Control-M Reviews

The major use cases we have are batch processing and MFT. We are heavy users of the MFT plugin.

One of the benefits of Control-M is that it's helping to give business users visibility into and control over their jobs, and freeing up IT personnel to focus on other operations. Here, I'm mainly thinking of MFT. Our MFT end-users did not have access to our prior MFT tools at all, so they couldn't see the jobs. They would just request a job be built and then we would publish job reports so that they could see what was out there. Now, in Control-M, we're able to give them job-control access. We still lock down the building of file transfer jobs, but they now have the ability to see a job and see how it's built. They can run a job and hold a job if they need to.

But even for some of the batch jobs, we've written some orderable services that are allowing them to run jobs on-demand, jobs that they used to have to log in to a server and go through a menu to do. Our business users definitely have much higher capabilities in our product now.

And while we are primarily on virtual servers, we are in the process of standing up some agents in the cloud. We have our first agent in AWS up and we're getting ready to do some testing on it. That's pretty critical. There's a really big push within our organization to move into cloud. A lot of our next-gen apps that are going to be replacing the current ones are being built in the cloud. We have that first agent out there, but I assume there are going to be many more to follow as these new applications are stood up in the public cloud. Today we're on-prem, but I definitely envision us moving the entire Control-M stack to the cloud. Eventually, it will be in the cloud and we'll just have a couple of agents on-prem, versus being on-prem and having just a couple of agents in the cloud.

Control-M has also helped to make it easier to create, integrate, and automate data pipelines across on-premises and cloud technologies. It's due to the ability to orchestrate between workflows that are running in the cloud and workflows that are running on-prem. It gives us the ability to have end-to-end workflows, no matter where they're running.

The automation is one of the most valuable features.

New plugins could be tested better. We've had a lot of problems with the MFT plugin. We've been working through a lot of issues with BMC on it.

The functionality that has existed for long periods is very stable. But the problems with the MFT plugin specifically, and problems we've had with MFT in general, have unfortunately caused the entire stack to be affected enough that our end-users couldn't even log in to the application. 

I wish we would have known better about how MFT impacts the application as a whole, and I wish they would have done more load testing around that. That seems to be where most of our issues have been. The issues have been so bad sometimes that the entire app goes down, not just MFT.

I've been using Control-M for about two and a half years.

The stability of Control-M has Not been great. A big thing we've been trying to work on with BMC is observability. Modern applications should be observable and resilient, but we're finding that sometimes Control-M is not very resilient and many times Control-M is not very observable. We're working with BMC to try and figure out how we can externally monitor this application. 

We are using Dynatrace because of the problems we've had with Control-M. If we stood up Control-M and never had any problems, we probably wouldn't be too worried about being able to observe the processes and the queues and the communication between processes. But because we've had so many problems, it has forced us to dig in. We can't wait for a problem to happen and wait for a week for support to tell us how to fix it. We can't do that in a production environment. We have to know before a problem happens so that we can be proactive and not reactive. That's been a big struggle that we're continuing to work with BMC on.

It's pretty scalable. You can stand up a ton of agents and you can stand up a ton of servers, if you need scheduling servers. Scheduling and agents are definitely very scalable.

There isn't the ability to really scale the EM (Enterprise Manager) a ton, although the GUI can be scaled somewhat. I don't know how much of a need there is to be able to scale the EM. We don't seem to have issues on the EM side, for the most part.

We're definitely having issues with the gateway between the EM and the scheduling server, but BMC is telling us that it's because we're running too many file transfers on the scheduling server. They say that if we stand up more scheduling servers, that should resolve that issue. We'll see if it does, if we still have any issues after we spread the load of MFT, not only over more agents, but also over more schedulers. If we still have issues after that, I think that would mean you're pretty limited in how you can scale your EM. That is the one thing about which I'm not sure how well it scales.

Technical support is very back-and-forth. That's one of my gripes about the support. We open a case, they ask us for logs, we upload logs, and they come back and ask us for something else. 

At times, there isn't a lot of what I would call working together with them. We do now, but that's because we had a ton of support cases piling up and we started escalating with their internal leadership. Now, there are weekly meetings between our leadership and their leadership and our account managers, as well as weekly meetings with the support team and the dev team, to talk through our cases and any updates on them.

