Control-M Reviews

I lead a team of Control-M schedulers and operators, and I also do some scheduling myself. A specific example of a task or workflow I manage with Control-M is that I have re-engineered a monolithic script. The process I re-engineered was designed for printing invoices, specifically the invoices of EDP clients, which amounts to about eight million invoices per month.

To handle that scale with Control-M, I made changes by decomposing the monolithic script, which was made in shell scripting, into Control-M jobs, getting the complete workflow, a PDF, and transforming it into a Control-M workload. I do a lot of transformation from monolithic scripts or jobs that can be transformed into workloads within Control-M.

The best features Control-M offers include cross-platform dependency management, which is interesting because a job on the mainframe depends on a file arriving from a Unix system that, in turn, depends on a Windows process completing, and Control-M handles that heterogeneous dependency chain natively.

A time when this feature really made a difference for my team was when we had several workloads that are dependent on each other, using different platforms, and that interconnection between those platforms is really relevant to the whole process. There are more features that add value to Control-M, such as the calendar and condition system, which is really powerful to schedule almost to perfection many workloads that are critical for the business, whether in energy, insurance, banking, etc., because it maintains the logic.

Using the conditions allows me to create the re-engineering process that I have mentioned, which depends not only on the conditions but allows everything to run smoothly and on time. Tasks that in the original monolithic script would take about two hours now take at least fifty percent less time because it is more efficiently designed. The time savings were enabled mostly by parallelization, but not only that; I can adjust several aspects.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization because if some condition fails or if a calendar is incorrectly defined, a simple error in a condition can stop a critical workload, stop invoicing, and stop files that should go to the banking system.

Control-M can be improved with better integration with modern DevOps toolchains, as while it has made strides with APIs and the automation API, integration with tools such as JIRA and ServiceNow could be more seamless out of the box.

There is also a knowledge barrier that BMC should be aware of; Control-M has a steep learning curve for deep operational mastery, where basic administration is fairly accessible, but truly understanding the platform takes months to years for a new person, and BMC could invest more in advanced training and certification paths beyond the basics.

I have been using Control-M for more than twenty years, since around 1996.

Control-M is stable in my experience. I have worked with Control-M environments processing tens of thousands of jobs, and currently, we have around six thousand jobs in the energy company.

Control-M is used quite extensively; we execute around six thousand jobs a day, serving around seventy to eighty applications, and it is always growing, also serving many DevOps teams.

BMC support is generally competent for standard issues.

Before choosing Control-M, I always worked with it and know alternatives such as TWS, Autosys, and other platforms similar to Control-M, but I have never worked with them.

The ROI of Control-M in critical infrastructure is less about percentage savings and more about what does not fail, such as when a national payment system opens every morning on time, or when millions of transactions are processed without a missed dependency.

Control-M has premium pricing, which is justified for enterprise-scale operations, as we are paying for a platform with decades of maturity, proven reliability, and the capacity to handle complex orchestration scenarios that simpler tools cannot manage.

I have always worked with Control-M, first on banking systems and then on energy systems, and though I worked with other systems, Control-M was always present. We have many users in many different roles; there are maybe four or five administration roles along with operation roles.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Control-M is that it makes your life easier in dealing with batch processing, whether on mainframe or distributed servers, allowing you to define everything the way you want. I advise others looking into using Control-M to invest in people, not just the tool, emphasizing that a well-configured Control-M environment with experienced operators is essential for reliability.

Integrating Control-M with technologies for our data ops and DevOps processes can be difficult as technologies change. I would rate this review nine out of ten overall.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Control-M is our main orchestration software which drives the data loading process every day. Control-M performs exactly what it is supposed to do. There is no favorite part of it; it simply does its job. It runs a multitude of different job types and covers everything that we need to run efficiently.

We have moved to the SaaS solution recently, which has taken away some of the back-end admin burden from us. It is easy to understand and easy to monitor, and it operates at a 99% problem-free rate.

There is nothing that we are missing right now regarding Control-M. The product has more job types and plugins than we actually need. There are hundreds of them, but we use a dozen.

