In my previous organization, which was in the banking domain, most of the Control-M jobs were related to finance, including SAP, file processing, and payroll generation. Currently, I am working in the healthcare industry, where Control-M is used mostly for claim settlement and process flows.
The most valuable feature is the automation process. Manual tasks like scanning claims at a hospital or dispensary are automated with Control-M, greatly reducing time and effort for processing and saving data. This process previously consumed a lot of time when done manually.
Most improvements are related to cloud connectivity. It would be beneficial to have cloud integration tools for services like AWS and Azure. Currently, batch flows integrate through modules but don't connect directly, which could be enhanced for better efficiency.
I have around 13.5 years of experience in both scheduling and administration with Control-M.
There are no stability issues mentioned, and everything is automated. In case of application failure, I get involved, otherwise, the monitoring team takes care of the operations.
The support was better previously. Nowadays, the support is less responsive and accurate, unlike the past ten years when the solutions and responses were much more reliable.
Other tools I compare with include AWS, Redwood, and TWS. However, Control-M stands out due to its user-friendly graphical interface, unlike TWS, which is command-based and hard to use.
On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the initial setup of Control-M a ten out of ten due to my familiarity with the tool. However, some users face difficulties with the web interface.
I am the architect along with two other team members who work with Control-M. We handle design, including servers, databases, and connections.
Other solutions considered include AWS, Redwood, and TWS.
I would definitely recommend Control-M because it is a reliable tool expected to remain relevant for the next twenty to thirty years. I rate it ten out of ten.
We use Control-M for batch automation. Previously, all of our batch work was manual, but now Control-M has significantly reduced the need for manual intervention. As a result, our batch processes are now 99% automated.
It's so easy to navigate, and especially for new hires, it's very straightforward to show them around the client because it is user-friendly. It's very easy to use. Compared to other softwares, Control-M has significantly simplified our monthly release process, making it easier to move things forward.
We're upgrading Control-M, and the process is very long. There are numerous boxes to tick and things to check to ensure everything is in order before the upgrade happens. We run three instances of Control-M, and making various changes for each is challenging.
I have been using Control-M for five years.
You might experience a brief connection issue, but it usually resolves within a few minutes. The problem is related to the web server.
Scalability is excellent. We utilize only about 20% of Control-M's capabilities.
Support is helpful, and the online community is very good. There's the community forum, which I use regularly to find answers to questions. BMC has been very helpful in that space. They were extremely fast and solved a difficult problem our in-house team couldn't solve in a matter of minutes.
Positive
The initial setup is straightforward. We used to use in-house software.
We have three different environments where people can work. People can use our development instance of Control-M to work on their batch processes before they go live, allowing them to experiment and refine until they get it right.
It's much simpler now. Everything was a manual batch job. Using the features of Control-M every day makes our batch processing so much easier.
It makes our lives so much easier. For our operations team, which runs our daily batch overnight, viewing everything as it happens has been an absolute lifesaver, especially if things go wrong overnight. It's great to have that visibility. It has also sped up our process, reducing overhead and weekend overtime. Batch processing is much quicker now, resulting in fewer manual errors.
Control-M has so much functionality that even if you initially purchase it to handle a specific part of your batch work, it can offer much more. We've progressed beyond traditional batch processing to include MFT, which has been incredibly useful. Our file watchers and other automation features have significantly simplified our workflows and made our lives much easier.
Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.
We can recommend it for all domains, such as banking, insurance, or telecom. Whatever the customer needs, it can handle without any issues and is highly secure for file transfers. It supports all transfer protocols and methods and can integrate with external MFT solutions from different providers. Control-M will fulfill all requirements.
Whether distributed or mainframe jobs generate files, they use Control-M for file transfers. However, if they are not using Edge jobs or any JIT process outside of the Control-M schedule, those areas do not use Control-M. However, distributed or mainframe jobs generate files that need to be transferred to another system using Control-M.
We use encryption detection methods and various monitoring methods to check files and ensure they meet all business criteria. If a zero-byte file is detected, we can handle it. We use file watchers to monitor and transfer files between source and target, whether the environment is homogeneous or heterogeneous, on-prem to cloud or cloud to on-prem.
Improvements could be made in naming conventions, such as adding dates and timestamps to filenames after replacing them. While the auto-delete function exists, enhancing it further could be beneficial. For example, when using SSH or WMA connections to transfer files, more detailed logs could be provided, specifying exactly where issues occurred. A pre-transfer check that warns if the file size is too large for the available target server space could be useful.
These enhancements are expected to be included in the upcoming 9.0.22 version of BMC Control-M.
