Control-M Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using Control-M for five years.

Control-M is stable.

Control-M's scalability is good.

The customer support for Control-M is good.

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

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

Currently, I'm working as a senior software engineer in HSBC. Here in my organization, we are using Control-M as a batch job scheduler. We use folders, calendars, and templates in Control-M for a number of applications. On a daily basis, as I mentioned earlier, it is a batch job scheduler; we support this application for a number of markets, including seven markets in the APAC region, five markets in MENA, and another market called AOC China. Control-M is used for all these markets, which total around 13 markets. Daily, we have batches where we use shell scripting code in Control-M for routine work by creating a job that runs based on the timings specified. 

These jobs execute commands, and we receive logs. Regarding folders and calendars, we manage our schedules based on holidays, weekends, and month-end requirements with various calendars to avoid running jobs at unwanted times. For example, we have calendars for the first day of the month and for month-end reports. Folders help organize jobs categorized based on APAC, MENA, and AOC China regions, with each folder having jobs executed based on their dependencies and specified timings.

Control-M is very easy to use. There shouldn't be any technical knowledge required for using Control-M. I have experience with AutoSys, and I find Control-M easier to understand. There is no need for technical knowledge to use Control-M, making it more user-friendly compared to other tools in the market. The initial setup for Control-M is easier. The support we receive from BMC is wonderful. They contact us promptly and resolve any issues quickly.

There are a few suggestions for improvement. Currently, the history module captures only seven days of job execution data, and if we had at least 30 days available, that would be beneficial for investigating any issues. Additionally, in the monitoring module, we can only view 15 days of statistics for job execution, which includes details such as start time, end time, and runtime. I recommend that if we could have 30 days of statistics available, it would greatly enhance the Control-M user experience.

I have been using Control-M for around three and a half years.

The product is stable.

The scalability of Control-M rates as a nine out of ten.

Whenever we encounter any issue with Control-M and contact BMC, the support we receive from them is wonderful. They contact us promptly and resolve any issues quickly. On a scale from one to ten, I would rate their support a nine.

Positive

The initial setup for Control-M is easier than other solutions.

Comparing Control-M to other batch job schedulers in the market, I would give it an eight out of ten based on my experience.

Problems with Control-M can arise depending on the data center where the servers are hosted. There are occasional server down issues, which occur rarely and usually last only for a few minutes, after which everything is fine. We are customers of BMC, not partners.

I would definitely recommend Control-M to others because, based on my experience with other tools, BMC is recommended over others. Control-M is easier to understand, with no technical knowledge required. A quick glance at the modules shows that job creation and management is straightforward. Self-script developers can quickly familiarize themselves with Control-M compared to other tools available.

Overall, I rate Control-M eight out of ten.

My main use case for Control-M is data management and control. I use Control-M in data center management, server management, and all compliance-related functions. My use case for Control-M involves day-to-day data center management specifically, focusing on compliance, handling daily operations, server monitoring, hardware monitoring, and the compliance measures we are following.

Control-M offers excellent end-to-end integration capabilities. The end-to-end integration connects multiple environments seamlessly, including cloud environments like AWS and GCP, which helps us significantly.

Control-M has intelligent data pipelines, manages file transfers, and MFTs, which are the best features we are using.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization with cost savings. We are mostly following compliance measures as per the RBI guidelines, making most of the compliance processes quicker by accessing them through Control-M.

Control-M helps me meet RBI compliance by generating automated reports, adding security features, and addressing fines we might incur due to compliance shortfalls.

I would like to point out that the bank needs to explore how we can better utilize Control-M according to our specific requirements.

I have been using Control-M for more than a year.

Control-M is correctly aligned with our banking environment, so everything is good and set.

Regarding Control-M's AI capabilities, I believe we do not currently have any AI inputs, but as far as security is concerned, it may be a good combination if we integrate that in our data center.

I have been using Control-M on a daily basis. My main use case for Control-M is the scheduling of processing of jobs. A specific example of a job I schedule with Control-M is OS jobs that run a script for backup.

I use Control-M day-to-day mainly for database jobs, OS jobs, MFT jobs, file transfer jobs, and many more.

In my opinion, the best features Control-M offers are advanced scheduling and the processing of various processes at a scheduled time.

