Control-M Reviews

My main use case for Control-M is to process batch workloads. We have multiple batch scripts which need to be run at a particular scheduled time, and we use Control-M for MFT and certain kinds of services where we need files to transfer to the client location.

For batch workload automation, we have SSIS packages and Microsoft SQL packages which need to be executed through the batch file. For MFT, we have Excel files which need to be transferred from source to destination.

The best features Control-M offers are better visibility through the dashboard and an AI-enabled system where users can ask their workflow details through chatting with AI.

The dashboard definitely helps to get better visibility because checking failures one by one by visiting the job is difficult. We are getting the exact figures through the dashboard.

Control-M has impacted my organization positively by improving the SLA and the overall workflow. Timely, we are receiving triggers for daily notifications due to the SLA improvement, and such type of information is useful.

In areas where we need a notification alert whenever the agent goes down, that is something that can be improved so people and clients can be aware and can take immediate action to remediate agent-related issues.

They can work on the integration part where Azure storage and Azure-related things can be integrated seamlessly with Control-M.

I have been using Control-M for the last two years.

Control-M is a great platform to centralize all the workflows. I would rate this product a 9.

Control-M is mainly used for our clients. We use workload automation and batch job automation with Control-M. There are many other BMC products that we use, such as AMI Ops automation, DB2 monitoring, and application infrastructure monitoring.

The user experience with Control-M is good. Users can implement many customizations, and though the licensing is pricey, there are many competitive products available that can provide the same features as BMC. BMC support and some of the customizations are very good. Product support and the ability to manage distributed and mainframe workloads make Control-M an enterprise workload management solution. It is easy to integrate Control-M with technologies for data ops or DevOps processes as things change, and it is not complex compared to other workload automation tools available in the market.

BMC does excellent marketing. Their product narrative is very good. From the functional side, there is no superiority when compared with other products. All products provide the same functionality. If you examine IBM Workload Scheduler, Stonebranch, or Rocket Orchestrator, there are many other products available. These products provide the same functions in one way or another. BMC might provide better user experience and better product support than other products, but there is no clear technical differentiation or value proposition when compared to other products with BMC. They offer essentially the same features.

Control-M has been part of my experience for two to three years.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate BMC's support an eight. They have very good manuals, and they respond to tickets quickly. They provide clear details about issues. From the product support perspective, they always perform well. They continuously evolve rather than letting the product remain static. This is one of the differentiators compared to other products. They quickly evolve with changing technology trends, easily adopt new features, and incorporate them into the product.

Control-M is good so far, other than being somewhat pricey.

The implementation requires significant time and personnel resources, and they are pricey. The migration costs are very high, and the available skills are limited.

I am familiar with other workload automation tools and have used many. Our clients use IBM Workload Scheduler, Rocket Enterprise Orchestrator, CA ESP, and Stonebranch, though I cannot specify why we use BMC instead of those alternatives.

It is difficult to clearly differentiate how Control-M has improved our organization's functions because many other products offer the same functionality. The key factors are how users can easily adapt to the product, the available functions and features in the BMC product, and mainly the product support.

I'm not sure about Control-M because it is only for another team member to use. What I can tell you is it is very helpful to use Control-M in the mainframe platform because we can run and schedule many routines at the same time and we can create some scenarios. By these scenarios, we can run a lot of routines. We can build some scenarios and maintain this in the real world in production environment.

Regarding Control-M, what I can mention is I only know about the platform used nowadays for our team, and I believe it is a very archaic model. Probably there is another interface, better solutions and maybe with an interface easier to use on a daily basis. But what we have nowadays is something not so familiar for people that don't have a complete understanding about how to use.

Regarding Control-M, I'm not the one to use it directly, but I know it is a very powerful tool and very dynamic and helps us a lot on a daily basis. I believe the tools to schedule a routine in Control-M are very helpful. On a daily basis, we can use a lot without some problems. It's very easy to use.

It is necessary to take some time to learn Control-M. More or less a month to be familiar with the first steps. As you continue, you will increase your understanding about the feature and probably need more or less six months.

People in the first initial step need more or less one month to be familiar with some commands and start using Control-M tools. To feel comfortable using it on a daily basis without support, it takes more or less six months. This is the appropriate time to be able to use Control-M.