I have been using BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer for five years.
Control-M allows team members to manage file transfers without any file size limit as long as the target server has sufficient space. If the target server lacks the necessary space, the transfer will fail with an error indicating insufficient space.
The tool itself does not impose any restrictions on file size, so you can transfer files of any size without limitation, provided there is adequate space on the target server.
BMC technical support is highly effective and responsive to concerns and questions. With the hybrid model, including BMC Helix Control-M MFT and BMC OneCloud, they support SaaS solutions, managing all patching, installations, and maintenance tasks. Using Helix, BMC can open necessary ports for customers, ensuring seamless access to the Helix environment. This approach minimizes the need for customers to handle patching and advanced maintenance themselves. BMC also ensures high availability and performs all required updates and support, providing a streamlined experience for users.
Positive
Currently, we have a B2B webMethods MFT solution for file transfers and script-based file transfers with specific security commands. Script-based methods offer limited GUI and tracking features.
We have not used them extensively in the last six or seven years. Since adopting Control-M, we have transitioned all non-standard file transfer methods to Control-M, which provides more comprehensive features and tracking capabilities.
We are not paying separately for MFT. It comes included with the contract, license, and software package. In addition to Control-M, we also use Informatica and other control modules. The MFT functionality is automatically included with the software package, so it has no separate cost.
Control-M is not just for file transfer; it integrates with all file-related jobs in downstream systems, including file generation, file transfer, and file usage. These processes run smoothly together, allowing us to meet KPH, PAs, and VNSLS SLAs. If you use a different tool for MFT, without proper control, there could be time delays. This might require adding buffer time between the file generation, file transfer, and file usage jobs, causing delays. With Control-M, there won't be any delays, as all three jobs run together seamlessly, ensuring no time lapse.
Compared to script-based or other file transfer methods, Control-M offers a more streamlined process that doesn’t require extra support for file transfer tasks. Those managing the Control-M tool can handle file transfers and perform necessary checks. The integration includes a web or self-service portal, allowing customers to track file transfers and check their status, even from a web view. Unlike other tools where only the production support or technical team can monitor file transfers, Control-M allows users with appropriate credentials to verify whether a file transfer was successful.
This is especially beneficial for reporting tool users like PowerBI, Cognos, or BusinessOptics, where data files are transferred from the source system to the reporting tool. Report users who refresh data manually can check if the file transfer was successful and, if necessary, rerun the job, ensuring their reports are updated on time without needing support from the technical team.
Control-M offers excellent file management. In my current customer environment, more than 90% of file transfers are handled by Control-M, with only 5% to 10% done using internal mechanisms within AWS or Azure for cloud-specific transfers. For transfers within AWS, between applications, a small portion of the files is transferred outside Control-M. However, most file transfers go through Control-M, and the customer is satisfied because they don't need to pay extra for the product or support team. Control-M also handles email service and business view integration, allowing users to monitor and resolve file size, space, network, protocol, certification, and public key problems on-premises without additional support.
Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
I've been with the same company for 22 years. The use case started out truly as a batch processing solution. That was what we originally got it for back in the day to help us automate what was being done manually or being done through homegrown tools or scripts, et cetera. The use cases evolved through the years. Now, we use it to orchestrate workflows that are touching traditional data centers and that are going out to the cloud and bringing it back.
From one spot, we have a single pane of glass. Like many companies, our systems are getting more complex and more diverse, with cloud and edge computing, containerization, et cetera. However, we have one place where we can go and look and see what's going on. If something happens, we can check what happened and where it happened. Today, we're dependent upon a lot of services and cloud technology that sometimes we don't know the ins and outs of.
A big challenge is to make sure that we have certain things run daily or on a periodic basis. That really was the driving use case. We had a lot of manual tasks going on and if someone, for example, left on vacation, something may not get done for two or three days, a week or two weeks. This solution takes all that away.
The main use case was to get away from having to stare at a system or a screen, and just let things run, let the workflows flow, and only be notified if there's something wrong. That was really a big driving use case.
It freed up people to work on exciting work instead of mundane work. No one has to sit around and stare at that screen all day long. No one has to reinvent the wheel for the 50th or 500th time to do tasks like maybe put a file out into an S3 bucket or out into an HDFS Hadoop file store since it's already there. It's already done for them. They just drag, drop, click and they're done. It's freed people up and they can do the exciting work that is really what we should be doing anyway. No one wants to be doing boring work.
I am a big proponent of an automation API and Jobs-as-Code. That is Control-M in the DevOps world. It opens up the tool to a traditional operations tool. Developers can jump right in there now, giving them that ownership, and integrating the existing DevOps tools that they have. That is a huge feature that I just love.