It took a lot of pushing from our end to get them to work with us. Otherwise, they just asked for logs and then we were waiting for a couple of days for them to look through all the logs and get back to us. We can't be doing that, especially if the issue is a production problem. We can't just upload logs every time we open a case and wait around for two weeks to get an answer.

Another gripe is that they're very siloed in what they know. Something that I've been asking for for a long time, from BMC, is somebody who can take a look at our environment as a whole, and not just in pieces. Every time we open a case with support, they want to assign it to a specific area. If it's a problem with the agent, then an agent person will look at it. If it's a problem with the EM, then an EM person will look at it. But nobody is looking at the environment as a whole. That's an issue because a lot of our problems, as I've mentioned, with MFT, are impacting the entire environment. It's not just one component. It's the entire environment and how those components relate and how they communicate that have been impacted. Nobody has really looked at the environment as a whole, in support. I think it would benefit BMC to have more experts on the entire application and not have everybody so siloed.

Neutral

The initial setup was a little complex, due to some of the requirements. It requires that you have C shell as it doesn't work with the regular BASH shell. There are some old mainframe requirements that have carried through the product, even though we don't run it on mainframes. For example, the user that you use to run it has to be under seven characters long. We had to modify the account we use because the name was too long.

We're still really trying to get our environment squared away. We started two and a half years ago, but we've got a laundry list of applications that we're migrating out of and we've only completed one of those migrations. We're having to modify our architecture now because of the load that we are running. I'm working with professional services at BMC to review our existing architecture so that they can give us a BMC-supported design recommendation.

One of the competitors we are migrating from is Broadcom/CA. Broadcom bought a couple of products. They own both AutoSys and Automic, and we are migrating out of both of those solutions. AutoSys has been pretty straightforward to migrate into Control-M because the job configuration is pretty simple. However, the Automic workflows are very complex. They utilize certain features that only Automic offers, things that we can't replicate in Control-M. That is causing a lot of issues and has caused us to put that project on hold for the time being, until we can work through some of the problems that are being presented. We've been migrating Broadcom for at least a year now.

Some applications are pretty straightforward. MOVEit is an example of one that's a pretty straightforward conversion. However, another tool we have, Diplomat MFT, has a backup file structure that is not what the conversion tool was expecting. We ended up writing a custom Python script to do that conversion for us. The ease of migration really depends on what application you're migrating out of. It could be very complex or very easy.

The migration process is a very high concern. We selected Control-M due to the ability to migrate everything into it and have everything in one tool. If we can't get our migrations completed, then Control-M will just be another tool on top of all the other ones that we have to support.

We used VPMA for the deployment. Our experience with them went pretty well. They're definitely very knowledgeable about the product

I don't know that they, or really, as I said earlier, even BMC had all the knowledge around how MFT could impact the application as a whole, back when we originally bought this. MFT was very new back then. VPMA did their best and guided us as much as they could, but I just don't think the plugin for MFT, specifically, was very mature yet. There were probably a lot of unknowns there.

We had a pre-sales team from BMC that helped us in the very beginning, before we worked with VPMA. They were nice, but I wouldn't say they were very knowledgeable. They had a very surface-level knowledge of the application. They didn't know anything that was deep. They would have to find out for us and get back to us.

It's not my realm, but I would assume Control-M has not helped us realize any savings on renewal costs after switching from Broadcom. The cost of an agent is significantly higher for Control-M than it is for Automic or AutoSys.

We are paying way more for Control-M than we've paid for any of our other scheduling tools. We have an inside joke that Control-M is sold as the "Bentley" of schedulers, but we feel that we got a "Pontiac" because it's falling apart half of the time.

BMC has two licensing models. One is where you pay by job execution and the other is where you pay by endpoints. I'm sure the specifics vary depending on the customer, but we opted to go with endpoint licensing. I'm not sure if that was the best decision, knowing what we know now.

With endpoint licensing, we pay per server. That means it behooves us to run as many jobs as we can on each of those servers. But we're very much finding that even if we make those servers very large and give them a ton of resources, they're still not able to perform because Control-M doesn't scale very well vertically. If you make the agent bigger, if you double the CPU and RAM, that doesn't necessarily mean you can run twice as many jobs. It's going to choke in other areas. 

We will see if we end up switching our licensing model. I think the endpoint licensing model we chose is quite a bit more expensive than an equivalent model where we would pay per execution. We would definitely have to change a lot about our environment if we were to change our licensing model from endpoint to execution, because today we give all of our end-users the ability to run jobs on-demand. If we were to change our licensing model to be based on executions, we would probably want to restrict that a little. 

