Control-M Reviews

I am working with a beauty products company and we are dealing with supply chain issues. Most of the jobs in Control-M are through SAP.

Right now we have it deployed on-prem, but we are planning to move to the cloud very soon. We are using Control-M Workload Archiving, Control-M Enterprise Manager, Control-M servers, agents, APIs, REST APIs, and Control-M Forecast. We use all the services Control-M provides except Control-M Workload Change Manager.

Since moving to Control-M we have seen a lot of reductions in the manpower needed. For notification, ticketing, and integration, we have different teams. We have Azure teams and some Windows teams. Previously, they were using and managing their own scripts and manually running them. After the migration to Control-M, there were no limitations. Where there are different protocols we can use the APIs and integrate things with Control-M. There are no worries about integrations with Control-M. In UC4 there were lots of limitations because we needed the same protocols to integrate things. With Control-M, there are no such limitations.

In our current environment, there are three sets of applications. The first, an online application, is dependent on some 45 files that have to be generated on Saturday. Our middleware job is supposed to run once all the 45 files have been generated by SAP jobs. There are sequences running through Control-M: First are the SAP jobs that generate the files in a certain location. Once those files are there, the sequence initiates the middleware that moves the files to the proper IT server. All these process flow dependencies go through Control-M very easily.

We have also automated daily audit reports through the solution's reporting facility. Through scripting, we get an alert when anything happens in the Control-M environment. An issue might occur with the agent, the process, or the Control-M server. We have everything reported via email. We can easily see what happened on a given day and sort out any issues.

As a result of using Control-M we have also seen an improvement in Service Level Operations performance. We have some monitoring tools in Control-M and our service SLAs have definitely improved. We have a ticketing system integrated with it and we can easily monitor the SLAs for tickets generated through Control-M. If the person responsible for a ticket will not handle it in the right amount of time, the ticket will pop up with a message saying it's in danger of breaching the SLA. Our service levels are much higher with Control-M, when compared to other tools.

Control-M Workload Archiving is a very good feature for us. It helps with our customer requirements in terms of reporting and auditing. We have internal audits every quarter, and every six months we have external audits. During these audits, the auditors get historical data through Control-M. Previously, when we didn't have any archive server, we managed the data in Control-M with man-made scripts, and we would pull the data for the last 365 days, or three or four months back. Since we installed the archiving, we have been able to pull the data, anytime and anywhere, with just one click.

Control-M gives us a unified view where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all our application workflows and data pipelines. We are mostly using SAP and other business warehouse jobs, and we can easily see the systems through Control-M. It gives us a very good view of geographical data. If I go through the Web Services to show things to my customers, they are very satisfied with the Control-M views. They can check historical data and they can see the current view. They can easily pull these up. We are satisfied with the fact that, with one click, we can see all the applications within one view.

Our line-of-business personnel use Control-M’s web interface to support their business initiatives. One of our big applications is our JG application, where a user needs a data pipeline and Power BI jobs with refreshed data. Instead of the user having to send a request to our Control-M team, they can use the Web Services directly to check their data. If they're using an iPad or a desktop, they can easily check on it themselves. They're not dependent on the Control-M team directly. We educate users on how to check things and how to pull the reports. It is very easy to use. Also, we don't have 24/7 support within our company. Suppose a user needs something at midnight. They don't have to wait for the Control-M admin team to give them the report. They can directly pull the details.

With the current version update, I'm not sure why we needed a separate database upgrade. Why not put it all in one package? Previously, you could do it either via a manual upgrade or an in-place upgrade but it wasn't separate. But for the current version, we needed to upgrade the database separately. It meant doubling our tasks to do the upgrade. That is something that needs to be improved.

I've been using Control-M for the last 17 years. My specialization is in Control-M and I'm very happy and very comfortable with it.

I would rate its stability highly, compared to other tools in the market right now, such as UC4, and AutoSys. In the past, I have worked with many banks. All these financial companies are using Control-M, and there is a reason: It's due to the stability.

I would give the scalability a nine out of 10.

In our environment right now, out of 20,000 jobs in Control-M, 15,000 are SAP. We are planning to expand our usage of Control-M to Power BI, Business Warehouse, PeopleSoft, and Azure. Those are in our pipeline right now.