There's an application integrator. It doesn't matter if you're trying to integrate with on-premises, off-premises, API, container, or serverless functions, it's easy for you to design. You just design that integration and then it's available instantly, and that's a huge time saver.
It's rather easy to create, integrate and automate data pipelines with Control-M. I can give a broad answer. It can be as easy as drag and drop, or it can be as complex as designing the integrations. If you use customization, you can access a data lake that your organization developed. For the typical user out there, the difference is on a scale of one to five, with one being easy and five being hard, you're probably looking at a two and a half. For most people, it's very easy. It's getting easier as it's all web-based nowadays. Alternatively, it can be all code-based.
I have not explored Python Client too much. I've tinkered with it and that's been the limit of my exploration. Now, with the integrations like AWS, we've made extensive use of it, and it is very easy for anybody to do. Python Client has a lot of great possibilities, especially in the data science arena, however, sadly we have not had an opportunity as of yet to play with it.
The Control-M interface for creating, monitoring, and ensuring delivery of files as parts of your data pipeline has gotten better. It is not perfect. That said, it’s come a long way over the years. Nowadays, most of it is web-driven. A lot of it can be API driven if you so wish. There's still probably some future work to be done there, however, for the average user that's coming in, starting to use it for the first time, they're going to need a little training and handholding at the beginning for maybe the first week or so. Then you can start setting them free to go out and use it on their own.
The orchestration of our data pipelines and workflows has been able to give a single point of view too. Management doesn’t care about the bits and pieces. A workflow or a data pipeline could have 100 or 1,000 components behind it, and management does not care about that. Management cares whether the SLA has been met or not. They want that easy-to-see red light or green light. We can provide them with that. The solution drives self-service and it helps. A manager doesn't have to call somebody in IT and wait around for an answer.
They can immediately get that information for themselves, consume it and be able to understand that, "Hey, you know what, this data pipeline over here, we're going to be 15 minutes off our SLA for today." Then, they can start asking why. I like parts of Control-M like Batch SLA Impact, is they can start doing some of that analysis themselves, for example, “this late due to the fact that maybe the system was down for maintenance for two hours last night." That's really beneficial in today's business world.
The automation of Control-M has sped up everything. We can integrate directly into existing pipelines and the DevOps teams can get anything integrated with their Jenkins deployments. They don't have to wait for traditional operation functions. This is all built-in. It validates and checks. In some cases, it automatically deploys the agents and deploys the configurations. That's something that years ago you'd have to wait for. The speed of delivery has vastly improved.
Nowadays, auditing is as simple as running a report. If this falls under an auditable category, we can just hit a button and the report is done. Control-M audits everything, even if it is not under the regulatory or audit spotlight. Every process, every movement, and every change is logged by the system. If there's ever a question, you’ll be able to find a why and a when. There’s an audit trail.
It certainly helped speed processes up. I can eliminate what I call the manual gaps between certain features. I don't have to send an email to somebody to say, "Hey, guess what? That file's ready. Now you can run process X, Y, Z." The system just says "Hey, the file is there, let's go." It's eliminated those gaps between parts of the workflow. It also helped optimize the infrastructure needed as it's like a Tetris Puzzle. I have these ten different workflows that I'm trying to run and before I may have had ten dedicated systems for them. Now I know that I don't need that.
We use this model all the time. We can run those ten processes on three systems and be just fine. That saves money. The solution is not only speedy, but it also saves money.
They are doing a great job with continuing to drive the open-source model of it. Five years ago, if you looked for Control-M anywhere, you would not have found it. Today, that model has changed. They're actively publishing on GitHub.
You can download for free an entire container and run Control-M at home if you want to tinker with it. That was unheard of a few years ago. You can type a query in Google and start to see all sorts of documentation that is now available to the public. The major strides that they have made there are pretty darn good.
If you want to take it and ramp it up to doing some very heavy-duty integrations, you can find yourself at first dealing with a difficult integration. However, once you get that integration going for maybe a month or so, the next person after you will have less difficulty. That's the power.
They can improve their interface. They're going through huge modernization efforts and they're getting there. They're probably 75% there, however, there's still another 25% to go.
I've been using the solution for 22 years.
Since it supports business, it has to be stable. It's very stable. We have not had major outages or anything. That's always a good thing, however, like with any solution, its stability is going to depend on how you deploy it and what safeguards you put in place, including high availability and disaster recovery, et cetera. All the hooks for that are in the product, however, it's up to you to decide how you're going to use those hooks.
