Control-M Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The initial setup was done before I joined the company.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We primarily use Control-M for financial services. We do file transfers, payroll, HR, and other related tasks.

The top three processes that we have automated with Control-M are payroll, HR reports, and time reports. This automation gives HR, and the business in general, a clearer picture of what is happening as far as the payroll timesheets go, including who's punching in and punching out. Essentially, it improves transparency.

Control-M provides us with a unified view where we can define and monitor applications, and this is very important to us, especially in the audit process. We have auditors and they request certain information; using Control-M, we can log in and create the report according to the parameters they're asking for. It makes life much easier.

Our developers use the web-based interface to monitor their jobs. They do not have access to do anything else but they can tell if their jobs have run, or not.

Our developers leverage the “as-code” interfaces and it makes it very easy to roll out new applications and application updates. Everything is automated as far as transferring files in and out to certain people. This is helpful because it doesn't have to be done manually. It also generates reports automatically for us. Control-M jobs produce the reports so we don't have to create them every day.

We just started using Control-M to streamline our data and analytics projects. So far, it has given us some actionable insights. The streamlining has improved our business service delivery because we can tell if something is running behind, and why. We know if there's an issue before anybody notices.

Control-M has improved our data transfers because it is much easier to do encryption back and forth when sending files.

This product has helped us to achieve faster issue resolution. I estimate that issues are now normally resolved within 10 minutes. It's very quick.

Control-M has helped us to improve service-level operations performance. We have a critical job stream and because we're an institution, we have to have certain data out at a certain time for the federal reserve. If we can detect when something is running behind, and why, then we can notify them ahead of time so that they know the reports are going to be late. It helps them on their end, too. This way, they don't have to call and ask us where their report is.

The most valuable feature is the reporting function. It allows us to pull up reports for specific information that the end-users are looking for.

The planning and monitoring features in Control-M 20 help us because we can forecast to assist with network maintenance. For example, if we have something major going on with the network and there is going to be downtime, we can do a forecast to see what's going to be running at that particular time and adjust things accordingly.

I would like to see more audit report templates added, and perhaps more customizability in terms of reporting.

I have been using Control-M for 15 years.

Control-M is very stable and we've had no major issues with it.

Scalability is not a problem. It absolutely extends with our needs and the jobs that it needs to run in. At this time, it is running payroll reports and other payroll jobs. We are looking at expanding this to other applications in the future, although there is nothing definite yet.

Technical support is very responsive and we have never had any issues with them. Generally, if we have a problem or question, we can open a ticket with BMC and we usually get a response back within an hour, or no later than two hours.

I would rate their support a ten out of ten.

We work with BMC for upgrades and support. We are part of the AMIGO program.

We have absolutely seen a return on investment with Control-M. It is centralized and it's made everything easier for the business end, in particular for getting their reports on time. 

The pricing of Control-M is reasonable. 

The developers in our organization are responsible for creating the scripts. There are 20 of them and they monitor their jobs. With respect to operations including creating, running, modifying, and killing the jobs, there is a group of six staff in charge of that. This group also creates the schedule and the calendars, so essentially, they take care of the day-to-day administration.

My advice for anybody who is considering Control-M is that if they have questions then BMC is great to talk to, but there is also a BMC community and if they have questions or want to know how it's running or working for other organizations, they can post and generally get a response back. There are user groups specifically within Control-M.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

• We use it to run batches in SAP, Teradata, WMS, Manhattan, and a wide array of applications. 
• We use it for mainframe, AS/400, Linux, Unix, and \Windows servers.

When we first started using Control-M, we had multiple scheduling solutions across several platforms. Going to Control-M consolidated all of them and allowed us reactivity across all of them based on the completion of processing.

• Maintaining and monitoring of workloads have been and continue to be the most valuable feature in our environment. 
• There is a batch monitoring tool called Batch Impact Manager, which proactively warns when processing is behind and SLAs are in jeopardy of being missed. 
• Their forecasting tool is very handy. 
• They also have an API interface, although I cannot speak to it as we have not amassed enough experience to provide a fair assessment.

