Control-M Reviews

Our organization works with the cloud and databases. Our primary use case for Control-M is automating orchestration and scheduling jobs across the cloud and on-prem. We use it to monitor and report on jobs. We also use the index to integrate with the cloud service. It leverages our ability to manage workloads across various cloud platforms like AWS and GCP. 

Implementing Control-M saved us time by reducing our manual intervention. We can divert more resources to meaningful work. It reduced the amount of manual intervention needed by 30 to 35 percent. 

In addition to improving efficiency, workflow orchestration enhances our integration with other tools. We can orchestrate across on-prem and cloud environments and reliably create and integrate data pipelines. Workflow orchestration is critical to our DevOps. Control-M is constantly surveying the network.

The most valuable features of Control-M are automation and orchestration. It allows a different schedule, and we can manage thousands of jobs. It ensures we can complete them on time accurately. This automation reduces our manual intervention, significantly reducing error.

Control-M should receive more notice when it releases new features. The user interface is also a bit complex, and the navigation should be streamlined. 

I have used Control-M for a year and a half. 

I rate Control-M eight out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Control-M nine out of 10 for scalability. 

I rate Control-M support eight out of 10. 

Positive

We used Broadcom before switching to Control-M. The migration was a little complex.

Deploying Control-M is somewhat complex. It's easier to convert to the other tool. We spent more than two weeks on the deployment and received some support from the Control-M side. We had almost five teams of people working on it. First, we set up the environment. Then, we ran the installation and reconfigured the database. After that, we did functional and integration testing. 

Switching to Control-M reduced our total ownership cost.

Control-M isn't cheap, but this is an enterprise model. 

I rate Control-M nine out of 10. I will recommend it. It's easy to integrate and has the flexibility we need. 

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 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.

I am a project manager and am responsible for the Control-M infrastructure.

Control-M is the only batch infrastructure that we have, so we run all of our batch activity on the platform. We are using the web interface, for example, the workload change manager and application integration. There is not a particular sector but rather, we run all of our batch jobs on this tool.

Control-M provides us with a unified view of our workflows, which is important to us because our processes are standardized. We have set up a company that is used mainly for scheduling, which is also involved in creating flows and monitoring them. As such, standardization from the point of view of the user is important. Effective standardization facilitates our work. 

We have automated many processes with ServiceNow, including some that are critical. For example, if we need to stop 100 instances, we can open a ticket in ServiceNow and it automatically creates the job flow in Control-M that sends the command to stop the instances.

The integration with our incident management platform has meant that we have been able to achieve faster issue resolution. The reason is that we have eliminated the manual phase of opening an incident. It was very time-consuming and it is not easy to calculate how much time we have saved, but I estimate that our process is 70% faster.

Control-M has helped us to improve the performance of our service-level operations by approximately 60%.

The integration with ServiceNow is good. When a job ends and there are problems with it, we automatically open an incident in this platform, and the number of the incident is forwarded to Control-M. This means that we have a record of it with the log of the job. This is a feature that reduces manual work. It is not officially included in Control-M; rather, it was developed for us by BMC.

The web interface supports us well because we have done some customization for each area of our company, and the client can see all of the jobs that they are interested in seeing. One can watch their flow on a phone or tablet. For example, we have integration with WeLink and our clients can see the flow of the billing workflow.

We use Control-M as part of our DevOps automation, and for our company, this is very important because it reduces the amount of work that has to be done. We are a very big company and we have millions of jobs scheduled. The more that we can automate, the better it is for us.

Integration with some applications and platforms is complex and requires development. We have done some integration with the application integrator, but it was more like a manual solution. This is an area that can be improved. 

I began working with Control-M approximately 20 years ago.

In past versions, there were issues with stability and it was a negative experience for us. However, in the version we have now, stability has improved. At this point, the product is good and stable.

Scalability-wise, there are no limitations. We have between 500 and 600 users including our DevOps team, applications teams, and others. For example, some people work on solving problems, others handle scheduling, and some only use it for viewing or monitoring the workflows.

We have a strong collaboration with BMC and we are constantly in contact with them.