It's highly scalable. You can run five things in it today and easily scale up to run 1,005 things tomorrow. In terms of scalability, there are no issues there.
Technical support tends to be very helpful.
Positive
I used to work for an insurance company and I used Computer Associates. It was called CA-7 and CA-11, which are similar tools.
We tried to use Computer Associates before this, but it didn't support the systems we needed and the integration was next to impossible.
I was involved in the deployment and initial setup of the solution right from the beginning.
We had jobs and workflows running within the first day. That was pretty good. We don't use the Helix model, however, there is a Helix model you can purchase, in which everything's hosted by BMC. You can be up and running literally in hours which is reasonable. There's a learning curve, however, if you do not get some value out of it within two days, you're probably doing something wrong.
At the time, there were only two of us deploying the solution. Today there are only three of us.
It's business-wide. Everything from data to marketing, to finance, even though it probably wouldn't make sense to anybody else, it touches everything. It's deployed across Windows, Linux, containers, VM, cloud, et cetera.
If anybody has a use case or wants to learn more about it, we'll show them. Anybody in our organization can get basic access and can tinker around in an alpha test environment. This includes non-technical people. We have non-IT people that use it.
If they can self-service and maybe design some parts themselves, that's a huge win right there. We have a very open model of deployment.
There are occasional patching and vulnerabilities that come out. Most of the patching nowadays can be automated if you're using the Helix-based solution. A lot of that is handled by BMC.
We did not use an integrator, reseller, or consultant for the deployment.
I can't speak to the exact licensing costs.
Every few years we go through a reevaluation. We'll go through and look at what's on the market and what companies have come up with or released new versions. We'll go through and we'll say, "Okay, let's compare these, what do we need and what are all the tools offered out there?" We do that roughly every five years and it keeps us on our toes.
The biggest difference as of late is the API and Jobs-as-code. Control-M is light years ahead of others. It is light years ahead of the competitors and what they're offering. Other competitors are starting to get APIs, however, only BMC is working with Job-as-code and is in the lead. To my knowledge, they're really one of the only ones who can define your entire workflow as code.
Control-M is pretty critical to our business as it runs many different business processes every day, and if it wasn't there, we would probably hire many more people, be a lot slower, and be more prone to error.
We use a hybrid deployment. We have parts in the traditional data center. We have parts in the cloud. We sometimes have parts that live on containers. They only exist for two minutes. It is very much a hybrid mix of goodies with our deployment.
I'd advise potential new users to examine it today and not think about what it did ten years ago. Control-M is an old product. It has been around since we all used mainframes, however, just because something's been around for a long time, doesn't mean it's a piece of junk or doesn't work with modern technologies. It has adapted and grown with the times. Control-M did cloud-based work before many of us were even talking about the cloud. It's hard to get rid of negative perceptions sometimes, however, the best thing for people to do is to head out to the internet, look it up, and go out to GitHub.
If you have a technical team, send them out to GitHub. You can download everything in an image or in a container and try it yourself. It doesn't cost you a nickel.
I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.
The biggest advice I can give is to try it out. Don't only believe what the PowerPoints tell you. There's no excuse that you can't have a deployment running clearly within hours. Be willing to think about how it can solve problems in new ways. Sometimes we try to find a new tool as we have a square problem and we get upset as all the tools we're looking at only have round solutions. Sometimes the reason that it only has round solutions is due to the fact that that's the proper way to solve the problem. You have got to be willing to break down whatever you're trying to do, whatever workflow you're trying to automate or integrate, and take it in pieces.
If all you want to do is save yourself a lot of money, use Cron, and use Windows Task Scheduler. However, if you want to take your business to the next level and start to get to the point where you can automate to remediate and audit, that's where tools like Control-M come into play.
Our organization works with the cloud and databases. Our primary use case for Control-M is automating orchestration and scheduling jobs across the cloud and on-prem. We use it to monitor and report on jobs. We also use the index to integrate with the cloud service. It leverages our ability to manage workloads across various cloud platforms like AWS and GCP.
Implementing Control-M saved us time by reducing our manual intervention. We can divert more resources to meaningful work. It reduced the amount of manual intervention needed by 30 to 35 percent.
In addition to improving efficiency, workflow orchestration enhances our integration with other tools. We can orchestrate across on-prem and cloud environments and reliably create and integrate data pipelines. Workflow orchestration is critical to our DevOps. Control-M is constantly surveying the network.
The most valuable features of Control-M are automation and orchestration. It allows a different schedule, and we can manage thousands of jobs. It ensures we can complete them on time accurately. This automation reduces our manual intervention, significantly reducing error.