We have about 25,000 users of Control-M on different projects, in the U.S., Japan, India, and Asia Pacific. Some are monitoring programs through Control-M, some are only doing scheduling. Some are responsible for designing, others for the implementation before the licensing. And once this transition team is done, the operations team comes into the picture for monitoring. We have a separate team for integration, as well.

The number of people we require for day-to-day administration of Control-M depends on the job size and the user requirements. We work in an offshore and onsite model. We have a key administrator over the 20,000 jobs, seven schedulers, and nine people on the monitoring team, and that work is done 24/7. The schedulers and admin work 24/5.

In a case where we fail to understand an issue by collecting data on our own through our audit reports, we open a case with BMC. BMC always gives us a fast resolution. Their support is very good.

The setup of the current version of Control-M, overall, is very easy. The upgrade is in-place. With one click the agent upgrades, the server upgrades. The only point, as I mentioned, with upgrading, is that we needed a separate database update. When we upgrade our Control-M server, the database server should be upgraded at the same time.

The initial implementation in my current environment was in 2006. When we took over we just upgraded it. After that, we implemented two more Control-M Servers in this environment, as a PoC.

The amount of time required to implement it depends on the environment we are working with. In this environment, we have two production servers, four QA servers, and two testing servers. We have eight Control-M servers, three Control-M Enterprise Manager servers, and more than 400 agents. It depends on the change process. In our change process, we first need to upgrade our QA and test environments. Once that is done, we can go for the production environment the next day. After that, over the next seven days, we update our Control-M agents. Some of the upgrades require downtime. In four to five hours, we could easily update everything, but it's dependent on the downtime and the customer requirements.

When we upgraded to version 20, first we implemented it in our QA environment and we tested the new version in our test environment for three to four months. Once we see there are no bugs, we implement it in our production environment. We've seen a lot of bugs and BMC has had to produce some patches that we have had to apply in our environment. That is why we approach it the way we do in a QA environment, and wait for three months, and then go to production.

When we moved to Control-M, we used the Control-M Conversion Tool. It's a very important tool. It gives us an idea of where we stand. If I'm going to move an old environment to a new environment, it helps us with any errors so that we can rectify them.

Back in 2016, when I was working with version 7, I opened a case with BMC and they helped me to upgrade everything. It was a very good experience. They dedicated a resource to us. We gave them our implementation plan, they reviewed it, and they suggested how to remediate some missing steps. We followed their approach and, at the time of cut-over, they assigned a dedicated resource. If there was an issue, we could open a ticket and they would come online and sort it out. The BMC Assisted MIGration Offering (AMIGO) is a very good program.

You must accept that BMC licensing can be very confusing. No one can easily understand how they calculate things, whether it is user-based, job-based, or server-based. The calculation is quite tough. How BMC calculates licensing is not easily available anywhere. It's a very tough part for the client at times.

But BMC is a market leader, so users don't easily go for different vendors. If there's an option to go with Control-M, they will always choose BMC. But for people who find the licensing challenging, they will go with a different vendor.

For us, the licensing part is managed by a team in the U.S. But what I deal with is that we have to manage our Control-M jobs to a maximum of 30,000, because we have 30,000 licenses. We have 20,000 with fraud detection and 10,000 in non-fraud. There is a BMC utility that can guide you and alert you if the forecast is for an increase beyond the licensing. It will notify us: "Hey, you have a license for 20,000 and the Control-M forecast shows you might need to increase that number in the coming days." So we do some cleanup, some internal housekeeping to remove things and remain under the threshold. Those are some of the things we do as administrators. We try to manage under whatever licensing we have. Through the BMC reporting tool, we can see our peak number of users in a month. BMC charges if you go over a certain peak.

Control-M is very robust. There is no harm to the customer if you choose Control-M every time. But when it comes to licensing, it's very expensive, and sometimes users think twice.

Previously we were using UC4 for more than 20,000 jobs. But our customers were not very comfortable with the user interface in UC4. Certain things were not appropriate in that tool. Since our decision to migrate to Control-M, our customers have been very satisfied.

Integration is very easy. When I'm thinking about integrating Control-M with anything I'm not worried about it. I know Control-M will definitely have a way to integrate easily. I have used UC4, AutoSys, and Dollar Universe. But when the requirements include integration, I always think of Control-M, because I know the integration will be very easy. I will never go for any of those other tools.

Control-M is very critical for anyone who is using it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We use 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.

We use Control-M for managed file transfer in the enterprise manager automating database workflows. We're using Oracle Business Intelligence with a generic database like Microsoft SQL Server. Next year, we plan to use Control-M for AWS Natural and upgrade Control-M to Helix Control-M. We need managed file transfers between our servers in Key West and Orlando. Vast amounts of data are routinely transferred between servers for backup and snapshots. 

We will deploy it on AWS and Azure next year. We will also integrate Control-M with other solutions like Salesforce and COS, which is challenging because COS is a complicated legacy IBM OS. Some of our customers require Control-M to do managed file transfer and also COS conversions between IBM jobs. Anything that involves COS or OS/400 is complicated but doable.

With Managed File Transfer, we gain speed and reliability because a managed transfer continuously checks the CRC of the data packages. That's a God send for those data transfers. Though we are migrating to the cloud, we still use some physical servers for sensitive data from our customers protected with NDAs.

We use Control-M for the maintenance of our Oracle and SQL Server databases. It automates maintenance in packages, including standard procedures on the databases themselves, snapshots, checking integrity, verifying the RDBMS of the databases, etc. It ensures that they aren't clogged, that they run smoothly, and that there aren't any jobs stuck, eating up the performance of the server or any of the CPU cores.

In the past, we had some troubles, and we needed a database admin to keep an eye on it almost 24/7 using the OES. It's essential to ensure everything inside the OES runs smoothly, and there are no stuck jobs or queries eating up table spaces. An admin is still required, but most jobs are now automated. It has had a significant impact on staffing. In the past, we had a couple of DBAs exclusively assigned to Oracle that we were able to reassign to other jobs. 

We reassigned them to other tests and outsourced one to work with our customers. Once we delegated DBA tasks to Control-M for our Oracle databases, we could reassign that DBA as a resource to our client in Puerto Rico. He became a source of income for the company. Also, with time saved by automating all the critical internal business processes, we could dedicate more time and resources to other projects that require human attention. We could devote more resources to projects that advance the company's strategic vision instead of monitoring an Oracle RDBMS 24/7.

If I had to rate how critical Control-M is to our business, I would say it is an eight out of ten. I won't give it a nine because we still rely on older applications, such as Oracle databases, but an orchestrator will always get at least an eight on our book. For speed of process execution, I would say it is a nine out of ten. Previously, it was a four, and now it's a nine.

Control-M is intuitive, and BMC has tutorials for every application to help you with the basics. Once you know what you're doing, everything falls into place. The graphical interface is drag and drop. There are plenty of objects to drag and drop inside. You need to study them, but once you know how it works, it's just dragging and dropping like you are playing with a Lego set. 

You drag two actions to the workspace and connect them to establish a relationship, schedules, and subtasks inside each one of them. It seems complex initially, but it becomes intuitive the longer you use it.

You can almost reach out intuitively into every nook and cranny of the entire UI. It's user-friendly for the initiate, but you could be lost if you've never used an orchestrator or an enterprise-grade software like Control-M. However, Control-M has built-in tutorials that help you with the first steps. The tutorial isn't comprehensive, but at least you will learn the first steps, so you can advance and learn more.

The performance could be better. Control-M Enterprise Manager tends to slow the system down even on a server with a six-core processor and 32 gigabytes of RAM. The console is Java-based, so maybe OpenJDK 16 or 17 would be a performance improvement.

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

The scalability is quite good. The framework lets you start with Control-M Enterprise Manager and add other products as you see fit. We added MFT, then Control-M for databases, and Oracle Business Intelligence. One of our customers added Control-M, including the agent for IBMI and another for Azure.

I rate BMC support a solid nine out of ten. I say nine because I never give a ten to anyone. 

Positive

Before Control-M, we had a traditional solution using an FTP server. Even with a T1 line that provided almost gigabyte speed, we still had artifacts during the transfer that corrupted the data. It caused serious problems when transferring 30 gigabytes of a necessary backup overnight that failed on gigabyte 28 because it was corrupted. Still, the mirror server rejected the mage because of corruption when we tried to restore it. 

We had to rely on traditional monitoring tools like SolarWinds and IBM solutions, which are pretty expensive. These tools only monitor, so they're typically not reactive or able to orchestrate the steps of a workflow. They don't follow up on each step inside the workflow, notify you when a step completes, or send alerts when something gets stuck and requires action.

I'm the senior services manager, and overseeing the deployment of Control-M is part of my job. I did not install it, but I supervised the team. It was straightforward because we all got our BMC certification before the deployment. Our team included me and two technicians. We also had a DBA around to integrate the database.

We did everything ourselves with some occasional help from BMC support. We emailed them a couple of times to check something, but so far, everything has gone smoothly. 

We recovered our initial investment in six months and were ready to commit more, so we could recover more. We saw an ROI with Control-M in the first two years because we could take a DBA off monitoring databases and loan them out to another company while saving time by speeding up these processes. 

Control-M gives us a lot of flexibility to automate our time-sensitive and data-critical processes. This is essential for enterprises, but Control-M isn't for everyone. Small and medium-sized businesses can use Control-M, but its power can only be leveraged by large enterprises because of the complexity of their business processes and the sheer size of data they handle. I think enterprise companies are the only ones that see an effective ROI from purchasing a tool like BMC Control-M for automating their business processes.

Small companies that purchase Control-M often cancel the contract after six months because it's too expensive, and they can get the job done using traditional methods. That's okay. It's about the business processes' complexity, depth, and maturity. 

The price is right because of the licensing schema, which is based on nodes and processes. You purchase what you use, no more and no less, and you can grow with time. 

There are few options like Control-M in the market, and the closest competitors are far more expensive.

I rate Control-M a nine out of ten. Control-M is flexible. You can use it in Azure, and they have a generic option for the cloud. You can deploy it in your own private cloud or on other cloud solutions like Kubernetes. You can use Control-M for big data applications like IBM InfoSphere. There's a Control-M solution for almost any situation.

There is so much to learn on the backend of the business processes. Typically when you see a business process, you only see a workflow, like a flow chart, arrows, boxes, etc. However, there's a whole new world under the hood. It's crucial to dig deeper and learn how to improve the processes. It's like you become the mechanic of your own car. The more you understand the engine, the more you can tweak it to get more speed, gas mileage, performance, strength, horsepower, etc. Control-M almost compels you to learn about that.

It's user-friendly, but you need some training. We have a certification from BMC. You need some prior training specifically in Control-M Enterprise Manager to know what you're doing because it's delicate. There are so many ways to customize job creation, automation, monitoring, etc. that you need at least a crash course on creating a job, monitoring, setting up alarms, and building workflows. 

It should take you no more than a week to get the hang of it, and there's BMC University, where you can get free training to use Control-M. Once you know the basics, Control-M practically handles itself. It's intuitive once you figure it out. 

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.

I manage the team responsible for the tool itself, the administration of the system. We have a separate team internally that does all the operations and scheduling facets of the tool.

Our primary use case includes supply chain, payroll, accounting, information technology, pricing validations, etc. Most of the areas of the business have some facet into Control-M.

We have automated critical processes with Control-M. It is critical in a lot of different processes. We use it for all of our server patchings every month, we schedule that so that it kicks off the job every month, then goes and updates all of our Linux servers, for example, or our Windows servers. It does deployments and things that are critical to IT business.

Automating this critical process has taken the human aspect out of that process. So, that user no longer has to be up in the middle of the night to do server patching. That's all hands-free, completely zero downtime, knowing back to the customers. It's been beneficial in that regard.

Control-M helped improve data transfers. Specifically things like processing sales information. So we have all the data from our various retail locations, our individual stores that get processed every day automatically using Control-M. And we have our daily pricing information that we send to the stores to update all the pricing for all the different locations. Those would be some of the bigger areas of business automation.