The way you license is a very large consideration when moving to Control-M.

We really haven't taken advantage of some of the features that Control-M offers yet. The main thing I'm thinking of is SLA management. We haven't implemented that yet on a lot of our business-critical workflows because we just lifted and shifted everything into Control-M from the old app. As of today, things are pretty much equal until we are able to implement some of those additional features.

There are capabilities that Control-M offers that are good and I can see it being a very good product. BMC, as a company, has some maturing it needs to do in a lot of its processes. They have a very good sales team, but a lot of things after that can use some work.

We definitely haven't bailed on it, but I've heard a little bit, back and forth, from people at BMC that they might not be too upset if they lost us as a customer because we've been having so many problems. We've been on them about helping us get this environment corrected and functioning as we expect it to. But in a year from now, it's possible we could be in a really good place. I'm excited to see where it all goes.

Our organization is a bank, and all batch processes are in Control-M. 

We have installed it on a mainframe. It is an on-premise distributed system.

For the bank, Control-M is one of the jewels of the queen. It is the heart of the bank. For batch processes, Control-M is most important. We have Control-M working seven days a week and 24 hours a day. 

All file transfers are managed from Control-M MFT. Some of our clients who are small companies send the data to the bank about their employees' salaries. The bank takes that data and prepares payments for different people in the company. Control-M MFT is used for the information transfer between the bank and Visa, American Express, or Mastercard. All of the information is sent by using file transfer in Control-M.

It has improved our data transfers. It gave us the security and the vision of what is happening with our file transfers.

All of its features are very valuable. We have been working with Control-M for many years. For people who have been working with it, there is no other way. This product is a part of us.

It is very easy to use. Our operators are new people, and they start to work with Control-M from the first day in the bank.

In our bank, all new applications need to be implemented with Control-M. We try to look for the best way to establish communication between both products. One of the new features for us is Application Integrator. It is a very interesting feature because it lets us integrate with those applications that are not included in Control-M. By using Application Integrator, we can easily integrate new technologies. With the help of Application Integrator, we recently integrated with Blue Prism, which is a robotic product. We could integrate such processes into Control-M. Now, we are working with Ansible, and we are putting Ansible automated processes into Control-M.

In general, it is a very good product, and we are very happy with it. It meets all of our expectations.

Although we have used the Smart Tables facility for a long time, today we have had a need to process services that include processes that combine Mainframe and non-mainframe jobs (Windows, SAP, Informatica). An improvement for Control-M EM would be the possibility of creating combined Smart Tables, that is, they include mainframe and non-mainframe jobs so that the work order can be generated with the Unique option. Today, to achieve this we must manage global Conditions with Variables and generating a unique code to pass to the MF tables and not MF. Let me name this feature “Global Smart Tables”.

Another need we have is that Control-M MFT also supports commercial file transfer protocols such as CA-XCOM.

I have been working with this product for more than 30 years. Personally, I have been working with Control-M since 1988. Here, in the bank where I am working, when we started in 1995, the product was on a mainframe.

It is the most stable solution that we have had. It has been working on the mainframe for two years without any problem. It is a very stable product.

We have not had any problem with scalability. The bank has been growing for the last 15 years, and we had no problem with Control-M. Control-M has adapted to our growing architecture. All new applications that we have, such as SAP, Informatica, or databases, are covered by Control-M.

We have about 40,000 processes per day. We also have 100,000 execution per day. All batch processes are integrated into Control-M from different systems, such as Windows, SAP, Informatica, etc. All file transfers between the headquarter and the branches and the external providers are managed from Control-M.

The bank has 6,000 employees. The system and IT teams have about 600 people. We have about 30 people for operations, monitoring, and implementation. In the technology area or system programmer area, we have six people. All of them are using Control-M.

We work around the clock, and we have three teams that work per day. Each team has about 10 people. We have people for Operation Console who are looking at batch processing in terms of whether it is working fine. Four people are there to implement new jobs in Control-M. They are working with the calendars and resources. We have three people to administer the product, and there are other people to administer the jobs on Control-M. 

BMC has very good people. Their support has been excellent. We had very quick replies. Their technicians have always been very friendly, and they have a lot of knowledge of the product.