Integrating Control-M with technologies for our DataOps and DevOps processes as things change is covered. They have provided us comprehensive coverage. If we have a product which we need to integrate into the process, we can speak to the integrations team and they will endeavor to add that onto their map. Control-M covers everything that we have. They have hundreds of integrations and we only use approximately 15 of them. If we need to integrate something else, then we would speak to them directly and ask them to put it on the roadmap.

The speed and quality of support depend on who you get with Control-M. There are some people who are familiar with the product and have helped me before, and some of them are very good. Some of them I have not heard of before, so perhaps they are newer and not as experienced. The speed is a bit slow, but I also think that we get a different time zone of support engineers than others, so they are not in the same time zone. This does not help matters, and I have spoken to BMC about this. The main level one engineers and top-of-the-range engineers are based in Israel or South America. The speed of resolving issues or getting back to you is inconsistent, and the communication is not brilliant. This is one of the things we could identify as what we do not like about the product. The fact that their support engineers are placed all around the world does not offer the best speed of contact when you have a really serious issue. To be fair, we do not have many serious issues.

I experience that the lagging in our Singapore office is not very good for us because their data center is in Ireland, whereas where we are in Oslo it is absolutely fine. They do not have a data center where everything is synced in Asia. One of our offices is fine, but another office is not as good. This depends on where you are located. The Singapore office does a lot of work with this product every morning before we get into the office, and they have quite bad latency issues. This is an area where an improvement should be made.

Control-M does require maintenance on our end. Each server that runs the product, which runs the jobs, has an agent that needs to be patched and updated on a quarterly basis.

Regarding scalability, Control-M being a SaaS solution on AWS is fine. We do not have much need for thousands of servers to scale it to a huge size. We have a small operation, so it is absolutely fine for our scalability needs. You can scale it to what you need as it is all cloud-based. We do not have any need for extreme scaling.

I contact the technical support all the time. I would give the support of Control-M a seven out of ten.

I have not used any alternatives myself. I came into the company with Control-M in-house and have been using it ever since. We have not had any need to try anything else. Control-M is the only piece of orchestration software I have actually used.

The initial deployment of Control-M is a bit different for me since I transitioned from one service to another. I am not sure if things have changed because Control-M has two products: an on-premises solution and a SaaS solution. We had on-premises before I got to the company, and then I spent some time migrating to their SaaS solution. That was difficult because I was an early adopter, but apparently since then, things are a lot easier. It is not like a double-click an EXE file and off it goes. It is quite a complicated process. We have one hundred different vendor connections and various agents running on various servers in different AWS accounts. The product is complicated regarding what it is doing for us, but ultimately, it is a straightforward setup to get going. The configuring thereafter is probably the difficult bit.

BMC helped me with the migration. They had a migratory tool, but it was not the smoothest process to get through. We were constantly working together with their developers in order to get that right. That was in the early days and before I think I was one of the first client customers to migrate back in the day, which was over a couple of years ago. It was quite difficult at the time, but they were there helping out all the time. They had to have a happy customer and be able to say that we have a client in the Nordics where this software is extremely important, and they have migrated them to the SaaS solution. They were there from day one.

Control-M is very fair for us, particularly for our needs. We have a whole bunch of other products which are a lot more expensive and do less. The prices have not gone up for us for a long time even as it has become more complicated. I think it is a very fair price. There are different tiers you are paying for based on the number of jobs you use or the number of executions that you have. It is not a one-price-fits-all model. Everyone is paying what they use, which I think is very fair.

My relationship with BMC is transformative in a way. I was invited to their customer advisory board this year, where you go and tell them what they are doing wrong and how they can improve. They are always looking for clients to come in and assist them and help them improve. I think they have to do this in this day and age. Everything is moving so fast that if they do not work with their clients, their clients will leave. For everything regarding Control-M, I would give them a good eight out of ten. I would rate this review eight out of ten overall.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

The core purpose of Control-M is automation, workload automation, and job scheduling. We use it for cross-platform services including clouds such as AWS and GCP, along with different databases. We are dependent on each service, which gives us a clear understanding of our architecture. Control-M is very easy to use and easy to monitor.

We migrated to Control-M from services including some databases and some cloud services.

We use different scripts with Control-M following standard scripting practices. We also follow the agents approach by installing agents to our targeted machines. Additionally, we use the UI, which is very good. We log in using SSO. Control-M makes it very easy for ETL jobs, data pipelines, and everything else.

