Control-M Reviews

Our organization is a bank, and all batch processes are in Control-M. 

We have installed it on a mainframe. It is an on-premise distributed system.

For the bank, Control-M is one of the jewels of the queen. It is the heart of the bank. For batch processes, Control-M is most important. We have Control-M working seven days a week and 24 hours a day. 

All file transfers are managed from Control-M MFT. Some of our clients who are small companies send the data to the bank about their employees' salaries. The bank takes that data and prepares payments for different people in the company. Control-M MFT is used for the information transfer between the bank and Visa, American Express, or Mastercard. All of the information is sent by using file transfer in Control-M.

It has improved our data transfers. It gave us the security and the vision of what is happening with our file transfers.

All of its features are very valuable. We have been working with Control-M for many years. For people who have been working with it, there is no other way. This product is a part of us.

It is very easy to use. Our operators are new people, and they start to work with Control-M from the first day in the bank.

In our bank, all new applications need to be implemented with Control-M. We try to look for the best way to establish communication between both products. One of the new features for us is Application Integrator. It is a very interesting feature because it lets us integrate with those applications that are not included in Control-M. By using Application Integrator, we can easily integrate new technologies. With the help of Application Integrator, we recently integrated with Blue Prism, which is a robotic product. We could integrate such processes into Control-M. Now, we are working with Ansible, and we are putting Ansible automated processes into Control-M.

In general, it is a very good product, and we are very happy with it. It meets all of our expectations.

Although we have used the Smart Tables facility for a long time, today we have had a need to process services that include processes that combine Mainframe and non-mainframe jobs (Windows, SAP, Informatica). An improvement for Control-M EM would be the possibility of creating combined Smart Tables, that is, they include mainframe and non-mainframe jobs so that the work order can be generated with the Unique option. Today, to achieve this we must manage global Conditions with Variables and generating a unique code to pass to the MF tables and not MF. Let me name this feature “Global Smart Tables”.

Another need we have is that Control-M MFT also supports commercial file transfer protocols such as CA-XCOM.

I have been working with this product for more than 30 years. Personally, I have been working with Control-M since 1988. Here, in the bank where I am working, when we started in 1995, the product was on a mainframe.

It is the most stable solution that we have had. It has been working on the mainframe for two years without any problem. It is a very stable product.

We have not had any problem with scalability. The bank has been growing for the last 15 years, and we had no problem with Control-M. Control-M has adapted to our growing architecture. All new applications that we have, such as SAP, Informatica, or databases, are covered by Control-M.

We have about 40,000 processes per day. We also have 100,000 execution per day. All batch processes are integrated into Control-M from different systems, such as Windows, SAP, Informatica, etc. All file transfers between the headquarter and the branches and the external providers are managed from Control-M.

The bank has 6,000 employees. The system and IT teams have about 600 people. We have about 30 people for operations, monitoring, and implementation. In the technology area or system programmer area, we have six people. All of them are using Control-M.

We work around the clock, and we have three teams that work per day. Each team has about 10 people. We have people for Operation Console who are looking at batch processing in terms of whether it is working fine. Four people are there to implement new jobs in Control-M. They are working with the calendars and resources. We have three people to administer the product, and there are other people to administer the jobs on Control-M. 

BMC has very good people. Their support has been excellent. We had very quick replies. Their technicians have always been very friendly, and they have a lot of knowledge of the product.

They always provided a very good solution. When we had a Severity One problem, they call us immediately and solved the problem even on the weekend.

Its initial setup was a long ago. It was very simple. The bank had about 6,000 offices, and it took about eight months to automate the whole batch processing.

At that time, people were not ready to use automated processes. The most difficult thing was to change the mind of the people. When we started with automation, people thought that they will lose their jobs with this kind of tool, and it was very hard to change the mind of the people. Using Control-M was very simple, and it was easy to use Control-M to automate manual jobs. From that stage till now, all new systems are syncing with Control-M, and all new developments are integrated into Control-M.

Initially, we used a partner. At that time, it was New Dimension Software. It became BMC in early 2000. Now, we have a lot of people in the bank with Control-M profiles. When we use any new feature of Control-M, we don't need any partner.

I am the Control-M specialist for technical support in the bank. My job in the bank is to set up all new products.