Control-M should receive more notice when it releases new features. The user interface is also a bit complex, and the navigation should be streamlined.
I have used Control-M for a year and a half.
I rate Control-M eight out of 10 for stability.
I rate Control-M nine out of 10 for scalability.
I rate Control-M support eight out of 10.
Positive
We used Broadcom before switching to Control-M. The migration was a little complex.
Deploying Control-M is somewhat complex. It's easier to convert to the other tool. We spent more than two weeks on the deployment and received some support from the Control-M side. We had almost five teams of people working on it. First, we set up the environment. Then, we ran the installation and reconfigured the database. After that, we did functional and integration testing.
Switching to Control-M reduced our total ownership cost.
Control-M isn't cheap, but this is an enterprise model.
I rate Control-M nine out of 10. I will recommend it. It's easy to integrate and has the flexibility we need.
We use the solution in Western Mutual Insurance Group's environment for the daily scheduling of around 11,000 jobs. Our number of end-users is in the hundreds, across 18 to 20 teams. We have three different physical locations as a company. Since COVID, we are a partially remote workforce as well, so we have multiple locations.
It's essential that the solution orchestrates our workflows. Regarding processes like file transfers and data workflows, we want one source for that. We want one area where we can check and see how things are progressing, and Control-M is invaluable. Everyone has access in our environment to Control-M, and we all use it heavily. We utilize a ton of plugins in our environment. We started the transition into servers and are seeing what our license allows in that area. We try to take advantage of everything we can.
We use Control-M to replace a lot of our manual logging of job data. It's been very valuable in terms of logs that can output alerts.
I just did an audit earlier this year, and it was a swift process using the product. It took me less than a few hours, and without the solution, it would potentially take a couple of days to a week.
We essentially have a nightly batch cycle. We process data overnight, so it's available for end-users during the day. Using manual execution, instead of Control-M, this nightly batch cycle would transition into a weekly or monthly batch cycle instead.
I recently took over as admin of Control-M about a year ago. Since then, the question has been how we can further utilize Control-M in our environment. We haven't yet found the limits of what Control-M can do. We're finding better ways to apply it every day. From the old days when we manually scheduled jobs to the current paradigm of using an automation tool. This made the process much more manageable.
We define Control-M internally as a "critical business application." I would say that if Control-M were not available, the impact would be catastrophic to our business.
The reporting is top-notch. I haven't found any other applications on the market that can replicate what Control-M offers. The alerting is very good, and I think their service monitoring is the best in the industry.
The solution is a key part of our system and I have not seen any significant limitations with it. It's very reliable and performs as advertised.
We're just starting our data pipeline journey. Compared to other products in the market, I believe Control-M's is the easiest to use. Theirs came out ahead in terms of ease of use every time. I rate them very highly in that area. We're primarily an Azure corporation. We found that the solution's built-in integrations with Azure are straightforward to use.
We actively build out methods of alerting, for instance, when workflows in Control-M don't complete, as this impacts our end-users and our managers that support the teams attempting to provide data for the end-users. I think Control-M has a ton of built-in integrations that make alerting when that data is unavailable more visible to end-users. I think that's been very useful in our environment.
The stability could be improved. I ran into an issue with a recent Control-M patch. The environment would become unstable if security ports were scanned. This is an area they need to improve on, but ultimately it's a relatively small improvement.
We have been using the solution for around seven years.
One patch had some issues, but the fix pack was very helpful. Other than that, we haven't had any stability issues with this product. So I'd rate it very highly.
The scalability is excellent, we're looking into options in Azure for scaling up and down in our environment, and Control-M has been essential in accommodating that.
Technical support would be a 10. They're always available. They've been very helpful with any questions I have. There are multiple means of contacting them, and they've always been responsive. The technical account partner, Jake, has been very helpful. The account rep, Chris, has also been very responsive.
Positive
Control-M in our environment predates my time. I believe the company first implemented the solution around 15 years ago.
The initial setup was before my time. We started off as a mainframe exclusive influence of Control-M, and then we transitioned to distributed servers from there. I am a team of one.
The solution's automation has improved our business service delivery speed. Our big push this year has been toil reduction and automation of manual tasks that ultimately take time away from our engineers. Control-M is factored into probably north of 80% of those reductions with its ability to automate tasks. So far this year, we're at about 4,000 hours of toil reduced. I would say Control-M has played a factor in 3000 of those hours.
I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. Control-M is critical to our business.
There are other solutions like Control-M out on the market, but in every recent market evaluation, Control-M has always come out on top. I think they are becoming more cloud-native as they progress with their Control-M Web Services. They're more reliable than the others on the market right now.