They always provided a very good solution. When we had a Severity One problem, they call us immediately and solved the problem even on the weekend.

Its initial setup was a long ago. It was very simple. The bank had about 6,000 offices, and it took about eight months to automate the whole batch processing.

At that time, people were not ready to use automated processes. The most difficult thing was to change the mind of the people. When we started with automation, people thought that they will lose their jobs with this kind of tool, and it was very hard to change the mind of the people. Using Control-M was very simple, and it was easy to use Control-M to automate manual jobs. From that stage till now, all new systems are syncing with Control-M, and all new developments are integrated into Control-M.

Initially, we used a partner. At that time, it was New Dimension Software. It became BMC in early 2000. Now, we have a lot of people in the bank with Control-M profiles. When we use any new feature of Control-M, we don't need any partner.

I am the Control-M specialist for technical support in the bank. My job in the bank is to set up all new products.

I have been working with Control-M for 30 years. So, I have seen other products. It is very easy to automate our daily manual jobs. It is not at all complex to set up the product. It is also very easy to teach to another person. It is not complex like other schedulers. It is a very easy tool.

So far, we have only been using its Windows client. We have now started to use its web interface. We are also starting to use the DevOps technology with Control-M.

We have migrated from Control-M 9.18 a month ago. We will start using centralized profiles. We will also start to work with Manage File Transfers (MFT) B2B. It is a new feature that we will start using to improve our customer delivery processes.

I would rate Control-M a 10 out of 10.

We use Control-M to provide business services to our customers. The use cases involve Hadoop, a lot of file transfers, and SQL scripts. In our business, automation is used for many things and we use a lot of the Control-M modules. For example, we connect to SAP, with databases, Hadoop, MFT, Informatica, and other technologies.

What we do relates to many different business services in a retail environment.

We have hybrid deployment; over the past two years, we have had a mix of on-premises and cloud-based implementations. Ultimately, we are moving to the cloud. We are using AWS, GCP, and Azure.

The main benefit is that Control-M can work with almost all of the applications that are on the market right now. We work with technologies including Hadoop, Informatica, all kinds of databases, and file transfer with MFT tools. The real potential with Control-M is that it can be used for everything you want.

It is really important that our clients can manage their own application workflow with full autonomy. Our customers are using this capability a lot and it helps because we don't need to be present when they want to perform a simple task. It's better for them because they don't need to wait to ask or to have something changed. They can just do it themselves. Also, it's better for us because we have more time to do other things.

The expanded capabilities in version 2020 for planning and monitoring have had a positive effect on our clients' operations, as well as our own. It saves a lot of time when it comes to developing and implementing things. As a result of saving time, both us and our clients are saving money.

Control-M has definitely helped us to achieve faster issue resolution, although it is difficult for me to estimate how much by. We don't have metrics that are suitable for tracking this kind of thing.

The best part about this product is that it has a lot of features. Control-M doesn't limit us and we can use it for a lot of things.

Control-M is easy to install, use, and maintain. It is easier to work with than other products.

The web interface hosts a lot of videos and webinars and I really appreciate this because I find them very helpful. They have tutorials that explain how to approach the new technologies and explain how things can be done using Control-M. This is something that I use a lot.

The Application Integrator is helpful because not all applications have a module available in Control-M, and we can use this feature to create them.

When it comes to supporting cloud services, Control-M is a bit slow. We are not advancing with the technology because we don't have the modules that can interact or use the new application services provided by the cloud technologies. BMC has been telling me that they are working hard to be more aligned with these new technologies, but they are a bit slow. Consequently, we are having a few issues when it comes to implementing Control-M. Some services that are being offered, such as Databricks, have been a problem.

The documentation is something that needs to be improved. Years ago, the documentation was very good, and I don't understand why but the documentation is no longer as good as it should be. For example, if I need to install or upgrade Control-M Enterprise Manager or Control-M server, the only information that I have in the documentation are things like "Execute this and follow the instructions on the screen".  What it doesn't tell you is what will be needed for the process. For example, you may need to enter a password or select a source, but you won't know what these parameters are in advance.

Also, it is different to find what you are looking for in terms of documentation. For instance, if you visit the Control-M download page, you see several tabs. There is a tab where you can download software and another tab where you can download patches. This is perfect. However, there is another tab for the documentation but there is never anything there.