I have used another tool related to Control-M, but it is not so similar. It is something more related about running only individual routines one, two, or three routines at the same time. It is Topaz. It is a tool directly connected to the mainframe as well, but it is more destined to developers to build routines and programs and run these sources. It is not the same, but it is what I use on a daily basis when I need to run routines.

I have never experienced any issues such as lagging or crashing with Control-M.

The scalability of Control-M is adequate. We need to follow some steps to add some routines, but that's acceptable. What I know about this feature is it is reasonable to use when you need to add some new steps, schedule some new routines, or add some files. It is pretty nice and not a big deal to use.

I didn't need to contact the technical support or customer support for Control-M.

Positive

I would rate Control-M overall an eight out of ten. I believe you can put my company name as entity data. I'm a software engineer.

We are a cloud service provider, and we have been using Control-M for integrating and automating the orchestrating applications in the data workflow in our production. This is the main use case for our flow.

We are using its cloud version, Helix Control-M.

Helix Control-M has helped us schedule the jobs and manage our workload. We save time in running the jobs. There is no impact on the software even if I schedule a hundred jobs at a time. It can accommodate all kinds of jobs. It helps to meet our large-scale requirements.

Helix Control-M’s ability to build, schedule, manage, and monitor application and data workflows in production is good. It is pretty straightforward. It integrates well with different applications, such as AWS, GCP, and various cloud providers, enabling job scheduling directly from the Helix Control-M interface without any agents. Integration is very easy.

We have a single pane of glass for scheduling and viewing job status. We get all the details in one window. We can schedule everything in one window. We did not have any downtime with the Helix Control-M. All the jobs have been running perfectly. Everything is smooth and straightforward.

We are mainly using the AWS Cloud, and we also have some GCP services. We can monitor all the details under the History tab. We can see all the past jobs. 

Helix Control-M gives our company’s business users visibility and control over their jobs and frees up IT personnel for other tasks.

Helix Control-M is very critical for our business. We rely on it. We do not want any other scheduler. It provides us with everything.

Helix Control-M has contributed to the overall stability of our applications and improved user experience. It has taken away some of the administration work.

The flexibility of Helix Control-M allows us to manage tasks efficiently. The user interface is comprehensive and lets me view all my jobs on one page, monitor everything, and access the job history. The UI is superb and flexible to use.

Scheduling multiple jobs at a time is a standout feature. 

There should be an expansion in storing more data as it currently provides data storage for only up to 60 days. 

There can be some complexities with the UI part, especially with the advanced features. Other than that, it has been pretty good.

I have been using it for almost two and a half years.

The stability of the Helix Control-M solution is good. I would rate it an eight out of ten for stability.

We also have access to their support. If we face any issues, we get support from them. Everything is good and working as expected.

Helix Control-M is scalable. It is being used by many people in our organization.

We have more than a hundred jobs running, and we have almost eight people managing it. We also have 3-4 end users using it.

The technical support is very polite, helpful, and available 24/7. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

Before Helix Control-M, we used different solutions. We previously used IBM Workload Automation but switched to Helix Control-M because it provides a comprehensive solution for everything and is very manageable without needing a dedicated person. Anyone can learn it. Its learning curve is very small.

The migration to Helix Control-M was straightforward. We did not face any issues.

The initial setup was straightforward. It took about three or four months to settle down. It is also not difficult to maintain.

We received support from BMC tech support and did not require any third-party consultants. We had six or seven people for the deployment of the solution.

The main return on investment with Helix Control-M has been a reduction in downtime and minimization of manual interventions, which has improved our operational efficiency.

The pricing is moderate, not too low or too high compared to other solutions.

We evaluated multiple solutions, including ActiveBatch, before choosing Helix Control-M.

The pricing was similar, but we found Helix Control-M better in terms of job automation and features. Their support was also very good. We got help from them with the orchestration and migration.

Before implementing the solution, thoroughly try out how it works in your current environment. 

My overall rating for Helix Control-M is an eight out of ten.

My main use case for Control-M is to schedule jobs and automate the workflow. A specific example of a workflow I've scheduled and automated with Control-M is a batch flow through which a number of customers receive an automated message about their transaction details on their mobile phones using Control-M jobs.

The best features Control-M offers include automating large workflows, allowing us to run jobs on a scheduled time basis, and requiring no manual intervention.