It has helped to improve data transfers. Specifically things like processing sales information. So, we have all the data from our various retail locations, our individual stores that get processed every day automatically using Control-M. And we have our daily pricing information that we send to the stores to update all the pricing for all the different locations.

The most valuable features are the scheduling aspects of the tool and to have everything scheduled and automated to be able to run on a set timeframe.

It's important to our work because we can set it and forget it. We don't have to worry about logging in and pulling that data every day or manipulating the data. It can be run on a schedule and then the proper timing after dependencies are run.

Control-M provides us with a unified view where we can easily define, orchestrate, and monitor all of our application workflows and data pipelines. It's not super important in my particular line, but it is important for the operations and scheduling team that use the tool.

We use mobile interfaces. They allow the development teams to be able to go in and set up the jobs that they need to schedule them accordingly. There's still quite a bit of a gap between the two tools. So, a lot of our users still prefer to use the desktop client.

We use Control-M to integrate our file transfers within our application workflows. But we do not use the BMC MFT program. We use a different third-party file transfer tool.

The ability to integrate file transfers has been instrumental in allowing us to accomplish the things we need with Control-M. In our industry, we take a lot of data and either push it down to the stores or retail grocery stores. We take files and push them down to the stores or pull files and information from the stores and bring it back to corporate. So, it's two-way communication with file transfers. One of the bigger things that we do with Control-M is scheduling data moves and moving data from one location to another.

We also use Control-M to streamline our data and analytics projects. It's not doing any automation now. That would be done with the tools that it feeds, like Cognos or other reporting tools. It just collects data for us.

The integrated guides and how-to videos in the solution's web interface are okay for some of the basic user questions that we get for how to use the tool and do some of the basics, but from an admin standpoint, which is what I'm responsible for with my team, they're not very helpful. We still go back to BMC Docs, open tickets when we need to, and things of that nature to get the information.

The MFT applications should have more functionality and flexibility within that tool. Having more flexibility with that tool for handling the one to many or many to one concept. Like being able to take data from one source and push it to many locations or pull data from many locations and bring it back into a single source. That's why we still use our TPS program for the file transfers just because we don't have some of those capabilities available to us within MFT.

It is still a little difficult to get support on Control-M. It seems to be its own very specific BMC product unlike Remedy and some of the other BMC tools we have. It's quite a bit more difficult to get support for Control-M.

I would rate their support a five out of ten. They're just average to adequate. 

You don't have the option to have a dedicated support resource and engineer. Someone that works with you individually to understand your environment, to help you grow and adapt to new things, and to roadmap your maturity within the tool as you do with some of the other BMC tools.

We use Premier Support for other BMC tools, just not this one.

I have been using Control-M for two and a half years. The company started using the product in 2014.

It's very stable. We have no complaints in this area. The application is very well built and it is reliable. We were also very focused on the idea of availability when we built our environment.  We are setup with both high availability and a fail-over environments. If we were to have problems with a particular server, we have the secondary to fail over to.  Or, worst case, another environment to use in our secondary datacenter.

Scalability is excellent. It's easy enough to spin up another server and add it to the server group.

Pretty much every application that we have in this company has some kind of Control-M piece to it. That's everything from accounting and payroll for our stores and customer interfaces. We're pushing and pulling data and doing different job-related things for almost all applications.

We'll continually use Control-M. Our IT business has 3,400 people. Control-M is mostly used by some of our development teams, traditional application development groups that develop our in-house applications. We have our system administrators, our infrastructure teams, IT security, operations, and those types of groups.

We require only one staff member for day-to-day administration. She was responsible for all the day-to-day administration of the tool like adding users, provisioning users, making sure hotfixes are applied to system upgrades.  

We recently did overall system health initiatives. It was also a point of contact for our operations scheduling group. If they have questions on the tool if there are any issues, or things of that nature.

Technical support through BMC Support can be challenging at times.  If any issues need to be escalated to R&D then you have to work with directly with the team in Israel.  This can cause problems coordinating between time zones.  

We previously used ESP. There were a few reasons the company decided to move from ESP to BMC Control-M.   

1. The need for a product that was distributed based vs. mainframe based.  The company was working to retire the mainframe so there wasn't as much of a need for a product that was heavily mainframe focused. 