The main features of Control-M are the UI and the monitoring part. It has a very comprehensive UI and monitoring system. Control-M agents are another valuable feature, allowing us to run jobs on the target machine easily across any machines. Enterprise-level support is also a very good feature.

We use different scripts with Control-M following standard scripting practices. We follow the agents approach by installing agents to our targeted machines. The UI is very good, and we log in using SSO.

Control-M has saved us a lot of time and effort. Previously, it reduced the human touch and manual work significantly. It has brought substantial changes to our organization.

Control-M is a very sophisticated tool overall. The main issue is that there are some RBAC issues related to improper access control. There is no clear role defined, though there are some operator and admin kinds of roles. Control-M should integrate some primitive roles or define them better. In short, there should be very minor permissions so that roles can be properly defined for users.

Another suggestion regarding Control-M is that there should be more automation APIs. Since we are mostly dependent on automation and do not rely heavily on the UI, we need additional automation APIs for triggering jobs, fetching status, and similar functions.

I have been using Control-M for more than four years.

Control-M is very stable. During more than four years of use, it has remained reliable and stable. I would rate it 10 out of 10 for stability.

Control-M has significant scalability. I would rate it 9 out of 10 for scalability.

Technical support for Control-M is very good. The support team helps us considerably. Even when we were new to Control-M, they assisted us greatly with any integration issues or other concerns.

Compared to other vendors, Control-M has many features that are very helpful. The features are defined rather than broad level. We know there are many other solutions in the market, but we were previously using Azure Data Factory. Control-M has significant advantages in that it is simple to use, and anyone can operate it.

Control-M requires maintenance, but very little. Maintenance for Control-M is easier compared to other solutions.

The deployment of Control-M was easier, and we received support from the Control-M team. The deployment of Control-M took approximately one to two months.

The deployment of Control-M was easier, and we received support from the Control-M team. The BMC service team helped us map out our migration strategy and served as our architects.

There were some challenges, but I can say the migration to Control-M was easy overall.

Control-M has reduced our work by more than 35%.

Pricing for Control-M is at a medium level. I cannot say it is cheap or high.

I would recommend Control-M. We were also using Airflow, and there is a very significant difference in our workforce and environments when comparing the two solutions.

I give Control-M an overall rating of 9 out of 10. More than 30 developers are using Control-M in our organization. My relationship with BMC is more transactional in nature. We are currently customers, and we plan to become partners.

Public Cloud

My main use case for Control-M is to control the batch for the day by scheduling the jobs, ensuring that all jobs run on time, and verifying that all conditions are met. Sometimes I force complete the jobs or rerun failed jobs by fixing the JCLs, and I ensure all batches are completed on time and all SLAs are met.

A specific example of a batch process I manage with Control-M is a weekly job which runs from Monday to Friday on all working days, and I ensure the job is completed on time. I also verify that if any files are pending to process which that job needs, the file is available so that the job can run once the file is available. Such scenarios are common in my work.

Regarding my main use case, I work on automation and ensure that there are no human errors. Everything we use is up to date, and we make sure to follow the SOPs perfectly.

Control-M offers several best features, including its user-friendliness. Compared to TWS and CA 7, Control-M is a tool wherein if you get training for 10 to 12 days, you can learn almost everything, and it is very good and simple to use.

What makes Control-M user-friendly for me is that we connect through the client interface, which is easy to log in to, and there is no downtime for it. Control-M is only recycled weekly. It is straightforward to define and monitor the jobs and to get insights from the zoom panel. The coloring shows us in yellow if a job is executing, red if it has failed, and other colors for different conditions, making it simple.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization, especially when new team members join as their first assignment. It is a tool we can explain quickly, giving them a few sessions to work in production or development environments faster compared to other tools like CA 7 or TWS.

In our organization, we work for a banking client where we handle 10,000 jobs running on Control-M daily. Managing those jobs would be difficult with other tools due to visibility issues. With Control-M, it is easier to manage workloads and handle abends, and the chances of missing things are significantly less compared to command-based tools like CA 7.

Control-M can be improved in several areas. Last week when creating a job, I found that the option for global conditions could be more streamlined, as well as the in and out conditions, which are a bit complicated. Integrating more AI options, such as automatically marking jobs that are known to fail as complete, would be beneficial.