I have been working with Control-M for 30 years. So, I have seen other products. It is very easy to automate our daily manual jobs. It is not at all complex to set up the product. It is also very easy to teach to another person. It is not complex like other schedulers. It is a very easy tool.

So far, we have only been using its Windows client. We have now started to use its web interface. We are also starting to use the DevOps technology with Control-M.

We have migrated from Control-M 9.18 a month ago. We will start using centralized profiles. We will also start to work with Manage File Transfers (MFT) B2B. It is a new feature that we will start using to improve our customer delivery processes.

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

We started to use Control-M in 2019 with the MFT (Managed File Transfer) module. Last year, we also started to use Control-M for SAP jobs.

Our transfer processes with MFT from Control-M, are quicker and safer now because we have implemented a lot of rules. For example, it helps balance jobs. Also, there are workflow capabilities, so that if a job succeeds it can call another job. And in case of failure, it can restart the job and warn us by email or by a Teams message. That kind of warning for the support team means we can address problems before the business complains. These are benefits we did not have before Control-M. Improvements to data transfers via Control-M are on the order of 80 percent.

Issue resolution, with Control-M in place, is about 90 percent faster, because most of the issues are resolved without intervention. It has also helped improve Service Level Operations performance by between 80 and 90 percent.

In terms of automating critical processes with Control-M, it's not only for transfer jobs but we have some applications that need to be restarted every week for performance reasons. Instead of having someone connecting on Sunday to do that, we can do it automatically with Control-M. These are OS jobs and it's very critical for us to restart them.

The kinds of things that Control-M is allowing us to do now that we couldn't do with our homemade solution are in terms of physical operations, the monitoring through the dashboard, and the reporting. With our previous solution we didn't have any reporting, but now we can export reports to PDF and share them with the business. We also have Control-M/Forecast to plan the maintenance of our system and to know which systems and jobs will be impacted during a maintenance period.

The most valuable feature of Control-M is the collaboration. We can all work together on it and have a better view of things with the dashboard, and that's true even for business users. The unified view where you can define, orchestrate, and monitor applications, workflows, and data pipelines is important because we have more than one team working on Control-M. We have a support team, a job-creation team, and a SAP team. We can all work together on it. It avoids anyone from working on his part and not using the latest modifications. In case there is an issue, we know who made the mistake, and we can also roll back the mistake. That is very good.

Our line-of-business personnel use Control-M's web interface. We have tried the mobile application, but we haven't used it enough. The web interface is very good. Previously, a business user would ask us, "What about my file?" Now that we have Control-M, they are up to date on it. The self-service portal is very helpful because it gives them a view of the latest version of the interface and they can consult it without having to ask us every morning about a given operation.

I would like to have a web version of Control-M to replace the client. Currently, our support and jobs-creation teams are using the client and that needs to be installed on a PC. It's very heavy, consuming a lot of resources compared to the web portal. I know that they're trying to improve the client with the latest version, but for me, there hasn't been enough improvement yet. I think their roadmap shows that there will not be a new version next year, due to the crisis. I think the next major version will only come out in two years.

I've been using Control-M for two years.

It's very stable. In the last year, there have only been two issues. One was our fault, due to our configuration. The other was because of the Control-M application. We had to call support to get them to solve it. But overall, it's a very stable application.

The scalability of Control-M is very good.

We plan to expand the jobs Control-M is running, including operating system jobs, and then maybe database jobs such as SQL Server and Oracle. Currently, we have more than 2,100 jobs and we are planning to have 30,000 within two years.

In terms of the number of our employees who are using Control-M, we have about 40 admin users, including on some support teams, our SAP team, and our job-creation team. On the business side, we may have about 15 users. For day-to-day administration of Control-M we need three to five people.

We started with Control-M to replace our file exchange solution, which was a homemade solution. Our needs were growing and growing and our solution was not enough to support them.

For the MFT part, the initial deployment took about four months because we had to convert all our jobs and all our scripts to Control-M. It was not easy because we had a homemade solution, so there was no conversion tool for it. That meant we had to do it manually, with some scripting on our side.

In terms of our deployment strategy, for SAP we started with one SAP system from among the many we have. We started with a complex one, which was Redwood. The version of Redwood we had was not supported by the Control-M importing tool. Again, we had to do it on our side without a conversion tool.