BMC Control-M has a slight issue with daylight savings time while advancing the clock in the Spring. It is not catastrophic, but it does requires some manual intervention to be issue free.

The features most valuable differ from client to client. One of our clients used Control-M to execute multiple scripts in distributed systems and mainframe environments, which in turn ensured proper functioning of equipment, updating data, BI report, etc. over their multiple stores and distribution centre. Another client I worked with required mainly files to be transferred to third parties/vendors/internal businesses.

In all cases, Control-M was able to deliver it flawlessly, and also with add-on security features such as SSH connections and PGP encryption.

Control-M helped automate workloads, which would have taken hours and hours of effort and resources. The tool increased the quality and efficiency of work performed with as minimum manual effort as possible. It also reduced cost to the company by ensuring timely/effective/error-free delivery of tasks.

Control-M as a tool has provided a really stable and effective platform to automate workloads. However, sometimes we do have to use different job types to achieve one task. For this scenario a welcome addition would be an application integrator tool that is part of the Control-M product and can be used to combine multiple/variety of job types into one, allowing us to achieve the same result in one job.

Now, since this tool is something the users would have to define on their own, the pre-packaged or existing functionalities wouldn’t recognise the new template we would have designed, if you work on mass-updating a folder. So we end up having to individually pick out the AI jobs and update it. Understandably, as multiple users will have multiples ways of working with the tool, it would be difficult to pre-code something into the Control-M tool without knowing what will be developed by, say, a random coder in a different part of the world with a different business requirement.

Another aspect that always bothered me, as an administrator, was the Old bug out-New bug in conundrum regarding compatibility of the tool when a new version/FixPack was installed. We would have to then install patches to ensure compatibility. Some of the Control-M modules would need their own patches on EM side/server side, etc.

I have used it for over eight years now.

I have not encountered any stability issues. Control-M, as a tool, has been pretty stable. We did come across some compatibility or connectivity issues at times, which usually were resolved really quickly, as BMC’s wonderful tech team would have released a patch beforehand.

We did initially face some confusion with the GUI servers. What happens is, when you log in to the tool, it automatically picks up the last used GUI server and most of the users, who aren't schedulers or administrators, wouldn't have bothered to check that field or change it. So with more users logging in at the same time, we would have a huge load on the servers and the tool would hang or disconnect or wouldn't connect. We were able to fix it when we created multiple GUI servers to share the load, and some education for the users. :)

I remember another instance during my initial experience with Control-M. There used to be a delay with the NDP (New Day Procedure) as the number of jobs were really high, and it took around 45 minutes to 1.5 hours some days. I haven't seen this issue again, though, and since I didn't get to work in-depth with Control-M back then, I am not sure if that was in fact the tool or our servers having hung processes.

Another instance was when we accidentally had more jobs running at the same time (around 200K Control-M jobs) than what our servers could handle; it all came crashing down. I think it could have been something our servers weren't built to handle, as I did hear of some stories where the company ran 500K jobs at the same time (can't vouch for that story, or how it went for them though).

But these were mostly situational issues, and we were able to learn from it and quickly resolve it, find workarounds/solutions or better server management. So, when we built any new environment, we took all of these into account.

Technical support is excellent. They have a great support team. Also their AMIGO program is great, where you can engage BMC support for migration of your Control-M versions, if you need BMC expertise handy, and they do go through the complete process from start to finish, which is great.

I hadn't had a chance to work with any other solutions.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, with all the necessary details mentioned in their well-written guides. They have guides for utilities, parameters, installation, administration, etc., which makes it easier to adapt for anyone who is new to the tool (of course, prior understanding of OS/DBs/networks/etc. is expected for you to understand it. ;) )

Control-M does come with a lot of features, but with those features comes the hefty price tag. :) It is reasonable comparatively to some tools that may only do, say, one type of the multiple tasks available in Control-M.

Most of the places I worked already had the solution in place, hence I cannot comment on this.

It is a great product and it will be worth it, if you plan to utilize it to its full potential and on a larger scale.

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.