The support is good and we are satisfied with it. In general, the responses are fast and the solutions that they provide are good.

In the past, we migrated from IBM's Tivoli Workload Scheduler (TWS). We did not use the Control-M migration tool at the time because it had not yet been developed. We completed the migration manually.

The reason that we switched to Control-M is that we stopped using the mainframe.

There was no particular problem for us in regards to the implementation process, as we had BMC to assist us. We have a very large environment and our migration took between twelve and eighteen months. We have thousands of agents and many Control-M environments.

We did not follow a particular implementation strategy.

For implementing and setting up Control-M, we collaborate strongly with the BMC team.

We have approximately 20 people of varied roles in charge of the day-to-day administration.

My impression is that we have seen a return on investment from using Control-M. As it is our only solution for batch processing, it helps us to centralize all of the batches that we have. This, along with the standardization of workflows, are the most valuable features of this product.

The licensing is managed by the commercial section of our organization.

We evaluated several options and we found that Control-M was the most complete solution.

We use Control-M to integrate file transfers within our workflows, although we don't use the managed file transfer capability that comes with it. We are currently analyzing it and we are deciding whether to use it or not. At this time, we use other programs for our file transfers. Our analysis will show whether we can migrate the process to this new feature.

Overall, Control-M is a good product. We do have small requests that we give to BMC, although they are very specific. The product covers a good percentage of our needs, as-is.

This is a product that we will continue to use and I can recommend it to others. I expect that in the near future, we will migrate to the most recent version, 9.20, and that we will use some of the newer features that it offers. That said, there is always something that can be done to make a product better.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

It provides enterprise scheduling for a lot of things, e.g., supply chain, payroll, reporting, sales and marketing, and web services, which is our online store and ordering.

We are currently running jobs on Control-M for databases, web apps, proprietary applications, Workday, Oracle, WebSphere, Kafka, and Informatica stuff on Unix and Linux. It is flexible. I haven't had any problems with compatibility.

It used to be on-prem, but now it is in a different data center in a different city. So, it is a VM.

We use the GUI, but there is a web interface that some users are using on the business side. Those users can easily check on their job flows on the web interface, so they can see whether their job has completed or it is waiting for something. It can check the status and  history of what happened, for example, the previous day.

The scheduling is quite easy to use and pretty robust.

Control-M provides us with a unified view, where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all our application workflows and data pipelines. It also provides the ability to filter. So, if I don't want to see everything, I can also narrow it down or open ViewPoint. This is very important since we have thousands of jobs to monitor. If we did not have this ability, it would be very difficult to see what is going on.

It is easy to use, and you can set things up very quickly. We can copy jobs, making copies of the existing configurations and setup. 

Control-M reporting is a bit of a pain point right now. Control-M doesn't have robust reporting. I would like to see better reporting options. I would like to be able to pull charts or statistics that look nicer. Right now, we can pull some data, but it is kind of choppy. It would be nicer to have enterprise-level reporting that you can present to managers.

I have been using Control-M for at least 12 years.

I haven't seen any significant issues with Control-M in several years, e.g., we haven't had to call support. So, it has been very stable.

It runs all the time. We are running thousands of jobs with little issue, especially when I compare it to some of the other systems that we use for other things. It has been very stable.

One to two people are needed for day-to-day administration. I usually do it myself.

I haven't seen any problems with scalability in terms of performance or stability. 

There are at least 50 people using Control-M. Some of them would be architects, senior programmer analysts, database administrators, Unix administrators, software engineers, and team leads.

I had an issue one time at my previous company. There was some issue with the database. We worked with Level 2 support to fix it. Other than that, there is not too much to talk about really in terms of problems. 

The integrated guides and how-to videos are very good in the solution’s web interface for reducing the time to full productivity with Control-M. BMC puts out a lot of webinars and videos on their YouTube channel. Sometimes I do use those. I go in and watch the video or webinar to see what is new or how to do things, which is very valuable.