I was the project leader for the implementation of Control-M in our organization. We brought in an external company to help us install the solution. Our experience with that company, to be honest, was not good. We have now changed to a better one. We now work with Ogchee.

We have had a person from Ogchee working with us, full-time, for a few months. He is here to help us and to support the application. But we also worked before with BMC support, and it was okay.

We have definitely seen return on our investment with Control-M. The benefits are very good.

We did not really look at other options because we had some good information from an external partner about Control-M and that is why we went directly to Control-M.

Don't hesitate to use Control-M, because there are a lot of benefits for your everyday work, especially the collaboration, scalability, and the visibility from the tool.

I would rate Control-M a nine out of 10. The one missing point is because the client is not that mature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have been using this solution since 2016.

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

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

I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

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

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

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

Cost-wise, it is good. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Control-M is a scheduler tool, and we have multiple batch jobs that are currently running in our organization. 

We are currently one version behind the latest one. The latest version is 9.0.19.200, which also has Control-M Python Client, and we are planning to go for the latest version.

We currently have it on-premises on the Windows platform. We are planning to migrate to AWS.

We have multiple technologies, and we have different types of jobs, such as Informatica jobs, SAP jobs, database jobs, web service jobs, etc. In such an environment, from the support perspective, usually, we need to log in to multiple technologies and check if a job is executed or not and if there is any error, which is not easy. Control-M acts as a one-stop shop to check the status of all jobs. The maintenance or support team members can easily log into Control-M and verify the job status.

It has been helpful in reducing the burden on our resources during the weekend. It has also been helpful in reducing delays and data mismatches.

It is easy to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines with Control-M. You can drop and drag whatever you want and then provide a time for the scheduler. There are many inbuilt plug-ins, such as the Informatica plug-in and the SAP plug-in. We are using these plugins. It is pretty easy and simple.

It allows us to ingest and process data from different platforms. For example, you can have a flow that starts with a REST call. Once that is processed, the records are picked from the database and sent to SAP. You can easily design a pipeline workflow and schedule jobs. You can also specify the dependencies. For example, you can specify to execute Job B when Job A is completed or execute Job C when Job A and B are completed. There are multiple options in Control-M to ingest and not miss data from any platform.

Testing is easy. You can have multiple environments, such as development environment, testing environment, staging environment, and production environments. You can easily test your workflows, and you can easily promote from one environment to another environment. You can promote from the development environment to the staging and production environment. There is an option called Promote, and you can use that option to promote to whichever environment you want.

We are an enterprise, and when the data moves from one technology to another technology, multiple teams get involved, which requires multiple communication exchanges between the teams. Sometimes, there might also be delays in getting the data from one team. With Control-M, we can create a workflow where we can specify to proceed for job B after job A. There is no need for a team to send emails to another team. There is no delay. Team A doesn't have to inform team B to run a job because otherwise, there will be a delay. Control-M eliminates such issues. It has improved our business service delivery speed.

It has good reporting capabilities. You can get a report of the status of all your jobs. You can see how many jobs are pending and how many are processed. You can also share these reports with the management. There is also a URL that you can give to your management or customers. They can check the job status, and they will have knowledge about the status and any abnormalities.

Automation of Control-M has improved the speed of process execution. No manual intervention is required using Control-M. You don't need to have a resource waiting to do a job at a certain time. You can automatically schedule a job, even over the weekend. It results in faster speed and better utilization of resources. You can also integrate it with other solutions. For example, if a job fails, a ticket can automatically be created in ServiceNow or BMC Remedy and assigned to a specific group so that they can look into it.

I find Control-M for SAP and Control-M for Informatica good. You can connect to the Linux or Windows servers, and you can run multiple jobs. 

Control-M Managed File Transfer is also a very nice feature for transferring multiple files.

It meets our requirements, and it is simple and easy to use. 

They can give more predefined plug-ins so that we don't have to create them. 

The security layer for Control-M MFT can be better. 

We have been using Control-M for the past six years.

Its stability is good.

Its scalability is good. We would like to increase its usage, but its price is a challenge.

Their technical support is very good. They also have a community portal. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We didn't use any other solution previously.

I am responsible for installing and managing Control-M. Its initial setup was straightforward. It took about nine hours to get it installed and up and running. The number of people required for deployment and management of jobs depends on the scope of your operations. If you have 50,000 jobs a day, two people are enough.

Its maintenance is handled by the server team. We have it on-premises, and they take care of the patches and upgrades. If it was on the cloud, the upgrades would be done automatically.

Its pricing is a little bit high. They could provide an enterprise-level license for an unlimited number of jobs. Currently, it is based on the number of jobs, and if you exceed the number of jobs, there are charges. For example, if your license is for 3,000 jobs per day, but you run 3,050 jobs, you will have to pay for the extra 50 jobs. They charge $120 per job. So, it is too costly.

To someone who is looking for a process automation solution but is concerned that Control-M isn’t modern enough to work with multiple cloud-based data sources and tools, I would say that Control-M is the best option even when working with cloud-based data sources. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. Control-M is the best solution to replace any enterprise solution if its price suits you.

We use Control-M to automate scripts that we use in banking and automotive use cases. These are our two big applications. We have a total of 18 applications running in Control-M now, and we want to move over approximately 13 more.

Control-M is running in a virtual machine.

Before Control-M, we had a lot of applications running under different operating systems, including Windows Server and Linux Server. We had a lot of scripts and a lot of programs that were running on the servers. When we implemented Control-M, we were able to automate a lot of those scripts. We have a lot of bank applications and processes and to this point, we have automated about 30% of the ones that we have to do.

We have automated some of our critical processes in core banking. Many of them are now being handled by Control-M. However, we have not yet finished all of the scripts.

Control-M gives us good visibility of our applications and processes. For example, in the morning we can see the results of all of the scripts, whereas, in the past, we could not do that. Our goal is to move the execution of the scripts from the server to Control-M. At this point, the scripts are controlled from Control-M but the execution is done on the server.

We have four domains in Control-M. We have planning, monitoring, history, and forecast. We do not perform data analytics yet.

Our clients use the web-based interface to interact with Control-M.

When a new team member or a new client wants to use Control-M, we have to install a client on their machine. After that is done, there are three options. The first is called Workload, and it is used for observing or monitoring the workload and execution of the jobs. The second one is called the configuration control manager, and it's for configuration administration. The third is reporting, which is another important one. We use the reporting module to generate our reports that concern the execution of the jobs.

We use Control-M to integrate file transfers with our workflows. It is called Advanced File Transfer (AFT) and is used by our financial team. We have another technology for file transfers but the problem with it is that it provides no transparency. There is no interface to see the transfers between applications. With Control-M, we can monitor the transfer between applications and it's great because we can see everything that happened throughout the day.

AFT allows us to configure actions. For example, if a file transfer does not complete successfully then we can send a notification to the destination about the problem.

Control-M has helped to improve our data transfers because it allows us to monitor the execution of the process. With other technologies, we cannot do that. Also, it allows us to configure the notifications, which is very important for us because it will automatically tell the other team when there is a problem with the transfer.

The most valuable feature is the monitoring, which allows me to see the execution and results of each of the scripts.

Being able to view the history is very important because if we have a problem then that is where we search for the details.

From an administrative perspective, the planning domain is very important when we want to add a new feature or a new script.

The forecast domain is what we used to ensure that the implementation is working and that the configuration is okay.

Compared to similar technologies, AFT takes a lot of time when transferring a large file from server to server.

The history module only contains a maximum of 10 days, but we would like to have access to more. For example, it would be helpful to have 30 days or two months of history available.

There should be more granular control available for monitoring applications and sub-applications. For example, when we want to monitor a job, we can specify the application, but we want to have the option to only specify sub-applications that are related to it. As it is now, all of the sub-applications are monitored.

We implemented Control-M for our clients approximately four years ago.

Control-M has been stable for us since we implemented it, four or five years ago. We have not had any problems with the database, file system, or scheduling component.

The scalability is excellent.

We have about 13 people who work regularly with Control-M. We are all engineers and IT managers, and I am the main administrator. The other administrators are in charge of their specific applications, and they need access to Control-M because they need to see the execution plans for the applications that they are in charge of.

I have worked with BMC technical support and I would rate them a nine out of ten.

They respond very quickly, according to the severity of the problem. Also, the responses that they give are really clear and assist us with finding the problem, as well as the root cause.

I have worked with Dollar Universe and AutoSys in the past, before working with Control-M. I find that overall, Control-M is the best one for several reasons.

