BMC Software and Solutions

My main business use cases supported by Control-M involve working with healthcare, insurance, telecoms, and banking, both retail and investment, primarily to ensure things are working. Much of this is in regulated industries, so we have established the necessary processes and tools to ensure that Control-M code is properly controlled, allowing us to satisfy SOX audits and other similar regulatory requirements.

Host groups are one of the most valuable (and unrecognised) features in Control-M and allows you to make your code environment agnostic. They allow for load-balancing, simple scaling, and technology groupings. Control-M supports my DataOps and DevOps initiatives by providing a single pane of glass to orchestrate and manage workflows across numerous systems. With the integrations, I have access to all my on-prem and cloud-based applications, and I can write my own interfaces for systems that are no longer supported, such as managing Solaris machines which still run for some of my clients.

Control-M integrates with new or changing technologies within my DataOps or DevOps stack fairly easily. The BMC team consistently develops new integrations at a rate of two or three a month. If they have not already got an integration available, it is very straightforward for me to create one myself, even for older technology through agentless connections to unsupported systems.

Control-M enables new capabilities or business processes that were not previously possible. There is significant capability embedded in the tool, some of which is not immediately obvious. With some creative thinking, I can leverage these capabilities to improve performance and allow Control-M to handle much of the load balancing.

One key element where Control-M could be improved is in providing a better audit trail for converting from development through to test and then to production environments. The process can currently be done, but the XML version is difficult. JSON offers an easier approach and is going to be the standard moving forward, so some XML-related issues will resolve naturally. For those still on XML for source control, it is an ideal opportunity to review procedures within Control-M to ensure compliance.

I joined JP Morgan in 2007, which introduced me to Control-M, and I have essentially been working with Control-M ever since then, marking 18 years this year.

The stability and reliability of Control-M in my experience is commendable; it simply works if set up correctly. Proper analysis of infrastructure requirements, source code control, and growth expectations should be carried out before commencing the migration. Once those factors are right, the conversion should run very smoothly. It is important that the conversion is carried out by a collaboration between teams that understand the old and new systems.

Control-M orchestrates workloads across multiple environments quite easily. I find that the graphical interface is very user-friendly, and although I have traditionally used the desktop interface, the web interface in version 22 is now nearly as effective as the desktop.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Control-M raises interesting points. Pricing is often perceived as high, and the licensing model can be unclear. However, in the end, it is clear that I am paying for a top-end tool which rarely experiences issues, with most problems stemming from the applications being managed rather than the tooling itself.

Regarding other solutions considered before selecting Control-M, I have seen conversions from Redwood and witnessed attempts to convert out of Control-M into a cheaper product. These attempts often ended in failure, leading to a reversion back to Control-M. Currently, I am looking at conversions from TWS into Control-M SaaS, and Axway into Control-M SaaS, along with several other potential conversions.

With proper planning, setuo is straightforward.

The biggest return on investment I have experienced with Control-M is the reduction in support time. If I set things up correctly with appropriate alerting levels, my support team can proactively prevent incidents rather than waiting for something to go wrong. The most significant metric is the number of support tickets prevented, rather than the number of support tickets closed.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Control-M raises interesting points. Pricing is often perceived as high, and the licensing model can be unclear. However, in the end, it is clear that I am paying for a top-end tool which rarely experiences issues, with most problems stemming from the applications being managed rather than the tooling itself.

When considering the overall experience with the migration processes of my customers, I find that if they approach the process with proper planning and due diligence, it typically goes very smoothly. A common mistake is trying to lift and drop what they had in another tool into Control-M without considering process differences, as the tools do not function the same way.

My advice to other companies considering Control-M is to conduct due diligence, examining not just initial costs but also ongoing expenses. It is essential to consider anticipated usage duration and growth patterns, as a correct setup facilitates easy growth, whereas a faulty setup complicates matters.

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

I am using Control-M mostly to automate banking jobs and monitor the jobs at the same time. Since I have been using it for the last year, it is mostly an operator's job as a Control-M operator. What I do is monitor the jobs, and if there is any job delay or job failure, we go through it. I use it to find where the problem is, why the job is failing, or why the job is getting delayed. Then I work with the application team to sort it out.