Most of my customer's jobs now run on Control-M, mainly on the finance side and for data management. Those are the core applications that we are running. We are using it as a scheduling tool. 

We have a few other applications that we are migrating to Control-M. Until about two weeks ago we were running on an older version of Control-M, so not many people were interested in migrating to it. But now we are running on an updated, supported version. So more applications should move to it.

Control-M is deployed on-prem.

Let's say the business wants to run some reports. We give them a console or the Self Service where they can run jobs. That way, they don't have to depend on the IT team: “Hey, can you run this job?" And then they have to open a ticket and the IT personnel have to keep to the SLAs. Instead of that, we give them Self Service where they can run their own jobs and they can see the data instantly.

For each job we have SLAs and, based on the SLA we define which ones are critical. The most important processes for us include the SFTP process. We have a few files that are very important and are generated every day. They have to be delivered to the business before they come into the office. That is a very critical process. We tried various options but after implementing Control-M we had better results. Another of our critical jobs is what we call our master data management, where we have near real-time data. We have a few SLAs where a job has to be completed within 20 or 30 seconds. That means the data has to be delivered within that amount of time. Using Control-M helps us to monitor and deliver critical data to the business.

We used to use a native scheduler, like a cron or MDM scheduler. Those kinds of schedulers were very effective, but there were no cross-platform capabilities. With Control-M, we have both types on a single page, and we can see when a file is available and when it's picked up. If I have two different data centers and Job A is running data center 1 and Job B is running in data center 2, when we used the native schedulers for moving files and getting alerts, there was always a delay of a couple of seconds. We have tight SLAs. With Control-M, we're able to deliver on time. While our earlier and our current schedulers are automated, we have a better solution now.

Control-M has also helped to improve our Service Level Operations performance. If I had to take a wild guess, I would say it has improved SLO performance by 20 percent.

The main reason we came to Control-M was to integrate everything together and have it all in a single platform. We use different applications, and integrating them was not possible previously. With Control-M it is. Apart from integration, the main features are for long-running jobs and SLA alerts. But there is definitely a lot to explore and to work on within Control-M.

The solution provides us with a unified view where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all application workflows and data pipelines. We have a team called pro-mon and they monitor all the jobs for us. A single view makes it easy for them to monitor things. Control-M comes with a documentation section for each job. As an SME, I put in the high-level steps in the job documentation; what to do if a job fails. They can read it and do level-one support. Some jobs are very critical and require an immediate call, but with other jobs they can wait, re-run, or read the documentation to give them some guidance. That really helps all our teams. That single view for the monitoring team, where they can see things in a single application, is important because the business needs all jobs completed within their SLAs. Indirectly, it's helping the business to get its data on time.

Another reason we use Control-M is to integrate file transfers within our application workflows. We have cross-business functionalities, where one business generates something and another business wants to use those files. We use a lot of MFT and AFT functionalities. As a result, Control-M has definitely improved our timelines and SLAs. We have an easy-to-monitor solution now. Before Control-M, each application team had to monitor its own jobs. Sometimes they would miss something and they wouldn't know that there is a mistake in a job. But once Control-M came into the picture and we had a dedicated team to monitor everything, we were able to provide timely files to the business. The business is very appreciative of the improvements after implementing Control-M. It has improved things a lot when it comes to providing files to the business on time.

With my current customer we have been using Control-M since 2017. I started using it over the last four or five years.

Now that we are using the supported version, we can leverage a lot of the features. Going forward, it's going to be very actively used by all our business teams, including all the applications teams. We don't have many jobs at the moment, around 200 or 300 jobs, but down the line, in the next six months or year, we are going to double that count.

It's a good tool, and they're coming up with a lot of new features and a lot of improvements on the scalability side. Version 20 might have come up with more features and more performance-related things.

Control-M is running multiple applications for us, including SFTP, MFT, Arkin, Informatica, and Java. There are also a lot of BA jobs and a few OS jobs. We have also integrated some of our reports with Control-M and I'm running them on my local machines. We are planning on expanding Control-M to other applications in the future. That's one of our next steps, to go to applications at the organization level. We are working on it.