With any Control-M product, it is hard to find the documentation. The reason for this is that they are moving all of the documentation online, in an HTML format. The problem is that it is hard to download documentation in this format. In particular, if it is a specific part that you need or a certain module, then it would be much easier to have a PDF version like they used to have. Consequently, it is more difficult for us to pass the documentation to our internal teams.

For example, if we are trying to configure a module for Informatica or SAP, it's hard because we don't have PDF documentation. We need to go online but it is difficult because it is very hard to find what you are looking for.

Another area of improvement for Control-M is the version release lifecycle. Prior to 2018, we had the same, main version of Control-M for two or three years. Since 2018, they have been releasing a new version every year. There was a 2018, 2019, and 2020 version. It seems that these new versions are being released in an unfinished state because we are seeing a lot of bugs. Historically, it has been very stable, but from a point between two and three years ago, it has not been so much so. It seems that the problem is that the versions are changing too quickly.

I have been using Control-M for nine years.

There are some limits to scalability in terms of cloud integration. There is some integration with cloud services but it is very simple. It is called the Application Integrator Module. This is a very good feature but the problem is that if we have to interact with cloud services, we need to create all of these modules on our own. We are paying a lot of money for a product where we have to create our own modules, which is not perfect.

It is very good that we have the Application Integrator available but for services that are being used by a lot of companies, we need official support from BMC.

I would rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

We have been dealing with BMC for several years and when you consider the support from a few years ago, the response that we received was more technical and more accurate regarding the problem that we were having.

As it is now, more and more we are seeing that the customer support has to rely on the product development team to resolve the issue. This is because there are a lot of bugs in the product and customer support cannot provide a solution for these. Instead, the problem has to be fixed by development, and then a patch is released to solve the problem.

For this reason, I am rating the support an eight instead of ten.

We have had cases where our clients migrated to Control-M from a competing solution. In fact, we did a migration last year from TWS, the Tivoli Workload Scheduler from IBM, to Control-M using the conversion tool. The tool was very important because it reduced a lot of work.

The problem is that the conversion was not as good as it should be. I estimate that we had to modify 90% of the jobs because the conversion was not good enough. It was still important because it would have taken a lot longer to create all of the jobs from scratch. That said, it was not perfect, at least that was our experience with migrating from TWS.

We were using TWS and another one that is called Visual TOM. It is another product that is similar to Control-M. These are both scheduling products, but Control-M has tons of features that the other ones don't have. They don't have the modules, the plug-ins, or the Automation API. They are stable and they are good, but we can't use them like you use Control-M because Control-M permits us to perform many more things. Unfortunately, with the many more things that you can do, it does introduce more opportunities for failure. However, this is true of any feature-rich solution. The more complex it is, the more prone to error it is.

Control-M is easy to install and maintain. There are not a lot of steps required to upgrade or downgrade from one version to another. With other products that I've been using, it is difficult and complicated to upgrade because there are a lot of confusing steps. But with control-M, you need only follow the onscreen instructions.

The length of time required to deploy depends on the customer. The scope and complexity of the client's requirements dictate the amount of time it will take to complete. For example, we can deploy for a smaller customer in one week. However, for a large retail customer, it could take a month to complete.

We have one client right now, where we are upgrading from Control-M 2018 to 2019, and it is going to take us almost three months to complete. Part of the reason it takes this long is that when you try to upgrade a production environment, it's really difficult to get a window to perform the upgrade or the installation or the modification. That said, it's still easier than many other products.

Pricing varies depending on which components and modules you are using.

My advice for anybody who is considering Control-M is that I recommend it. Although it's not perfect, it is relatively easy to use and maintain.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We install, configure, and deploy Control-M for customers and make it run on-premises from them. After that, the customers take over.

BMC uses partners. They don't sell directly in the Middle East. So, they don't directly install the product and sell it. Instead, they go through partners, like my company.

We, as a company, don't use Control-M, but we sell Control-M to customers. We go onto a customer site, install the product, and configure it per their requirements. Then, we get their feedback and support related project stuff.

From a services perspective, we actively use BIM, which is the affiliate manager. We use the history to see the forecast. When the customer gets Control-M, the affiliate manager comes along with it. 

It is 100% on-prem, primarily because the Helix part of Control-M is not hosted in the Middle East yet. For many customers, there are regulations since the primary customers are banking, insurance, etc., which all require their data to remain within the country.