I would advise anyone to start with a trial version of this product. I think they'll be very impressed with it.
We don't use Python to a significant degree at all in our environment. We have been looking into that, but nothing solid yet. We don't use AWS but are looking to get into it in 2024.
We use it for our workload automation. We use it as a single pane of automation for our enterprise.
We are currently using three different environments for three different productions. We have production data tasks, and we have multiple different levels spread out.
We are currently using its most recent version. In terms of deployment models, they have both models. They have an on-prem solution, and they also have a SaaS solution. It just depends on what your company needs. They can take care of you.
Over the past so many years, I have learned that one of the most important features is giving everybody one tool that can do many different types of automation and workflows. That's been invaluable. Instead of having multiple tools for different teams and different platforms, Control-M has become the one-stop-shop for a lot of these automations.
It is very easy to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines with Control-M. It allows us to ingest and process data from different platforms. It could take us anywhere from a day to a week to get a new integration in place. We've taken it upon ourselves to try to introduce that to all of our internal customers as well.
It can orchestrate all our workflows, including file transfers, applications, data sources, data pipelines, and infrastructure with a rich library of plug-ins, which is very important for us. We try to utilize all new plugins that come out. If our company uses it, we try to use that plugin at least somewhere in our infrastructure.
In terms of creating, monitoring, and ensuring delivery of files as part of our data pipeline, it is a recent project, and it is something I've been learning about recently. However, having the ability to set up a job, set up a connection, deploy that job, and automatically have the feedback on where your files are when they've been moved has made life five times easier.
It has had an effect on our organization when creating actionable data. It has decreased the time to resolve dramatically. Everywhere I've worked, having Control-M orchestrate those alerts has been invaluable.
Our internal customers and management really appreciate the ability to be proactive before things really devolve into a problem or a high-severity incident. We're trying to incorporate analytics and proactive notifications as much as possible to decrease our downtime dramatically.
It impacts our business service delivery speed. Within the past few years, we have taken projects that normally would have taken multiple months, but the duration came down to a couple of weeks. So, we've increased our productivity tenfold.
Its impact on the speed of our audit preparation process has been great. With some of the built-in tools and some of the built-in reporting, being able to pull that data at any given moment has aided audit and probably increased our personal response time tenfold. We're able to get reports and audit out to the requesters within a week, if not sooner. Without Control-M, it would typically take us at least a month or so to get that out.
It has dramatically improved our execution times. We're able to get solutions out the door much quicker. A lot of our automations have been built around that, and we're able to get valuable output relatively quickly. When developing a new solution, without having Control-M, we would spin our wheels trying to come up with something that could only do a fraction of what Control-M can do at this point. Especially for a new solution or a new execution, we would be looking at a couple of weeks if not a couple of a month or two to come up with something deliverable. With Control-M, we're able to get that down to a week or two.
Our ability to integrate with many different solutions has been invaluable. The new approach of the automation API and jobs-as-code is also valuable.
The biggest improvement they could have is better QA testing before releases come out the door.
I have been using this solution for about 10 years.
I love it. It is rock solid. It is very stable.
There are no limits. You can easily scale up depending on your workload or whatever you need in a very short time. You can pretty much automate it at that point.
It is being used extensively in the organization. We do have multiple locations, but because we're using a web client, it is hard to say exactly how many end users are using it at this point. It is a company-wide solution. So, we probably have a couple of hundred users at this point.
They're very responsive. I'd rate them a 10 out of 10.
Positive
I personally have always used Control-M as my primary. I do know that other companies have experimented in the past, but I've always come back to Control-M.
I wasn't involved in the deployment. I always came on a little afterward.
In terms of maintenance, it is relatively maintenance-free besides the patches that come out. They come out pretty and frequently, but when they do, they're pretty comprehensive. Other than that, maintenance is pretty minimal. Because it is low maintenance, our engineering team does the maintenance when required.
We have absolutely seen an ROI. Over the last five years, I've heard we've done price analysis, especially with other tools. We always come out on top with Control-M. It always has the best price-to-performance ratio.
It is critical to our business. I don't know the facts and figures, but from anecdotes and talking to other management and up levels, I can say that it is considered a priceless solution in our environment.
If we no longer had Control-M, a lot of our most important pipelines would fall apart. Workflows would go unnoticed. The automation is so deeply integrated at this point that there's no telling what would break at this point. There may be things that we're not even thinking of.
For the tooling that you get, the licensing is acceptable. It has competitive pricing, especially with all the value that you get out of it.
There are additional costs with some of the additional modules, but they are all electives. Out of the box, you get the standard Control-M experience and the standard license. They're not forcing some of the modules on you. If you decide that you do need them, you can always purchase those separately.