What stands out to me about the automation and scheduling is the error notification service, which I find very helpful because we do not have to monitor our jobs on a daily basis. Whenever there is an error, the team receives notification regarding the job failure, which makes our work easier.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization by saving a considerable amount of time, and manual intervention is not required for most operations because most things are automated with Control-M. I work as part of the batch operations team, and we used to run Indian batches which typically took around two hours on a daily basis. With the help of automating the batch through Control-M, the batch now takes approximately fifteen to twenty minutes to execute and run, which means we save around one to one and a half hours on a daily basis.

Control-M could be improved by offering more additional features and ensuring that more people are aware of Control-M.

I have been using Control-M for five years.

Control-M is stable.

Control-M's scalability is good.

The customer support for Control-M is good.

Positive

For the deployment and maintenance of Control-M, we require majorly four teams: one is needed for operations, one is needed for scheduling the jobs, and one is needed for maintaining Control-M.

I would advise others looking into using Control-M that it is a good tool if you want workload automation to be done and if you want to save time. I have given this review a rating of seven out of ten.

It is a job scheduler. It is used for scheduling jobs.

It is useful for any sequence of jobs that are complicated, such as Job A can't run after Job B, but if Job C hasn't run, you can't run Job B. Building that logic into a script is almost impossible. Control-M solves that problem. Normally, in large banks, there are many different dependencies. It helps with dependency mapping.

Banks need to bring the branches online at seven o'clock in the morning, so you have to finish your batch processing by the time you bring the branches online. Typically, if you've got a big outage in the middle of the night, it would take hours to fix, which means you will run late, and your backups and all other jobs will not be completed by the time your branches open their doors. Control-M can manage that for you. It can make some smart predictions and change the workflow dynamically so that businesses can run with predictability every night.

It keeps the run times of all jobs. If you need an SLA to complete a particular suite of jobs by a particular time, for example, 2 AM, it can provide the historical average run times of each job. It can help predict or forward plan to see what time it's going to finish those particular jobs. It can do predictive analysis, so if it's not going to finish by 2 AM, it can warn you that it's not going to finish by 2 AM. You can then build in some actions. Some of them may be less important. You can omit those for the night to save time.

A large bank in South Africa would have more than one million jobs to be run each and every night. If something goes wrong in the middle of a million jobs, it can be very complicated if you're managing that via scripts or manually. Control-M solves that problem.

It has a graphic representation of the job flow. It has a very nice GUI to help you understand the sequence of events. On the GUI, if a job is green, it's running or it's completed. If a job is red, there's a problem. It uses alerting and color coding to assist the operator.

Control-M is the number one leading product in the world. What they've done about scheduling, other people are still trying to figure out, so it's difficult for me to propose anything new. There is not so much AI at this point in time, but I guess it's coming. However, predictive analysis is built into it.

I have been using this solution for 20 years.

There are no complaints regarding stability.

There are no complaints regarding scalability. I sell it to most of the large enterprises, but it's also applicable to medium enterprises.

They are very good because this is a tool that requires 24/7 support. If something fails at 3 AM in the morning, you need to fix it and get it back up and working really quickly. You can't afford to have the tool down for long.

Positive

It is very simple as long as you know the prerequisites. 

It's worth the money. It is cost-effective because you need fewer things. It has a high level of automation. Staff can go home at five o'clock. You can run a million batch jobs or tasks at night when all of your highly skilled people are at home sleeping. When your staff comes in the next morning, all of that work is completed, and the business is ready for the next day

It depends. It's packaged in such a way that you can buy the base model without all of the fancy stuff. You can try and keep your price similar to competitors. I guess it's natural throughout the world. It doesn't matter whether you're buying cell phones or something else. The best cell phone will always be more expensive.

There are other solutions, but the difference is that Control-M has constantly undergone development. Each and every year, many improvements have been coming out. The GUI is one example. Often, people think about job scheduling as something you did in the 1970s or 1980s. You don't do that anymore. A lot of the competitor tools are legacy. They're kind of locked in. That's how they work. They're not trying to evolve. We used to talk about job scheduling many years ago, but now, it is orchestration. There are fewer tools that can do proper orchestration.

The fact that it has been in the top right-hand quadrant for 20 years tells you everything about the tool.

I would rate Control-M a nine out of ten. I have been a reseller of the tool for 20 years. I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't believe in the tool, and I didn't like it a lot. I am proud to say almost all of the banks in South Africa are using it. That speaks for itself.