My customers are primarily banking customers, so they have their end of day processes that happen at night after the bank closes. These processes would involve AML, banking, and end of month payroll-related stuff across multiple organizations.

We do maintenance, project management, and support. Once a project is done, the customer has a support contract through BMC. That is through us. Customers cannot directly get in touch with BMC to open cases. It has to go through a partner. Therefore, we offer first and second line support to the customer.

There is definitely room for improvement. Version 9.0.20 actually comes with a web-based interface, but there are still a lot of things unavailable with it. There will eventually be more inclusions added into the web interface, but there is still a long way to go. 

There is also the automation API, which is a way to interact with Control-M, but it also needs a lot of improvement for other people to understand how to use it.

The documentation isn't really straightforward for the initial setup. It says, "Follow the on-screen instructions." The reason why people read the documentation is to have a heads up of what to expect and what is coming up. However, when you say, "Follow the on-screen instructions," I believe that is inappropriate.

I have been using it for two or three years.

It is very stable. We hardly get calls in respect to issues on Control-M, particularly on version 9.0.19. 9.0.20 is still pretty new in terms of deployments. However, with version 9.0.18. I have had a couple of problems from customers.

You barely need one person for customer maintenance because the system is pretty stable. Of course, if it is version 9.0.18, the number of support cases that come in are more compared to version 9.0.19. We also get information requests from the customer where they might have audit requests or want to enable certain protocols because of security compliance within their organization. In these cases, they reach out to us. 

It is not that we are always involved with the customer. It is not an onsite model. If there is an issue with the product, the person calls. We have 20 customers whom we manage at the moment for BMC. That is just done with three people: an onsite resource and two employees, including myself. The onsite employee is with a telecom vendor within the UAE. His job is monitoring and maintaining the system as well as assisting the customer. He does everything in respect to Control-M at the customer site, e.g., defining jobs, monitoring jobs, executing jobs, and making sure that they are done properly. Another of my colleagues and myself deal with all the other customers from a project and support perspective. It is primarily support because once a project is done, then a customer has support with us. We manage those cases, involving ourselves in those cases. We understand what is required. If we have the information already and know how to do it, we will give them the procedure, etc. If we cannot do it, we get in touch with BMC to get the relevant answers.

I have not had an issue with scalability per se. If there is any kind of resource crunch, the customer just needs to add resources. If it is a memory usage, then add memory to the virtual machine and you are good to go. 

You can have jobs at multiple customer sites. For that, there is a different level of scalability altogether from an infrastructure perspective.

BMC support is good. I would give them eight or nine out of 10, most of the time. They reply quickly, even before the actual SLA time. However, in certain worst case scenarios, I would give them a seven out of 10.

Most of the time, the integrated guide immediately opens up the relevant page. You can get the necessary information from that. The videos are really basic. For example, with version 9.0.20, there are videos that come up by default in many places as part of the help page, which is ideal for beginners. Whereas, at my level of implementation, we are looking for more detailed explicit knowledge for a specific scenario. For beginners, the web help is more than enough, if a person is patient enough to go through it.

Personally, I have worked previously with a competitive product: Automic One Automation Platform. I was working with Broadcom earlier, doing a similar profile, where my portfolio was dealing with retail support and projects. So, I was deploying Atomic solutions. After that solution, I made a change and moved to BMC, as a partner. I have been working with Control-M ever since. Therefore, I have exposure with other automation products.

The initial setup is straightforward.

If all the prerequisites are ready, a full-fledged setup for a single system would take 15 to 20 minutes to deploy.

Normally, we deploy with high availability so it has an uninterrupted service, even if a server goes down.

Once the PO is all done for a project, we have a pre-kickoff with our company and the customer. We basically run them through the prerequisites and understand their priorities. For example, some customers are more inclined towards Windows and others are more inclined towards Linux. Most of them would like to have the DR environment in the setup, meaning it would be the primary site with two servers for high availability and a DR site with two servers. All these technicalities for the infrastructure and environment would be run by the customer along with the prerequisites. 

From a project perspective, we ideally implement the process flow. So, we understand their documentation. Then, we have an actual analysis and design phase, where we sit down with the customer stakeholders and get their requirements in terms of the actual process flows early on. Until then, we just know at a high level that these are the number of database jobs that will run on Control-M. We don't have explicit details at the analysis and design phase. We literally sit with them and go through their documentation, understand what they want to implement on Control-M, and how we can make it better or include notifications. After this, we start off with the installation. Based on the outcome of the analysis and design, we implement the process flows.