I would advise working with the engineers, reading the documentation, and going into it expecting to set up high availability.
Control-M has been around a while. They're very quick to market, and they're very quick to adapt. At this point, they do have offerings, either on the way or recently released, that can support multiple cloud environments.
We are currently not using the Python Client, but that is on our board, and I do intend on investigating. We are utilizing some parts of the AWS integration.
I would rate it a 10 out of 10.
We are a large insurance company that uses BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer for batch processing and file transfers.
The batch is running on Linux, and it also has Windows components. Micro Focus is another system that we integrate with BMC Control-M.
It's an excellent method for organizing system change management. We use BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer to script our releases, which is probably the best use of it, but everyone would have a different answer. Because it is adaptable, we do a variety of things with it.
The file transfer feature is certainly useful.
The most important aspect is the ability to integrate different platforms.
We can run batches on mainframes, Linux, Windows, and all sorts of strange systems.
It can be difficult to stay on the right side of the licensing structure. Obviously, BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer wants to profit from it, so it's difficult for us and not cheap.
It's probably more expensive than many of its competitors, but technically, there's really no downside.
They have caught up with most things at the moment; for security, they added SSL a few years ago, which helps a lot, and for file transfer, they will probably have to keep upgrading to add new protocols.
I am familiar with the password vaulting interface; they could probably add something for that because user IDs are a major issue in Control-M. You can now get systems that identify where the user IDs are, and you have to go there, and if you have the appropriate authorization, you can simply select a user ID and use it for the Control-M job. An interface to password vaulting would be useful, but they may already be doing so. I don't want to say this is a big missing piece only to discover that you did it two years ago.
Password vaulting would be a feature that should be included.
I have been using BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer for 20 years.
We are working with version 9.19, but we are also testing version 9.20, which I believe is the most recent version.
BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is very stable. We use it for about 40,000 jobs per day, but I know of sites that run hundreds of thousands of jobs per day on a single Control-M server.
There is no problem in terms of stability. The only time I've had issues was when we used unusual servers to run the server on, and many years ago there were chips made by Intel called Itanium. That release was extremely buggy, but only about ten companies in the world used it.
Stability and reliability are not an issue if you stick to the mainstream releases. It has internal high availability, failover capability, and all of these features. It is trustworthy, and it has to be. If it fails, other businesses will cease operations, so it has to be 100% reliable.
BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is very scalable.
We have an unusual setup in that we don't allow many users direct access. They must send requests to a small team that will create jobs for them. We only have about seven or eight direct users in the system, but the number of people who rely on it is in the thousands. It is a strange setup.
Most sites are set up in this manner, with people creating jobs on behalf of the larger community. We also have Control-M Self Service, which is a web-based tool that users can't really do anything with.
We simply have it set up so that they can only see the jobs as they execute, and that is our approach. Many businesses are reluctant to grant widespread access to Control-M because, while it can be a powerful security tool, it can also be a security risk if many people have it.
We are moving, and MicroStrategy is one of the systems we are integrating with Control-M as well as SAP. SAP users want to start using Control-M, there is nothing special for MicroStrategy, but there is a plugin for SAP that we will install and use in the future. But, it will probably be another year before we get around to fully incorporating it. It would be implemented during the PoC consideration phase.
Technical support is good, but it depends on the situation. At times they restructure and assign you to other countries to communicate with. It's been very good when I've had to talk to people in the UK.
They have occasionally relocated us to Italy, where some of the technical knowledge may be lacking, but they have good systems.
They have BMC communities where other users can ask questions and interact. Technical support isn't bad; I'd give it a four because it's extremely helpful. They always do their best.
Positive
It was the very first solution we worked with. We tried a few other options when I first looked at the market 20 years ago. We investigated Tivoli Workload Manager, or TWM, as an IBM product that we didn't think IBM was developing much at the time, but that turned out to be the case.
There is another product called title software that is a good competitor that we considered, but it wasn't as reliable as Control-M and all of the CA. Broadcom now owns everything.
They have a wide range of solutions in their portfolio, but I've never used any of them. CA-7, which is not a very old mainframe-based solution, could be compared to Control-M if you only had a mainframe, but it is incompatible with Unix and Windows. I have always worked with BMC Control-M and seen other schedulers, but it's always been BMC Control-M. I am trusting the software.