We are not heavily dependent on Control-M as of now, but we are slowly migrating to it. Our users of Control-M are developers and application owners, which puts our number of users in the double digits. There are some business users as well. But it's more the application side and the team leads who are using it. Previously, I worked with a very big financial company where we had thousands of jobs. Everyone was using it there.

Jesse, my account manager, is very prompt and he answers all my questions in a timely manner.

We have hardly reached out to the support team. Whenever we would reach out to them when we were running on the older version, they would always say, “Hey, you have to upgrade in order to troubleshoot.” In my experience, the support has not been excellent but it has met expectations. Since upgrading our version, we haven't reached out to the support team.

With earlier versions, the support was not accurate or delivered in a timely manner. What would happen is that I would be in production mode and I would have an issue and would want to get someone on a call to see what was happening. But they would always say, “Hey, provide the log first and then we'll review and we'll get back to you." I feel that when a customer asks about a production issue, they should jump onto the call to see what is going on, and then collect the logs. At least that would give me hope that the support is there and that they are on top of it. I did not get that kind of support from Control-M.

It could be this was just my experience from a very limited number of tickets. Once or twice we had a production issue and I was expecting that someone would join the call immediately. I know they need a log to see what is going on, but before that they could jump on and see if they can fix it. Sometimes an expert will know what the problem is before seeing the log.

I do work with support from other vendors' applications as well, and I get a different response from those vendors, so this is something BMC might have to improve.

We moved from native schedulers to Control-M.

We have in-house people who are expert enough to implement Control-M, but due to other engagements, they were not able to do so.

The initial setup was straightforward. The vendor implemented it for us. We reached out to our account manager from BMC, and BMC sent a certified vendor, Cetan Corp., to our environment and they implemented it for us. Overall, it was a simple installation, a simple environment. Our initial deployment took about three months, end-to-end.

We recently upgraded and we also used a partner for that, VPMA Global Services. The process took about six months but that was not six months of work every day. The actual working time on it was about one month. The other five months were due to securing hardware, testing things, et cetera.

When we went with VPMA for the upgrade, we gave them our requirements, how we wanted our implementation to be. They came up with an architecture diagram and we had an internal discussion about it. The VPMA team came up with their recommendations, multiple approaches, and we choose the best of them.

Both partners were recommended by our account manager at BMC.

I also definitely check the integrated guides and how-to videos. They are very helpful. Products like this might be using different approaches, but they have the same types of features, so we had an idea of how to implement this. We know there are best practices so we went ahead and searched the integrated guides and YouTube support. We got a lot out of them. They're very helpful for our new people. They can search and go through the how-to videos.

We don't require many people for day-to-day administration of Control-M. We spend around one to two hours on Control-M most days. The monitoring team is always monitoring all the jobs on the screen. But the application owners, who are the admins, hardly spend two to three hours on it per day, unless there is an alert.

Whatever we have spent has definitely been worth it. At every renewal we evaluate it internally. As a Control-M SME, I have to provide some stats in terms of man-hours, the amount that we spent on it, the stability, and SLAs. Based on these, we have always had a good impression. We have to justify it that it's worth the cost, and it is.

Initially, our licensing model was based on the number of jobs per day. That caused some issues because we were restricted to a number. So at our renewal time we said, “We want to convert from number of jobs to number of endpoints.” That cost us extra money but it gave us additional capabilities, without worrying about the number of jobs.

At first we had the standard edition and later on needed some additional features and we paid extra for those.

Control-M helps us to proactively monitor things and see what is coming up and what is happening. Based on that, we can take steps for resolution. But I don't think Control-M itself has the ability to proactively fix issues.

Overall, it's a good automation tool. And it gives us a single view of the customer. I would advise going with something like it. I'm not going to advise about any particular solution. All these tools are very powerful and give you a single view.

I've never worked in a company where we weren't using it, so it's hard to say how it improves our organization. Our Oracle Database backup teams used to do this all themselves via cron. They've automated what was done by cron with Control-M. Other than that, everybody's using it.