We migrated from CA Unicenter, which was out of service and quite clunky. That system didn't have a graphical user interface; it was command line-based. It had a console, so it was very difficult to see what was going on. It was also difficult to troubleshoot. It took a long time to find information or set things up. Therefore, management decided to move to Control-M, especially since I had experience with it. It has been much easier to use and work with than CA Unicenter.

CA didn't have File Watchers. It had another way of achieving that outcome, but it was very cumbersome and not always reliable. It was also difficult to troubleshoot. 

There is a lot of logic in Control-M that you can do. For example, after a job completes, there are actions you can do. There are actions before the job completes or before it starts. There are actions you can do afterwards. There was some logic that you can add to the job, and we just didn't have it with CA.

The calendars are also a lot easier to work with using Control-M. The CA calendars were just terrible. In Control-M, we have a lot less calendars, about 20 calendars, compared to 80 or 100 in CA.

It is faster to implement things like new jobs or projects with Control-M. Whereas, in the past, certain things would be executed manually, like scripts and workflows. It is very easy to use. I can set up jobs and workflows quickly, which helps developers to test.

It is very easy to set up a PoC. If someone just wants to do a quick test, it is very easy to do. Assuming that everything is in place, it is quite easy to test or set up cyclic jobs.

We did the setup twice. The first time was a migration from another system, which was not BMC. That took three months, which was still pretty fast, and it was very successful. The second time was an upgrade to version 19, and that took about two months, and it was also quite successful. From my perspective, the solution was very good as far as upgrades go. We didn't have any major issues, before or after the upgrade.

We had a vendor help us out, but overall it was very smooth and a success. We used Control-M’s Conversion Tool when migrating from CA Unicenter to Control-M and the vendor helped us. Using the Conversion Tool was very important because it speeded up the process. It took all the information from one system and transferred it over, which saved us a lot of time. So, we spent more time on the verification. We spent less time on the setup and spent more time just verifying the setup to make sure everything was correct. It was a time saver for us.

My experience with BMC during our initial deployments and upgrades was very good. I got quick responses with good information. The people that I dealt with were knowledgeable and helped to resolve the problems. So, my experience was very positive. I would rate them as 10 out of 10. I never had any issues.

Control-M has helped us achieve three times faster issue resolution. We have it integrated with ServiceNow, so it tickets automatically. Whereas, in the past, we used to do it manually. We had operators opening tickets, so it speeds up ticket resolution for opening and assigning a ticket. Also, Control-M captures some errors. Sometimes, this helps to troubleshoot any problems. You can set up alerts for jobs that run too long, etc. So, it has a lot of features that we use.

Control-M helped us double or triple our Service Level Operations performance.

CA sent us a proposal and IBM also sent one for Tivoli Workload Scheduler. We saw their presentations and packages, then did some research. We thought Control-M was the best solution based on experience and feedback from others. I had experience on Control-M already. I had been working on it for several years and had a positive experience. The other thing was just ease of use. Tivoli and Unicenter just do not seem as polished. They didn't look as easy to use, especially Tivoli. I think we heard that Tivoli was very clunky and not easy to use.

It was mostly my experience with it. Control-M was easy to use, very stable with no issues, and easy to configure and maintain. Whereas, CA was not as easy to use nor polished. CA also always keeps on buying other companies and incorporating things, so the experience is not as smooth. With Tivoli, we just heard that it was terrible to use and lacked a good interface. We had another Tivoli product from IBM for backups, and it was just terrible.

Give Control-M a chance. If somebody is considering the solution, they should install a demo on their system and use it. It is very easy to use. It has a lot of options and features. BMC is pretty good when it comes to upgrades and implementing new features, so there is always stuff coming in. There are a lot of new options that we haven't even tried.

Of course, you should compare all your options, but Control-M is a good choice. It is probably the best.

In the future, we will probably use Control-M as part of our DevOps automation toolchains and leverage its “as-code” interfaces for developers.

I would rate it as nine out of 10. The reporting is something I would like to see improved. Other than that, there is not much I dislike about it. I work with it every day. I have been working with it for the last dozen years or so. It is an excellent product. It just needs more reporting.

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 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.

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.