It's a lot easier now; years ago, it wasn't; some of the releases were extremely complicated. They have worked hard to improve that. It can be distributed from a central location, which makes releasing new agents much easier now, and many of the issues that people had with installation have been resolved if you're using mainstream platforms. It is now a very simple install for Linux and Windows. On the Control-M server, you can run the installation process and choose an internal database supplied by BMC, typically Postgre. That is a much easier process to do now than it was 10, 15, years ago.
For the installation process, I would give it a four out of five, maybe a four and a half out of five. There are always things they can improve on, and sometimes you notice small details that aren't quite right. For an educated user, an easy install would be no problem. It's a simple procedure these days.
You can do the Control-M components in a couple of days, but it's what you've tied it into. Many people create their own scripts and then realize, oh, hang on. To keep up with the new Control-M, we must make changes. Two days for Control-M, but what you've tailored with it, if you're upgrading, obviously if it's a brand new install, then you start from scratch, hopefully with good conventions and standards to apply. However, if it is an upgrade, you may encounter issues where people say, "We hit some scripts on an agent, and now we have to go and figure out exactly what we were doing with those scripts." But that's not the Control-M side of the story; rather, it's what the users have done with it.
If you wanted to install a Control-M survey, you could do it within a day if you were to start from scratch, using all of the defaults.
When you start doing something different, you run into problems. But if it is simply to perform the standard installation, and you want to take the database that we'll give you, or you can have a medium-sized installation. You keep saying yes. You should be able to complete it in a single day.
I have done a lot of installations over the years. I have sometimes been the third-party consultant who comes to companies to do the installation.
I believe you can do it in-house these days. The last one I did was in-house, but if you didn't have a lot of experience, you might want to find some specialized company to do it for you.
There are specialist partners who will do this for you, but I believe you should do it yourself because you will have control and will know what to do if someone comes in and asks you how is this configured. You will know because you will be the one who configured it.
We currently have about four people in the team who are responsible for Control-M. It's complicated because one of the guys is retiring, and I'm not sure if he'll be replaced. People looking after, I'd say four is a good number for a Control-M server. There are various components to it, such as Unix administration and database administration. Obviously, we have other people who are specialists in their fields to whom we could go and notify them that something has happened; and ask them to have a look. or to log in to check.
Four people would be the minimum number of people who would be responsible for a server.
BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is expensive.
Because we are part of a company with subsidiaries all over the world, I can only provide an answer for Switzerland. At the moment, we are probably paying around $120,000 per year just for ourselves. But, they are attempting to restructure so that they can offer a global license, because, across Europe, we obviously have about 30 different companies that all have to do the same things.
I speak with my colleague in Spain, who is experiencing the same issues with questions and having to visit the local BMC branch. We are all paying the same amount, but different countries have slightly different prices. In fact, prices can be quite high at times; obviously, Switzerland is not cheap.
Our headquarters are in Germany, and I believe it would be better if they simply forget about everyone doing their own thing, and use this product all over, get a license through Germany and use it globally.
Their pricing is really their weak point. It's pricey. I would give them a three or three and a half out of five for pricing and licensing.
People do get value out of it, and the work it does quickly pays for itself.
We pay for the file transfer module, which is an additional cost. They are not huge sums; perhaps you pay 20% more for the file transfer module, and you obviously have to host it on the platform. We are also paying for all the ancillary costs, but you have to pay extra Self Service, which is the website, which could be another 20% on top.
If you said $150,000 for the year, that's about right. We do it per agent rather than per job, which is the difference between the two on-premise models. You can do it per agent or per job, and we only have a few agents, each agent handles a large number of jobs.
If you are starting from scratch, I would strongly recommend the Control-M Matrix, which is BMC's current SaaS solution. It is my understanding that it is a lot less expensive. I haven't used it myself, but based on the prices, it's likely to be nearly half the price of what we currently pay.
That simplifies your life because any upgrades to the Control-M server are handled by BMC. You go to the cloud, and they give you control and a server, and you don't have to worry about upgrades and such.
The disadvantage is that BMC now has your data, and they do not currently have a SaaS solution available in Switzerland. I believe it is only in the United States that things can become complicated, and BMC would then have complete control over your licensing.
They'd be able to see exactly how much you're using because we currently report how much we use. I believe it would work well for BMC because they would see a genuine reflection on usage and could then say, "You should be paying a lot more for what you are doing with the product."
The SaaS solution is called Matrix Control-M. If I were starting from scratch today, that's what I'd look at first, but some people might want to keep it on-premises.
Control-M obviously has agents that will work in the Amazon and whatever cloud, the Google Cloud, but that's a different story.
Where you can have it on-premises but have your agents somewhere in the cloud. That's not a solution I've considered, but I suppose it's becoming more popular.
I would rate BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer a nine out of ten.