Control-M has impacted my organization positively by automating many of our daily based tasks. The automation has helped us as taking backup has become really easy; earlier, we used to do it manually, but now with the help of Control-M, we do it through automation.

Control-M is deployed in my organization on-premises. It is easy to integrate Control-M with other technologies. We have added AWS cloud as of now, and we are trying to move all of the infrastructure jobs to the cloud.

Control-M has improved the way my organization functions by mainly automating all the backups and database jobs that we used to do manually. The implementation of Control-M has had a great impact on business-critical applications as it provides clear monitoring and troubleshooting for business-critical jobs within the SLA.

Everything is good regarding improvements for Control-M. There is no need for additional improvements.

I have been working in my current field for seven months.

Control-M is stable.

Control-M's scalability is great.

The customer support is good. My experience with Control-M's customer support was good, and I would say it was helpful and responsive.

I previously used Autosys. Before using Control-M, my organization used Stonebranch because it was what we relied on for job scheduling and automation. I switched from Stonebranch to Control-M because it was hard to understand, the scheduling was difficult, and it had fewer integration options with technologies.

We directly chose Control-M without evaluating other options.

I have seen a return on investment with Control-M as we need fewer employees because it is really automated.

I think the forecast is a feature to consider. I assess Control-M for building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring production workflows primarily through the Control-M GUI. The accuracy and reliability of Control-M's AI output are ninety percent accurate and reliable. My advice to others looking into using Control-M is to have it in their organization. I find this interview good and do not think any changes are needed for the future. I would rate Control-M a ten out of ten.

My use case for Control-M is that it's a job scheduler for some jobs regarding data warehouse jobs and billing tasks for a telecommunication company, mainly monitoring jobs.

The best features of Control-M that I most appreciate are the integration and unification of different systems, such as BMC Remedy, integration with alerting systems, and the unification for the dashboard—something akin to one dashboard to monitor everything, which is very good. It can communicate with different platforms such as cloud, different systems, and OSes. I also appreciate the visualization; when we are designing a tree, a job tree, the option to visualize the dependencies and the mapping is very user-friendly.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization, particularly in the flexibility it offers in scheduling jobs. It has a nice feature called Calendar Integration that integrates with the company calendar to allow for the holidays and special events regarding the organization, not only the public calendar, but specifically for the organization.

There are some areas in Control-M that have room for improvement, particularly some constraints regarding the scripts, such as limitations in how they can be executed and integrated; it's not the normal scripting way in some cases. It's not in all cases, but in some cases, there are limitations and constraints in running the scripts. 

Additionally, Control-M requires some hardware resources in terms of system requirements; it consumes some hardware resources.

I have been using Control-M for about five years or more than five years.

The stability of Control-M gets a nine from me; although we faced one issue during this year regarding its stability, nine is good for it.

Scalability for Control-M is good; I would rate it an eight due to the high license cost, but it's scalable.

I would rate the technical support for Control-M a nine.

Positive

I have seen a return on investment with Control-M; we have the real-time alert feature. Our administrators get alerts for any job failures or emails for any issues, which saves our business. We also have reporting tools embedded in Control-M to generate daily reports and keep historical data. All of this handles our job, mainly the monitoring and automation for the scheduling. That's why we are using it.

My thoughts on the pricing of Control-M are that the cost of the license is very high. You have to implement some cost-saving measures, such as cleaning up jobs that are not required anymore on a monthly basis, in order to control the license, as the license is very costly. 

Additionally, there's a dependency on training; on a yearly basis, or whenever there's a new version, we need to schedule training and an official training from an accredited course center or from BMC itself, which is very costly.

I haven't dealt with other solutions or vendors on the market, but I can say Control-M is better than good when it comes to automation.

There is a good feature about the drag-and-drop; we can easily create and modify jobs with drag-and-drop in the interface, which makes it easier and user-friendly. BMC is a good strategic partner; they are helping us in mapping out our migration strategy, and we have a team from their side that supports us in our job. They know our case and they are specialized in our system, following up on our system.

I recommend Control-M to other users because it's user-friendly, it has a unified dashboard, and it's easy to schedule and use. However, there are certain limitations, especially for larger organizations, to afford the cost of the license and the cost of training. For a small organization, I wouldn't recommend it, as it would be very costly for them.

I would rate Control-M an eight out of ten, considering I have some concerns about the cost and the training, which is also related to cost. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using this solution for 20 years.