2. We were told that BMC Remedy and BMC Control-M were integrated so job failure ticket automation would be simple.

3. There was a desire to have the same vendor for our automation, orchestration, monitoring, CMDB, and ITSM tools.  BMC was able to meet this requirement.

For the initial conversion, we used BMC. Through the last couple of upgrades, we used other BMC preferred partners.

We have used both CFS and Cetan Corporation to assist us with upgrading the application.  Both companies were knowledgeable and we were able to perform the upgrades without problems.

Recently, we have been able to upgrade the environments without assistance from a third party.

The licensing and pricing are bundled together with our other BMC products. I don't know the specific cost of Control-M by itself. For us, it is based on how many jobs we run annually.  We run roughly 9,000 jobs a year.

If I had to guess, I would say it's in the neighborhood of about $250,000.

Since it is based on a per-job run, if we increase the number of jobs that we run annually, the cost will increase accordingly.

There are also additional operational costs, hardware for servers, databases, BMC maintenance, etc.

Yes, other vendors were evaluated at that time.  Control-M was selected primarily because of the integration between it and other BMC tools.

Make sure that you spend enough time to design and build your environment, both high availability and failover are critical to overall success.  Because we rely on Control-M so heavily, it needs to always be available. Control-M is critical to the success of our business, we cannot accept downtime. We do everything we can to keep the system running 24/7, 365. For example, we have invested additional time and resources to fully automate our monthly server patching. Now we can patch our environment with zero impact to jobs. 

Another piece of advice, use BMC as a partner for professional services, especially when doing your initial implementation.  It is a big endeavor and BMC can help you be successful.  Lastly, spend time training your staff on how to use and administer the product.  Control-M is a powerful but complex application.  It requires skilled and knowledgeable operators and admins to keep the system working well.

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.

The business services that Control-M supports for our organization include everything from finances, marketing, data analysis, big data, data lakes—pretty much everything.

We have it on-prem and we also use it in the cloud. We still have most of our components in the data center right now.

When it comes to data analytics, Control-M helps make sure that as we're ingesting data and running it, that the workflows are kicking off in the correct order, and that we're actually getting the data. It's also making sure we return data to the appropriate business units or partners. It definitely streamlines our data analytics. It has sped things up because we don't have to wait on humans anymore to kick things off.

Our line-of-business personnel use Control-M's web interfaces and it gives them a view, a red-light/green-light dashboard. They can see if things are behind or ahead. It helps them keep track of the stuff that's important to them without having to call other people or put in tickets.

In addition, the use of Control-M as part of our DevOps automation toolchains and leveraging of its “as-code” interfaces for developers has considerably sped up our ability to roll out new applications and application updates. It's also allowed our developers, even when they have one-off projects, to easily use the automation API and Jobs-as-Code to kick those off without having to write that kind of function by hand or find another tool. It has been a big part of our DevOps process.

We have also automated critical processes with Control-M. The top-three are 

1. a number of financial processes
2. data ingestion
3. and what we call partner management. 

Those automations mean we get things done consistently and on time. It also lets us know if we're not going to meet our deadlines and enables us to be proactive instead of reactive.

By using Control-M 20’s Role-Based Administration feature, we have been able to decentralize teams to manage their own application workflow orchestration environments. That's important because it frees up resources. People can get things done more quickly without having to stop what they're doing. And it allows them to focus, instead of constantly being pulled in a thousand directions or having to call in different people for help. It helps eliminate tickets or requests to a Control-M administrator, and that frees up our operations personnel to focus on what's more important for the business. Instead of watching for and answering tickets, they're actually able to be proactive and look for potential bottlenecks or to help people enhance their processes.

Another benefit comes from using Control-M 20's Centralized Connection Profiles. Being able to store all connection profiles in a central database helps with efficiencies, with DevOps initiatives, and it helps with ownership.

The extended capabilities of version 20, especially the web interface, help because we don't have to deploy clients or maintain the clients. It lets pretty much anybody who wants to use it just fire up a web browser and use it. That's the biggest capability of version 20, for us.

Overall, Control-M lets us spot problems more quickly. And in terms of Service Level Operations performance, it helps because we now can be proactive instead of reactive. If we know that we're not going to meet an SLA, we can meet ahead of time instead of having to wait and see.