First, with Control-M, it's easy for someone to be an administrator. All of the documentation is available online, which is important. The second point is that the interface is easy to use. The third is that the solution is really stable compared to other products, such as AutoSys or Dollar Universe. These solutions were not stable in our environment. Part of the reason was that we had trouble finding any documentation online.

This is an expensive product compared to other solutions, although I think that it is a good one. We are in a good position with licensing, as we can run 10,000 jobs. To this point, we have 3,000 jobs that are running, which gives us room to integrate the remainder of our applications. 

My advice for anybody who is looking to use Control-M is to have a lot of money. It is a good solution but it is expensive compared to others.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

In my organization, Control-M supports large services and data management. We are mostly using it to schedule jobs in applications, like Informatica PowerCenter, PeopleSoft, and SAP.

We are using the desktop interface.

We utilize Control-M’s streamlining of our data and analytics projects. We are in the retail industry. We are also into other industries, like gas stations, baby stores, and online stores. When it comes to data, we have a lot coming daily. It can be product, purchase, or business information. Only 70% of the data is being used with Control-M. It can be a data transfer from one location to another location. Or, it can be putting the data into a database, then storing it for the future. Every day, the purchase history and product details are uploaded to the database using a Control-M job. Because of that, our business is able to identify our customer's needs. Using its analytics, we are tracking reports that help us provide more services to our customers. Control-M is definitely playing a vital role, in terms of handling a lot of data.

There are very critical processes that we have automated in Control-M, e.g., order confirmation. This is a service when a customer tries to purchase something from our online stores. Normally, when a customer places an order, it makes updates in the background, puts some things in a database, and performs some actions, then it gives an order confirmation. That has to be done within a short span of seconds. For us, that is a critical service because a customer should receive an order confirmation as soon as they make a purchase. This is one thing that we have automated. Because a lot of things are done in the background when a customer tries to order something, the process is automated. Automation of these processes improved the quality of our service. It has also reduced manual efforts and the time to deliver services has decreased, giving us a time advantage.

The scheduling feature and scheduling tool are the most valuable features. I like the scheduling services that we have in Control-M, which are very beneficial to our organization because they are automating things. There is also less manual work. We can schedule a task without any manual interruptions.

We use the File Transfer feature from BMC. Before File Transfer, we used to have to develop the script, which was always a problem for us. After using File Transfer from BMC, a lot of our issues were resolved. Also, it is ready to use. There are many extra, additional features, which help our day-to-day work requirements. File Transfer is a fantastic feature of BMC.

The web version is quite new. When compared to the client version, the web version has made a lot of improvements that needed to be done.

Because of the Role-Based Administration feature, we have been able to give autonomy to our users to develop their cycles how they want. Using this Role-Based Administration feature, we are able to give restricted access based on their job roles. 

The user interface is not that good. While we know that BMC is working on it, the user interface is how we work in the client. Also, the web version is quite slow when compared to the client version. 

Currently, per our requirements, we are planning to use Control-M Web more. However, because the UI is not good and still not up to the standard, we are not using it fully. This is one area where BMC needs to really focus further development.

For installing or upgrading the PeopleSoft and SAP plugins, currently there is no way to do it via Control-M Configuration Manager. So, we are installing or upgrading the plugins, like PeopleSoft and SAP, manually. If BMC could provide an option via Control-M Configuration Manager to upgrade these plugins, it probably would reduce a lot of manual work as well as ease our work. This is one improvement that I personally want to see, because it would help our way of working.

I have been using Control-M for four years and 10 months. It has been close to five years.

Control-M is 100% stable.

For day-to-day administration of Control-M, normally less than five people are required in our organization.

As per our requirements, it is okay most of the time. We do not need to search for another solution. It is very scalable.

There are currently 700-plus people using Control-M services. Their job roles are software developers and system engineers. 

In 80% to 90% of situations, BMC has provided better solutions. In rare cases, the support was not an asset.

BMC Control-M videos and webinars are being uploaded on YouTube or the BMC website. These are really helping us a lot to solve issues or understanding some things. One thing that BMC needs to continue is giving more webinars and uploading videos.

My company used a couple of applications before using Control-M.

When we migrated Control-M, we tried to use Control-M's Conversation Tool. However, it did not fully satisfy us per our requirements.

Normally, we do upgrades ourselves. However, if we need assistance, then we normally contact BMC by opening a case in Case Management.