It saves us time. Instead of 800 applications internally doing their own thing, we centralize it into one location where there are notifications. Taking the power of economies of scale into one point of focus, it saves us money for sure. We turned a company of mom-and-pop little fiefdoms all over the place into a company where things are centralized in one location.

Monitoring is a valuable aspect of it. The monitoring tool is very good. It's very easy for expert and entry-level users to use on short notice. Also, the usability is good.

The reporting tool needs a major-league upgrade.

I also would like not to have to reach out to a third-party application company to do automated notifications. Right now, we still have people manually calling people and emailing people. There's a company called xMatters - and there are others - that has an API through Control-M that can automate any aspect of failure management. I'd like to see it build right into the product. I'd like to see a better notification product.

In some parts of Control-M the stability is good, in some parts it's not so good.

We're going to see the scalability soon when we upgrade. 

Most of the time we don't get the answers we're looking for. That's why we use a consultant company.

It works on task-based licensing.

Procurement may have looked at other products. But from our perspective, they probably would have scared the living heck out of us if they had told us they were looking at other things.

You have to talk about it more in terms of how Control-M fits into the scale of other products which BMC offers for what you're doing. It's got Helix, cloud management, ITSM, etc. BMC offers the whole scale - everything. We don't choose to use it all. But from another prospective, it's a real positive that they have this scope, that they can handle everything a corporation could throw at it.

I would like to see us use more things such as Helix. From that perspective, I would recommend it because of all the product offerings and because a lot of the approved vendors, which work directly through BMC, really make the experience a lot better.

We learn things every day about the product and the availabilities. We work in an IT environment with inquisitive people. There are millions of options available, parameter-wise, within the system and I learn something new every day, by working around smart people and intuitive people.

In terms of how the solution affects business modernization initiatives, this is all somewhat new for us. We're starting to go into a little bit of the DevOps and the Workload Change Manager, and the cloud chat-box. We're just starting to get into things like that with BMC Control-M.

I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. We've had massive growth in the last year to two years because of company acquisitions. We've added a lot of big-data processing and a lot of other processing and it's handled it quite well. We really haven't had any serious outages in quite a long time, even through the large growth we've had. We've doubled the work and it's handled it seamlessly. It's just that the reporting aspects are poor, because management always wants to know things. It's hard to get at tangible numbers without doing a lot of additional work outside of the system.

Control-M has a huge number of features, including:

• Cross-platform support
• Integration with applications such as Oracle, SAP, FTP, Hadoop, JMS, and many others.
• A GUI with various filter options that allows you to manage jobs from one screen.
• Add-ons such as BIM, Reporting Facility, and Forecast.
• Automated error handling allows you to define actions to be taken depending on the exit status of a job.
• Web-based and mobile applications allow you to manage Control-M from anywhere.

Before implementing Control-M, SAP or FTP related jobs were triggered using scripts. With Control-M, these jobs can be triggered using modules already integrated into Control-M, reducing team effort.

Also, Forecast and BIM give us a clear picture of batch job deadlines and alerts us of schedule overruns.

The cost of Control-M is a major factor. It is difficult for small-scale organizations to use Control-M as a solution.

I have been using Control-M for 10+ years and have no issues to date.

We have not encountered any stability issues. Control-M provides a highly stable environment. Fix packs are released regularly and immediately upon discovering bugs.

We did not encounter any scalability issues. Control-M can handle multiple servers, multiple cross-platform agents, and a large number of jobs easily.

BMC technical support is great. I rate it 10 out of 10. We have received immediate help with issues.

Previously, job scheduling was done internally using a SAP scheduler, Windows Task Scheduler, and cron. However, they all had limitations and we needed a single interface to handle different types of scheduling.

Initial setup and installation of Control-M does have challenges, but BMC has good technical support. Related documentation is also available online. Once you are familiar with these, setup becomes straightforward.

Pricing is somewhat on high side. But it’s recommended for bigger organizations.

We evaluated AutoSys and IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler, but they didn’t offer anything close to the functionality that Control-M offers.

If you need a one-stop solution for all your automation needs, Control-M is your answer.