Among the most valuable features are

• the measuring and monitoring of the SLAs, the service level agreements—they code in recovery actions for when things go wrong
• the single pane of glass enables us to see everything, all the processes, in one place
• the ability to integrate with all sorts of different platforms and services.

It provides a unified view where you can orchestrate and monitor all your application workloads and data pipelines. That's very important because with cloud, software as a service, edge computing, traditional data center, and legacy apps, there are all these environments. If you don't have that single pane of glass or that one place to look at, you're going to invest a lot of time and resources into tracking things down when they go wrong. You really need that single pane of glass to show you what's going on across all your disparate systems, in one location.

We also have Control-M for internal and external file transfers. It's really just a part of our normal, everyday procedures. It makes sure that they happen. It makes sure that we got the files. It makes sure that data has flowed back to the appropriate departments.

They really need to work on improving the web interface, as there are still a lot of bugs. 

Also, the new Helix Control-M version doesn't seem quite ready for prime time for many of us. 

In general, they need to do a lot of work on shoring up their testing and quality assurance. A lot of bugs seem to make it into the product.

I've been using Control-M for about 21 years.

It's a highly stable product. It has to be—it runs your business. It's very mature in that arena.

It's highly scalable, so as your enterprise grows it's very easy to continue adding in agents or to expand out your management platform, with little or no downtime.

We use Control-M for financial applications across the spectrum, including marketing, data analytics, data analysis, and partner management. We continue to grow and as new things come online we're adding them in.

They do a really good job in terms of how they expand the product and keep up with the times. It's very cloud-centric, but at the same time, it can also handle legacy-type stuff. Overall, they've done a very good job on that.

What we had previously were all home-grown solutions. We switched to Control-M to get a grip on our environment, to have the single pane of glass to enable us to monitor and manage everything from one location. And the big thing that Control-M allows us to do now that we could not do previously is to orchestrate workflows across all types of disparate systems.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy to get going, easy to install, easy to create workflows consistently. There wasn't a huge learning curve. We learned as we went, but it was pretty easy to learn the product.

Our deployment took about a month.

The integrated guides and how-to videos in the solution’s web interface, for helping get to full productivity with the solution, are very helpful. People watch them. They need to be a little more in-depth and they need more of them, but what they have is a good start.

We have about 120 people in our company who are actively using Control-M. They range from developers to operations personnel, financial analysts, marketing analysts, and data scientists. We have a team of three for day-to-day administration of Control-M but they do more than just Control-M.

We worked with a partner to deploy Control-M. Our experience with them was very good.

We have definitely seen return on our investment in Control-M, many times over.

It's an expensive product, there's no doubt about it. It's one of those solutions where you're paying upfront to reap the benefits down the road. You're going to spend a lot of money upfront, but the benefits you're going to get out of it are going to quickly pay for it. That's something people don't understand sometimes.

We looked at a few others including IBM's Tivoli and Computer Associates.

The biggest difference is that Control-M is a more mature and growing product. The other ones were very stale. They just didn't seem to be keeping up with the times. Also, Control-M requires a lot less administration than the other products did, and Control-M was a lot easier to learn than the others. The others had a very high learning curve.

Look at Control-M from a high level, not only down to the details. See how it can benefit your company. Most companies have data centers, they use cloud, they use software as a service—they use a mixture. But even if you're 100 percent cloud, Control-M can still benefit you because it is going to give you that vision that you've never had before of what is going on in the company. And it's going to present it to you in a way that business owners and business management can understand. It's also going to allow you to do some amazing things with automation around the automation API and Jobs-as-Code. So instead of having all these siloed systems, it is really going to help you get many things under that one roof.

My biggest advice to anybody looking into this product, or any product like this is, is to do your due diligence and get your training. It's very important to have some sort of education on this going into it. That training could be formal training or it could be help from a Control-M partner for your implementation. You can get the easy stuff out of the product on day one, but to get to the things that are really going to save money and make you say, "Wow," that takes some knowledge.

The biggest thing I have learned from using Control-M is that you never know what you can automate until you try.