Control-M has improved quality levels as well as standards. When it comes to cost and time, we have seen an improvement of approximately 70%.

The use of Role-Based Administration has eliminated the need to submit tickets or requests to the Control-M administrator.

BMC's price is based on the number of jobs.

If it is for scheduling, we only use Control-M in our organization. For non-scheduling solutions, then we probably will look at other solutions that are feasible for us.

DevOps automation toolchains are in our roadmap for next year.

We want to use Centralized Connection Profiles in the future.

I would rate it as nine out of 10.

We use it for scheduling nightly processing of data.

It has improved our organization a lot. It has helped us control any problems that we have with jobs. We have critical jobs that run and we can tell ahead of time if there's a problem. There are alerts that we can send out. And if a certain job goes down, we can tell what the impact is and which jobs are impacted that are waiting for that job to complete.

We're better able to meet our service level agreements because we do a lot with the Fed. There are certain things we have to have done at a certain time. The automation the product provides means we either meet our or are ahead of our deadlines. In addition, we can tell if a job is running long and if it's going to meet the SLA. And if it's running long we can see why it's running long. That's a benefit for us.

Before, we used to schedule jobs on the servers and we'd have issues with the servers. With Control-M, we can tell if there are any issues coming up because we can run the critical path and see if there are problems before they actually happen. On the server, we couldn't necessarily tell if something wasn't running.

When it comes to creating actionable data, it gives the auditors a very accurate and timely report. Our audit preparation process is much easier. We don't have to do as many manual reports anymore. Previously, it was painful. We had to do everything manually with multiple spreadsheets and it was just ugly. With Control-M, it's all in the database and we just extract the information from the database.

Also, our management team is happy with the orchestration of our data pipelines and workflows. They're happy because they get to see the information through the reports that we create. We're also meeting our service level agreements with the end-users, in terms of getting them their data. And customers are happy because their information is being put into their accounts on time and correctly. 

And for projects, the orchestration of data pipelines is helping because we can go through the testing before we move something into production. That means that when we have a major project or an upgrade coming up, they can run it all through the test, try different scenarios, sign off on it, and then move it into production. It's a very streamlined process. If we didn't have Control-M, our projects would be slower because we'd probably have to be doing a lot of stuff manually.

It's very critical for our business. If we have an outage coming up, for example, if we have to shut down power, we can tell what's going to run and if anything is critical during that time frame. We can manage the data much more easily.

• The reporting facility is very helpful in creating reports for auditing. 
• The FTP function is very easy to use.
• It is simple to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines and to ingest data from different platforms. It integrates well between platforms.
• The Control-M interface is also very easy and very comprehensive. It's pretty simple to navigate through all the different functions.

It's very important for us that Control-M orchestrates all our workflows. And the plugins have enhanced what we already have.

I would like to see more auditing capabilities. Right now, it has the basics and I've been trying to set those up to work with what our auditors are looking for.

I've been using Control-M for 12 years.

It's very stable. We've had no downtime with it. The only time that ever happens is if we have lost the server but that's been very rare.

It's scalable. We use it across multiple states, geographically. We have about 1,600 end-users. 

The technical support is wonderful. I've had no issues with them. Contacting them is very simple, you can do it online. And I usually get a response back within an hour.

Positive

We did not really have a previous solution. We just scheduled tasks on the servers. There was no uniformity.

Our return on investment is that we don't have a lot of downtime anymore. The information that we receive and post to our customers' accounts is quick and there are fewer errors. As a result, we don't get as much feedback from the customers compared to what we used to get.

The pricing is reasonable. It's not an exorbitant amount. The licensing is pretty reasonable for the number of jobs that we run.

The plugins will be an additional cost.

The only maintenance required is due to the updates that come out from BMC. Three people manage that part of it.

If someone said to me they're looking for a process automation solution, but they're concerned that Control-M isn't modern enough to work with multiple cloud-based data sources and tools, I would tell them they can test it. They can physically set up a test function and see the product work for themselves. It wouldn't be a full-on PoC, just a snippet, but they could see the functionality and how things interact. It depends on what they're trying to accomplish too.

My advice is "use it." It's very end-user-friendly. It works, depending on what you're trying to do. All the platforms work very well and it doesn't take a lot to get it up and running. And the help is out there if you need help.