My use case with Control-M spans three different organizations, primarily in the banking domain throughout my experience, working with major banks. Now I am in the telecom industry, where major telecom companies use Control-M for their operations.

The best features in Control-M include the ability to schedule scripts at any time, and if they are not running, there is an option to run them again without any manual intervention in case any execution fails, plus you can get failure logs and alerts directly if a job fails. 

It's a user-friendly tool. I've used other solutions which are not as user-friendly. It's easy to understand.

It is simple to integrate Control-M with technologies for your data operations and DevOps processes, especially as we upgrade this tool to the latest versions, providing more options for integration with cloud solutions. It is not very challenging if you are skilled with Control-M and integration aspects, such as using Control-M APIs to connect your applications and action on jobs or run scripts through API calls as well.

I see major improvements from Control-M, specifically since I started with version seven, and now we are on version 9.21. I have seen major changes, such as transitioning from a thick-client version to an online self-service version accessible through the Internet, alongside multiple UI changes.

Currently, there is room for improvement in the cost aspect compared to other tools. Control-M could be more user-friendly, and while it is user-friendly now, it can be improved to be more intuitive.

I have been using Control-M for the last ten years.

I experience very little downtime with Control-M and would rate its stability eight out of ten.

Regarding scalability, I would rate it around eight out of ten.

Control-M requires maintenance, and we need support from BMC; it would be beneficial if BMC invested more in providing customer support to users. 

I assess BMC services for helping my team with migrations and overall strategy as very good; when we raise cases to them, they help us understand and provide valuable feedback, and I would rate this support an eight out of ten. My relationship with BMC is more transactional.

Positive

I did not migrate from Broadcom, CA, Redwood, or any other similar solutions in any of those companies.

The deployment is a bit complex. 

It has saved us time and money.

When compared with other tools, Control-M is a bit costly. That said, it provides the best results, and since it is very user-friendly, investing in it gives you great outcomes. I'd rate the pricing seven out of ten.

If I compare Control-M with other solutions or vendors on the market, it stands out for its security and is the best in the market as of now due to its functionality and cost-effectiveness, which usually comes from the total number of executions in your organization, making it a great choice for daily activities.

I would recommend Control-M to other users. Although it is slightly more expensive on the market compared to other tools, it is very user-friendly and includes multiple features, such as integration with other applications. 

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

We have been using it in the institute to manage all the student data and post-study processes.

We have been using Control-M in our IT department to maintain server backups and database updates and schedule regular updates. Furthermore, it is being used in our library system to automate periodic updates of library catalogs. Control-M also automates email notifications for event announcements and fee structures.

The best feature is that we can automate everything. Moreover, we can access all the features through one dashboard, which is beneficial. 

We have been using Control-M for managing simple automation tasks. It will be very effective in managing other types of tasks. Control-M has the potential and can be very useful in managing business aspects.

The licensing cost can be improved. Although it provides good value, it could be better. The pricing model should be optimized.

Its initial setup is a bit complex. They could provide more documentation and tutorials to make the initial setup easier to understand. Enhancing the documentation could simplify the setup process.

We have been using it for more than one and a half years.

The tasks we have been handling are straightforward automation tasks. Considering that, I would rate it a ten out of ten.

It is scalable. I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.

We have 50 to 60 users.

Technical support has improved. In the past, they were not as supportive, but they are better now. Based on recent experiences, I would rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

This is the first solution that we have used.

The initial setup and configuration are a bit challenging. There is a bit of a learning curve for some people. It takes a few days.

At the time, there were not many recommendations or resources to understand and deploy it properly, so it took us a couple of weeks to understand and deploy. It has been simplified over the last eight to ten months.

We implemented it in-house.

It has reduced the total cost of ownership by 30% to 40%. 

It has saved a lot of time for our employees and staff members. For a small task, there have been about 40% to 50% time savings.

It is a little bit expensive.

Our relationship with BMC is more transformative. We consider BMC as a strategic partner and trusted advisor.

I would definitely recommend Control-M to every institute because it is extremely helpful to manage every task without any manual error. I would suggest trying Control-M at least once. It is also recommended to start with the documentation and familiarize oneself with basic concepts before integrating it into the business aspect. 

Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten.