Control-M Reviews

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 is job scheduling for most of my BFSI customers. In banking, I use Control-M for job scheduling to execute day-end jobs and month-end jobs where we do the data processing.

Regarding my main use case for Control-M, it is customer-specific, which I cannot disclose, but Control-M is delivering 50% of productivity or 50% of cost optimization at a very high level, which is very useful.

My organization is a service integrator, and while we do have Control-M, I am not responsible for that, as I mainly support global customers and use it only for my customers.

For my customers, Control-M has had a positive impact, saving approximately 50% of the cost compared to not using Control-M, where the manual effort increases by 50%.

The cost savings from Control-M are achieved mainly because jobs are automated, so fewer staff are needed, and the primary cost is associated with staff.

The best features Control-M offers are job scheduling and job management. I also saw in the demo about the future-ready model where you can leverage orchestration, doing agentless and agentic AI, all of which is going to enable artificial intelligence infusion. I am looking forward to taking it further.

In my day-to-day work, I find job scheduling and job management the most useful because that is the foundation and that is the day-to-day responsibility.

Regarding the features, I integrate most of my customers with the BFSI systems, and for other customers, I use the SAP integrations.

For improvements, BMC is already taking a lot of steps with the agentic AI infusion initiatives, and I want to see it live. I just saw a demo, and right now, I believe BMC is going in the right direction, but once I see it in action, I can provide more detailed feedback.

I have used Control-M for around three years in a hands-on capacity, after which I moved into leadership roles. I have known about it for ten years total.

I do not have any additional improvements to add; it is all good, and BMC support is excellent with no hesitation.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Control-M a nine.

I gave it a nine because there is always room for improvement; I should give it a ten, but I gave it a nine.

Regarding Control-M's AI capabilities, I think its governance and security are yet to become live, and I am waiting to see it in action.

For Control-M's AI capabilities, I think of its accuracy and reliability of output, and I need to see it in action. As of now, it is still to be evaluated.

Control-M is deployed in my organization, but I am not responsible for its implementation. However, regarding my customers globally, I have worked with all models including local implementation, on-premises implementation, hybrid implementation, and public cloud. We do all types.

For my customers who use public cloud or hybrid cloud, they most often use majorly AWS and Azure, and GCP is a little lower, to be transparent.

The advice I would give to others looking into using Control-M is that I pitch Control-M to most of my customers or most of the new opportunities where I work because, in today's scenario, cost optimization is the key, and Control-M helps us achieve that.

My main use case for Control-M is automating the deployment of ETL jobs which run periodically as batch processes, and also for deploying REST endpoint-based applications while ensuring that all required checks are performed and preventing unauthorized deployment by unauthorized personnel.

We have ETL jobs which run periodically and are fully configurable in our pipelines. These jobs pick up telemetry data available at a specific storage location, which is the telemetry data of Dell servers coming over the network. Since there are many such jobs, each targeting specific Dell offerings and corresponding telemetry data, we no longer need to manually monitor or trigger these jobs.

Control-M has automated the workflow, and we have specified all checks required for successful batch job triggering and for reporting any issues that arise. We find Control-M invaluable for relying on automated processes rather than manual intervention for triggering jobs and ensuring they run successfully with all checks passed according to our authentication requirements.

REST endpoints follow a slightly different flow since they are not deployed regularly. During release, when a feature is completed, REST endpoints are triggered, and this triggering of Control-M jobs is somewhat manual since release intervals are not fixed.

Before using Control-M, we had different environments including development, staging, non-production, and production. All deployments went through these environments with various integration tests, unit tests, and QA testing occurring whenever we moved from one environment to another. Previously, all of this was manual, and although we introduced some automation, it did not help as people still found ways to bypass the automation workflow.

Control-M has provided us with very strict controls that help us avoid failures caused by someone triggering jobs arbitrarily. We now have control, predictable execution and workflow, and we can rely on it to always work according to the checks we specified in the pipeline.

We have our own S3 storage and on-premises databases like PostgreSQL with applications also located on-premises in our Dell cloud or on-premises infrastructure. Since these are all on the same network, this integration does not pose any issues, and Control-M is able to trigger file transfers if required between all these components.

Our AI and ML workloads are in a nascent stage as we are still working on that. We will definitely explore the possibilities of introducing Control-M for our agentic workflow triggers.

Control-M has provided us with all improvements. First, a significant amount of work has been automated, allowing us to use our workforce for more useful purposes and saving on employee costs to some extent. Efficiency has improved since automation ensures that workflows run reliably. We have reduced time by eliminating the need to wait for someone to be notified to trigger workflows, as they are now automatically triggered. Availability is 24/7 due to Control-M automation, and error reduction has also been achieved.

Previously, we had a team of at least two or three people dedicated to executing workflows and notifying the team about failures. Now, the bandwidth from those three people working eight hours per day has been utilized for business-relevant work.

Beyond basic automation, we are implementing a next level of automation using Control-M agents. When we provide proper RBAC to a particular Control-M agent, it takes care of jobs, and they are now fully automated and monitored without any human touch. We have triggered alerts with Teams and Slack for any monitoring messages that may arise, indicating which team needs to know for debugging and fixing issues. Control-M automation combined with the latest Control-M agents feature has enabled us to deploy to our VMs and our Dell private cloud, which we use for deploying jobs and REST endpoints. The new Control-M agents feature is helping us eliminate the manual intervention that existed in earlier Control-M automation.

Every software now provides integration with notification mechanisms, and it is good that Control-M provides those as they are essential. Control-M has done a thorough job with governance and security, as we constantly see that agents could potentially access components they are not supposed to. Control-M agents have provided a mechanism to enforce that only authorized credentials provided for the agent can execute actions, and this is fully configurable and within user control. This is the best part.

Control-M has met our expectations. Our use cases were to trigger workflows without manual juggling, which was possible with manual triggering of Control-M jobs, but now with the AI agent, those are automated. We have not experienced any issues.

Audit trail is something we require for all workflows, and Control-M provides this very well.

Control-M is evolving day by day and is currently fulfilling all our needs. In the future, we may have more complicated requirements that I cannot anticipate now. However, Control-M is keeping pace with technology and customer demands. I am satisfied with what Control-M is offering.

Documentation is an area where some of my team members have struggled with following the documentation, and they frequently turn to experienced leads to understand issues that arise when configuring Control-M. While I have found the documentation very clear, I have received feedback from my junior team members suggesting that documentation could be improved.

I am involved with Control-M teams as the tech lead for the application development team, the batch processing team, and a few other areas. We work with Control-M all the time, and I am always involved in our workflows.

Control-M has been very stable for us.

We do not have many workloads that require us to scale Control-M itself. Whatever workloads we have, a single instance serves us sufficiently.

I have not encountered any issues that would require customer support.

Before Control-M, we used to deploy our applications, batch processing, or endpoints manually by triggering CI/CD pipelines. This type of automation was not available, which Control-M has now provided us.

We definitely achieve ROI. We need fewer employees, and we are saving both time and money.

We did not consider alternate solutions.

I would give Control-M a rating of nine out of ten. I am not giving ten because there is always room for improvement. Nine is perfect from my perspective.

Control-M stands out because of the numerous benefits we are receiving. Earlier, we struggled significantly with executing workflows in a standardized way with all security controls and ensuring all checks were done so that random people could not trigger workflows, which resulted in wasted time resolving issues later. Now, with Control-M, we are confident when it comes to executing workflows, allowing us to focus more on business requirements and development rather than worrying about who manages timely execution and monitoring. I would have liked to rate it ten, but I believe there is always room for improvement with any technology as new business requirements arise and the world evolves.

If you still do not have any sort of automation in your workflows, especially with agentic automation, Control-M is the solution. If your infrastructure or project management team is struggling with this, you definitely need to use Control-M.

My main use case for Control-M is batch monitoring.

I use batch monitoring mainly in production and non-production environments.

We manage the integration and sequencing of data processing across diverse data platforms and cloud environments with special applications that help them communicate with each other because of our heterogeneous environment.

We are planning to use Control-M to support AI or ML workloads; currently, we are using on-premise Control-M for job scheduling only.

Control-M is mainly used in my organization for regulatory reporting to address compliance requirements like SOX and audit trails.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization by improving productivity and tracking.

Productivity and tracking have improved with daily jobs like getting the status, pulling data, and transmitting data from client to client; those tasks are scheduled overnight, and there is a morning consolidated mail to inform if there are any issues with overnight job scheduling.

Control-M's best features include job scheduling, monitoring, troubleshooting, and visibility.

I rely on all those features because in order to lead day-to-day operations, all these features are important to manage the environment.

I want to add reporting because that is something we can look back at.

In terms of Control-M's AI capabilities, I think its accuracy and reliability of output are good, especially with Control-M Guardian for AI-specific offerings, and I think new features are added with global availability addressing some of the issues on security and vulnerability levels.

Control-M has facilitated the integration of Kubernetes or cloud-native workflows with traditional batch processing through various plugins or features that integrate with different tools and technologies; one of them is Kubernetes, which is widely used and for which Control-M is well equipped to cater to the needs.

Control-M could be improved, but I have no frustrations because AI features have been included and continue to be added, which is great.

Regarding Control-M's AI capabilities, I think agentic and governance is an important need of the hour, and Control-M has some of the features that address those issues, so we are looking forward to the maturity of the product because its AI adoption is at a rapid pace; it may require more time to reach a mature level.

I have been using Control-M for three years.

Control-M is stable.

In the past we used UCS, which is a job scheduling tool plus monitoring; now we are using Control-M.

I have seen a return on investment from using Control-M; I think it has resulted in fewer employees needed and money saved, which is why we continuously use it.

I am a technical person, and the pricing, setup cost, and licensing are managed by our client.

Before choosing Control-M, I evaluated many other options, but I do not want to name them; however, the majority of people said to proceed with Control-M, just because of the offerings.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Control-M a nine.

I choose nine out of ten for Control-M because maybe I need to explore more on all the features, as some features are not applicable.

My advice to others looking into using Control-M is that it combines a job scheduler with AI features, keeping up to date with industry trends and requirements; it has a proven track record and longer usage in the industry, so the maturity developed in this product is high; all users or prospective customers can use Control-M without any doubt.