There are no complaints regarding stability.

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been working with Control-M for eight years. Control-M was simply used for batch scheduling. I use Control-M on a day-to-day basis. Control-M allows me to automate the process of running the JCLs. From my perspective, Control-M works well, and I would say that it is a very good tool for building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring production workflows. Control-M is very important to my DataOps initiatives due to the specifics of the functioning of the logic of IT business processes in a bank. I am not in DevOps, but I think it is not so difficult to integrate Control-M with technologies for my DataOps and DevOps processes as things change.

That is a difficult question because I do not actually know any other tool that would be competitive with this one. I appreciate Control-M because it is a very reliable tool and it is easy to work with. I cannot imagine my work without Control-M; it is a core tool in banking systems, so I think that without it, it would be difficult to run a bank itself.

I do not see any improvement needs for Control-M at this time. There are not really any features that are missing in Control-M at the moment that I would like to see included in the future or enhanced somehow. I am not sure if this is the case, but perhaps the knowledge of how to use Control-M should be more propagated or better accessed. It can be used in other aspects than my needs, so it is also valuable to know.

I have been working with Control-M for eight years.

Control-M is quite stable; I have not had any crashes, downtimes, or performance issues with it.

I have never had a need to scale Control-M, so I cannot tell you if it is difficult because I have never had a need to do this.

I did not migrate from Broadcom CA, Redwood Technologies, or any other similar solutions to BMC. I have not switched from a different product; I started using Control-M straightforwardly.

From my perspective, to start working with Control-M, you need to learn, but it is not difficult to get a grasp of how it works.

I do not know because I did not set Control-M up. I did not have an internal team or any partners, consultants, or BMC representatives help me with the setup.

It is difficult to say how many users are using Control-M in my environment; probably over a thousand, but different roles, I would say. I have it across different locations and different departments.

Given my experience with Control-M, I would recommend it. Control-M is a good, reliable tool, and I do not think that there is much of a competitor for this in terms of banking solutions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have 50 to 60 users.

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

Positive

This is the first solution that we have used.

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

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

We implemented it in-house.

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

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

It is a little bit expensive.

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

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

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

My main use case for Control-M is to deliver the client's cases.

A recent example of how I use Control-M to deliver a client's case involved a complex client case with several moving parts and a tight delivery timeline. I took control by first clarifying the client's requirements, breaking the case down into specific actions, and ensuring that I understood the responsible deadlines. By keeping the client priorities focused, we ultimately delivered the case on time and to the expected standard.

The best features of Control-M are the ability to take ownership of a case from start to finish, keep track of all important details, and ensure nothing gets missed.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization by providing better visibility, consistency, and accountability across the client cases. It helps us stay organized, track work more effectively, and ensure that important actions and follow-ups are not missed. It has also improved collaboration, as everyone has a clear understanding of what needs to be done.

Control-M is functioning well, and I am not aware of any necessary improvements at this time.

I have been working in my current field for the past four years.

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

I would rate Control-M an eight overall on a scale of one to ten.

I gave Control-M an eight because everything is good, but I have not been exploring all the features, which keeps it from being a ten.

I believe Control-M's AI capabilities provide complete assurance of security to us, so there is no issue with governance and security.

I think Control-M's AI capabilities are generally accurate and reliable, especially for handling routine tasks, summarizing information, identifying relevant details, and helping move cases forward.

Control-M is deployed in a cloud-based environment within our organization, with appropriate enterprise security, access controls, and governance measures in place.

We use AWS as our cloud provider.

We purchased Control-M from BMC, and we did not purchase it through the AWS Marketplace.

Control-M is relatively easy to integrate with our existing DataOps and DevOps processes because it can fit into the broader technology ecosystem without requiring major changes to our workflows.

I recommend that others looking into using Control-M understand the business problem and start with a focused use case, validating the results while paying attention to the quality of the data and inputs.

Control-M offers excellent scalability. One person can deploy it, though a team deployment is also an option. The quality and speed are both very good.

My relationship with BMC is more transactional. I am primarily paying them for the service rather than experiencing active involvement from their team.

We work with both Control-M and another solution. I use Control-M in my company with eight people overall using it. I do not have any official partnerships with BMC, and we are not resellers. We are simply a customer of theirs. I would rate this product an overall seven out of ten.