The annual licensing within BMC Control-M is on a per task basis. Three- and five-year contracts are also offered. The customer usually buys a bundle of tasks, e.g., 5,000 tasks, then my team configures Control-M for their usage. 

It is a good, stable solution. It does depend on what exactly you are implementing, because automation solutions are primarily back-end solutions, e.g., back-end processes and batch processes, which can be executed on Control-M. However, sometimes customers get back-end solutions confused with RPA, which is front-end automation. When customers decide that they want to use some kind of an automation tool, they should really understand what their process flows actually need. There is a handshake that can be given between the front-end and back-end, but there are some customers who come to us wanting to buy Control-M, but they are actually looking for an RPA solution because their operations are front-end.

I would rate Control-M as eight or nine out of 10 in terms of stability and features.

We use it as a scheduling tool. We use it for infrastructure backups and running scheduled tasks, but nothing in regards to data analytics.

It is an infrastructure process behind the scenes: custom backups and custom file migrations.

We leverage Control-M for backups. That would be a critical process that we have integrated. This allows teams that rely on the backups to have a single pane of glass through the dashboard to determine if their backup is successful. It allows email alerts or triggers, if something fails or we need to do manual intervention.

My organization has been able to script scheduled jobs in Control-M to potentially replace legacy products that are at end of life or end of service. The previous backup applications that were being used for specific files, folders, or applications were no longer being supported, therefore being able to use Control-M to replace that has been very valuable.

We rely on Control-M for automation. Anything that would have been a manual effort previously or legacy, Control-M has been able to replace.

The scheduler allows you to pretty much run anything from anywhere. It is very convenient. The sensor reporting that the scheduler gives you can monitor hundreds of jobs that could potentially be running in a given hour.

All the scheduled tasks are available in a dashboard or workflow view that different teams leverage. This is important and great. Having the ability to have a dashboard or workflow allows for easier troubleshooting. We also have alerting set up through email triggers, which are very helpful.

We leverage it for file transfer. We don't necessarily have application workflows dependent on those, but we do have Control-M for the migration of files. The visibility of a successful transfer is very useful, e.g., the ability to report on that or view whether that job succeeded or failed in the dashboard. You have an alert that would trigger on a failure. So, failure is automated. The Control-M job could retry that file migration a number of times based on logic that you have programmed into the job, and having to avoid manual intervention is useful.

The alerts are helpful and can contribute to faster issue resolution in the event of an issue.

The infrastructure updates could use improvement. Some of the previous updates that we have run to get to version nineteen were troublesome. So, a more seamless upgrade path for the infrastructure components would be useful. I don't know if they have replaced that in version 20 or if version 20 has an easier path, but I would like to see the upgrade from one version to the next version be a little smoother.

I have been using it for about five years.

The platform has been great. I don't think we have had any downtime besides our upgrade process.

The scheduling process has been able to handle almost everything that we have asked it to do. It seems to be able to run pretty much anything from anywhere within our environment.

This solution was a new integration/installation done before my involvement.

The application was a part of the infrastructure when I joined. We have been able to add automations for components that were otherwise manual. 

The upgrades are a bit complex. The last time we did an upgrade, it took several hours.

The upgrade was planned. We ran into an issue, then we had to reach out to support. They were quick to respond, but the resolution did take several hours. They did a good job. The issue was resolved in a timely manner during our upgrade window. Their service was an eight or nine out of 10, as far as issue resolution. To be a 10 out of 10, I would like something prescheduled. If we could have had support personnel available for the upgrade procedure, it would have been helpful. So, it was just the time element.

The product is helpful for its automation components.

It is worth evaluating.

Control-M is mainly an infrastructure tool that we use for scheduled tasks. The IT teams and most of the operations teams are the ones who use it. I would estimate about 10 people, but the management of the application is centralized.

The big lesson learnt: Reach out to support when using the product and do something that you could reimagine.

We don't have any data analytics in Control-M.

We don't have developer integration with Control-M at this point.

Control-M is doing a fantastic job for what we use it for. The product is a nine out of 10.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The initial setup was done before I joined the company.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Control-M for 15 years.

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

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

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

I would rate their support a ten out of ten.

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

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

The pricing of Control-M is reasonable. 

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

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

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We did not follow a particular implementation strategy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.