I was not involved with the initial setup. That was before my time.

Our data transfers have improved using Control-M processes, e.g., our monthly batches. When we used to do things manually, like copying files and reports, we used to take three to four days to complete a batch. However, with the automated file transfers and report sharing, we have been able to complete a batch within two and a half days and our reports are on time to users. So, 30% to 40% of the execution time has been saved.

Control-M has helped us achieve faster issue resolution. Whenever we come across any data-related errors, instead of going into the process, we just get the Control-M log. Nearly 50% of our issues are resolved by looking at the Control-M logs. 

Control-M has helped us to improve Service Level Operations performance by 30%, because we no longer need to manually copy reports and receive email notifications. So, the process has improved a lot.

Organizations looking for seamless integration with different applications can move forward with Control-M. In my experience, Control-M provides a good solution. It also integrates with different applications and software.

At this point, we are not using the solution's streamlining for data and analytics projects.

I would rate it as eight out of 10.

Control-M is the primary tool used in our department as an interface between desk jobs and SAP. I create and monitor the jobs in Control-M and that ties into SAP.

At this point, we are using it as a batch scheduler, which is primarily used for SAP. We use it for everything financial, like payroll, because SAP is our primary ERP.

Our system administrator uses Control-M when he is scheduling batch jobs. 

Our SAP jobs are fairly critical, because there are a lot of collections from a financial aspect coming through on a daily basis. From that regard, Control-M is fairly critical for us. We need to know when and if jobs fail since that has an impact on the collection of money.

We used to have multiple shifts of people sitting there and monitoring our jobs until the introduction of Control-M. So, with Control-M, we have been able to reduce the human capital, in regards to shift workers. Therefore, we are saving money from a cost perspective, in this regard, by about 25%. We have had a 50% reduction in staff. The ability to monitor and be notified, when our jobs have on time completion or fail, has had a big impact on the company.

It is more about the notification tools and its ability interface with SAP. It has the ability to notify people about jobs and schedule based on prerequisites, because this is not something that we can actually do within SAP. For example, if one job is dependent on another job completing, SAP doesn't have this capability. This is why we went with Control-M. 

It is very simple to use. I have only been in this position for four years, but it was really easy for me to pick up and monitor Control-M.

In the client, it provides a unified view for me. I can alter the view that I want to see jobs and conditions. This is nice to have. The fact that you can see everything in one space is very important, especially these days where everything is about data and monitoring as well as because we are working from home on a global basis. So, in real-time, I can monitor jobs, failures, or anything that might be stuck. The real-time monitoring and the ability to see everything in one place is important for us because we operate 24/7.

I use the mobile and web interface. I started off with the desktop client, and there are some slight differences in the interface between the mobile, web interface, and desktop client. This is a nice feature, because when I am on the road or going for a walk, then I have my mobile with me and I can get notifications if I need to run anything. Then, I can just log on from there.

All the modules within Control-M can interface with SAP.

Everybody's biggest gripe is the reporting capability option. It is a gripe because there is a lot of information in Control-M, but the solution doesn't have a good reporting tool to extract that information. Now, if you want all that information, you need to rely on another third-party BI tool to extract the information out of Control-M.

Two or three years ago, I was at a seminar where they said that they were looking at improving the reporting. However, from that time until now, there hasn't been much of a change in the reporting capabilities. Especially in today's day and age, where accessing data has become very important, this is something that they should be looking at.

We are using Commvault as our backup application. Currently, there is no integration between Control-M and Commvault. 

I have been in my position as an operator for four years. The company has had Control-M for over 20 years. 

Over the last three upgrades, Control-M has improved quite a bit. When I joined our department, Control-M didn't have a good reputation because it was always falling over. All our issues were addressed by Control-M with their upgrades. 

In the latest version, we find it has been extremely stable. We haven't had many failures as far as the program is concerned.

Generally, we don't interact directly with BMC because we have a service provider that we use, Blue Turtle. So, we interact with Control-M via Blue Turtle for any queries that we are having.

The initial setup was done before I joined the company.

We have a system administrator who applies our Control-M updates.

Control-M has helped us improve Service Level Operations performance. It helped us from the monitoring perspective. Now, we are able to control real-time monitoring and real-time notification of any failures that would occur within the system. Because we run it 24/7, we have notifications for any failures that have been setup. They will come through on our mobiles, and in that regard, Control-M has helped us.

Unfortunately, I can't compare it to anything else.

It just works. Control-M is very good. You only need to look at something else when an application gives you problems. However, in our environment, it is stable and just works. We haven't even bothered looking at anything else.

I can highly recommend it. It is very easy to learn. It is very stable. It has multiple interfaces, e.g., you can use it on your desktop, access it via the web interface, or access it on a mobile. The support that you get is actually quite good. It is a tool that I highly recommend. For what we require it to do, it does exactly that and more.

We have a system administrator, a chief scheduler, who is my supervisor, and two operators, including me. The four of us are power users who have scheduling capabilities in Control-M. We have different people on our BI team. Overall, 10 people have various levels of access.

We have tried Control-M as part of your DevOps automation toolchains. We are only getting into DevOps now as a company. We are still playing around with it. Currently, we are still fairly separate as far as DevOps is concerned. My department is basically the middleman between dev and operations. Whatever dev wants, we will create those jobs and test them. Once they want to send them into production, they let us know, and it then goes to operations. We are the center for those types of things.

Because we went into lockdown and the financial impact of the lockdown, projects were placed on hold. This year, they were& still on hold. Probably sometime next year, we will be starting on those projects again.

I would rate Control-M as eight out of 10 because the reporting needs improvement.