Overall, it's very well done. We go through the AMIGO (Assisted Migration Operation) process, and there's a lot of help out there for Control-M. There's a community as well if we have questions. We really have no complaints. The solution has sped up our process execution.

We use it for workload automation and it's the primary application tool that we use. We use the Monitoring domain and the Planning domain daily, as well as tools and Configuration Manager as needed.

Our product support team installs it in our Citrix servers so that people can log in to Citrix, choose the application, and use it. But I, and the team that does the batch scheduling, also have our own local clients installed on our machines.

You can do the same thing in many different ways, but Control-M allows you to identify and improve any gaps in batch processing. It makes people aware of things through notifications and alerts. You want to be on top of things if jobs are not running correctly, are running long, are not executing, or end "not okay." There are various ways to set up having that information sent to the operator or the individual support teams.

Also, the Self Service feature allows end-users to do their own scheduling. That frees up resources like me, and is a huge benefit of Control-M. There are huge possibilities with Control-M for helping to give business users visibility and control over their jobs while freeing up IT personnel. Some companies that I've worked for have used the Self Service a lot more than others, and some places haven't used it at all, which is something I don't quite understand. There's an opportunity to free up your IT resources if you can get your users used to scheduling their own jobs.

Monitoring and planning are critical to my day-to-day work. Monitoring is for the active schedule and Planning is where you make scheduling changes on a more permanent basis. My roles have spanned multiple functions. I've been an operator, where you have to watch the active schedule in the Monitoring domain. I've been a scheduler, where you use Planning and do your work based on scheduling requests. And I've been an admin, where you use Configuration Manager and make sure that the product is installed and behaving properly. All three are equally important.

Control-M is excellent when it comes to building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring production workflows. Those workflows are of very high importance to our operations.

I've never been very successful when researching ways to utilize Batch Impact Manager. It's a tool to set up dummy jobs in your job flow and it's supposed to come back to you and say, "Okay, for this job flow, you are 50 percent complete at a certain point in time."

I've had varying levels of success with it, and it's not because Batch Impact Manager doesn't work. It's just that I don't have the knowledge to make it work. I would like things like Batch Impact Manager to be a little more user-friendly, out-of-the-box.

Also, BMC has a ticketing tool called Remedy, but very few places that I am aware of use it. They use solutions like Jira and ServiceNow. It would be nice if it were easier to use those solutions with Control-M. I don't have any firsthand experience where somebody comes in and says, "Okay, now JIRA and Control-M can communicate with each other. And if you want a failed job to automatically open a Jira ticket, this is how you do it." I don't believe that exists or, if it does, it is not simple.

Another point is that, for a while, they were pushing a Control-M mobile app, but I haven't seen anything about it for a very long time. Maybe it was scrapped. Because I wear multiple hats in my organization, I would love it. I would love to be able to go to a mobile app, log in and see a scheduler, go to a job, and see what it's waiting on. I would be interested in the ability to support things via mobile.

I've worked in IT for 30 years and I have worked with Control-M for more than 12 years. I'm not interested in learning another tool. I'm all-in for Control-M.

The stability is an eight out 10. It's good.

It seems like Control-M can handle just about anything.

Their technical support is okay. Sometimes, just to get them to look at it, you have to run a utility called data collector, and you have to give them all this information just to engage them. That can be burdensome.

Although I haven't been involved in the initial stages of a Control-M implementation, I have contacted BMC's services team. Sometimes they're very responsive and sometimes they're not. They're not terrible, but sometimes it's tough to engage the support team for more general questions. 

But if I'm doing an upgrade or something related to the product itself, they seem to be pretty responsive.

Neutral

I've never had to set up a Control-M environment. But there is a certain level of complexity when you do your upgrade, even though they market it as "upgrade in place." As long as you're on version 9, you can go from 18 to 19 to 20.

 The only question about adding plugins is, "Does it affect our support cost?" I was informed fairly recently that BMC changed its support structure. Instead of a tier, based on the number of the jobs, now they charge based on endpoints.

Before I download a new plugin, I want to make sure that it doesn't add a new endpoint and require us to pay more and not be in compliance with our current support agreement.

There are a lot of schedulers out there. I don't have firsthand experience with many of them, but I know from working in the field, production support, that BMC is at the top.

Using Control-M to manage and orchestrate workloads across our enterprise is critical.