My favorite feature is in the web version, since I have been asked not to use the UI. In the web version, what I mostly appreciate is that when a job is waiting for any reason, whether a prerequisite is not met or the in-conditions are not satisfied, I can simply go to the waiting info section. There is an option where I can just click on it and I get to know every detail, such as why the job is waiting, whether the prerequisite jobs or the earlier jobs are executing or have failed. So in just one click, I get to know everything about that particular job, including why it is waiting and where the job flow is getting stuck. That is my favorite feature.

I heard that Control-M is going to discontinue the UI version. When I search for a job and ask for the neighbor jobs, such as the predecessors and the successors, it does not give a sequence; the jobs are not in sequence. I have to do some settings and navigate through multiple screens and clicks, and then I find out the information. If I could get the jobs in sequence by default, that would help me a lot in troubleshooting and understanding the job flow, particularly which job is going to run first and which job is going to run after that. This is the thing that I mostly do not appreciate.

I have been using Control-M for the last one year.

In the last year, I have never seen Control-M environment lagging or crashing. Sometimes some servers are down, which is a different matter, but I do not have any experience in the last year where Control-M was down. Failover is a different consideration.

Control-M might be scalable because I remember in April of this year, I attended a roadshow for Control-M and there were very new features, including AI integration. All these features have already been released in April of this year. Seeing those features in Control-M, the AI integration and how easy it has made the job is impressive. For example, in simple English, I can type it down in my environment and jobs get started. With the help of AI, I can make scripts, and if a rerun is required for any particular job, I can do that just by using very simple English language. I would say it is scalable.

I have used multiple tools, but nothing similar to Control-M. I have used Dynatrace, I have used Splunk, I have used SCOM, but nothing similar to Control-M.

It was not very difficult to learn how to use Control-M. It was something new for me, a totally new thing. It was not that difficult. I started learning things, and it hardly took me three months from scratch to understand how things are working in Control-M.

Control-M was already deployed when I joined and started working.

Control-M provides automation workflows for the telecom environment. A specific example of how I use Control-M to automate workflows in my telecom environment includes application workflows such as billing, billing systems, infra setup, backup, storage, and requests, all of which are taken care of by Control-M.

With the 9.21 version of Control-M, I find quite good features with MFT and API integrations, as well as Azure and Kubernetes.

MFT has made the biggest difference for my team; it has been the main feature we are using as of now, with a lot of configurations with managed file transfer in place.

Having a secure file transfer is very crucial in today's world of cyber security threats; that is the additional part or the best functionality available with Control-M.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization by providing a platform to automate the workflows in complex environments while having data security in place, which has really helped the organization grow positively.

For Control-M to improve, the vendor support can be more improvised. If a solution is not existing, providing a patch for a vulnerability would be more helpful than always stating to move on to the higher version of the application.

I have been using Control-M for the past 13 years.

Control-M is stable.

Control-M's scalability is good.

Customer support is good.

We migrated from Autosys, CA Autosys to Control-M.

We switched to Control-M from Autosys because Control-M has better integration options and the GUI is far better.

My deployment took place around 14 years ago; it is a very old deployment that we are using, and we have been upgrading the system now and then.

The migration was smooth, so we were able to migrate on time and on budget without any disruptions.

We have around 1600 Control-M users in our organization for our particular license; the users vary from first level support to monitor jobs, some application users with browse access, and a few admin users.

A part of the admin team of Control-M, around 25 members, takes care of deployment and maintenance.

I do not have experience with the usage and investment calculations myself; however, discussing benefits, the employee count is reduced, and we can achieve quite a lot of FTE saving by having Control-M integrated.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing indicates that the pricing is on the higher side with respect to the license, but overall the tool is good.

We finalized Control-M without evaluating other options.

The biggest lesson I think I have learned from using Control-M is that the technology is vast, and we need to keep exploring, learning, and integrating more to ease out our life.

Control-M is used widely in our global environment; we have a licensing of around 75K, and currently, we do not plan to increase the usage.

I assess Control-M as a good tool for building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring production workflows; it is important for my DataOps and DevOps initiatives, but I have not explored DevOps deeply.

I assess Control-M as a good platform tool for modernizing and transforming our business; it removes human dependencies for mundane tasks and eases out the workload, which is easily possible with Control-M.

It is very crucial to free up IT personnel to focus on essential operations; this allows them to focus on the latest technologies and also implement POCs for the latest technology integrated with Control-M, which ultimately helps optimize the complete workflows.

I would advise others looking into using Control-M to explore Control-M. I rate this product an 8 out of 10.