I have been using Control-M for the last 16 years.

Control-M is 100% stable.

Regarding scalability, I would say it is good and there are always possibilities for scalability.

Customer support from BMC, who owns Control-M, is excellent. They provide good support for critical issues, and I would rate it 99% out of 100.

Positive

I have experience working on CA 7 and TWS. While CA 7 is a good tool, Control-M is better due to its simplicity and less complicated nature.

To deploy Control-M, I would say two resources would be sufficient for proper installation and defining architecture, security levels, and access control.

In our team, approximately 24 users utilize Control-M, with 15 members working 24/7 for batch operations and nine members focusing on scheduling tasks during business hours.

Regarding return on investment, training a resource on Control-M allows them to handle two or three clients at the same time, thus saving costs for the company and making it easier to train.

Those things are managed by the sales team. I do not have much visibility regarding pricing, setup cost, or licensing.

We evaluated Jobtrac, CA 7, and TWS before making our decision.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Control-M is time management, reliability, and the tool's availability, which makes our work easier.

I advise that if you have banking or insurance requirements or operate in a small industry, you can definitely consider Control-M as your first option.

I provided this review with an overall rating of 10 out of 10.

On-premises

Other

We are a service provider company using Control-M for implementation for other companies and our customers. We are a partner of BMC and work closely with our SIs, direct customers, and BMC. We operate as a reseller, partner, and service provider, offering both services and professional services.

When we enter the environment of any customer using Control-M, we understand their processes, how they are performing them manually or with other tools they are using. We gain a deep understanding of what processes they are running, what manual interventions are required, and what notifications or automation is needed. Accordingly, from the Control-M perspective, it is very easy to translate these processes into Control-M jobs. Control-M jobs have advanced-level scheduling options available, and we can create multiple dependencies in multiple ways. This makes it very helpful to schedule jobs, configure jobs, and monitor jobs.

From a single control panel in Control-M, we can control all enterprise-level processes. We can administer, monitor, and control all processes, which is the basic feature of Control-M. Beyond that, we have MFT and multiple integrations available. We can control each data pipeline with no limit from the enterprise level and no limit on integrations because BMC continues to add out-of-the-box integrations. If any customized integration is required for any application, we can use the Automation API and create the jobs.

Control-M makes this very easy. Out-of-the-box integrations and Control-M modules are available through which we can connect to DataOps and data pipelines.

Every application in any organization uses multiple applications. In the enterprise-level companies where we work with customers, they are running hundreds of applications. Each application has its own scheduler. For example, MS SQL application has its own scheduler, SAP application has its own scheduler. For normal scripts or processes, you have cron jobs on Linux systems and task scheduler on Windows systems. These schedulers are sufficient to run their processes in themselves, but they operate in silos. Control-M helps in bringing these different silos and platforms onto a single console where we can configure, monitor, and control all enterprise-level applications in a single platform. You do not need to have multiple application schedulers and teams to manage these applications in silos separately. A single Control-M monitoring team can monitor all application operations, which drastically reduces operational cost.

In one project where we migrated from JAMS Workload Automation to Control-M SaaS, I saw that application had a workflow designer on the left panel where you could drag and drop each logic piece and it would be created in their system. That feature is something I would like to see in Control-M.

Control-M is on the costlier side. When we try to sell it, it should be to a large enterprise company where they have a budget for automation. Otherwise, small companies use their in-house automation scripts to run their small jobs and do not want to invest in this costly product. It depends on the volume of jobs and the size and scale of the organization. Control-M is only applicable when it is suitable for them.

I have been using Control-M for almost ten years.

I rate the stability of Control-M as nine. I am leaving one point just for the scope of improvement. Otherwise, I have never seen any instability in the platform in my ten years.

Scalability with Control-M is again nine. I am leaving one point just for the scope of improvement. Otherwise, I have never seen any instability in the platform in my ten years.

I rate the technical support of Control-M as seven out of ten.

Whenever we contact BMC support for Control-M, they ask for logs and then take their own time to analyze them. They have software that does the analysis for logs and provides the output, but the time they take to analyze these things can be painful when trying to close open issues. We are working in the customer environment and the customer expects issues to be closed as early as possible. Sometimes it depends on BMC and it takes time. The turnaround time should be minimized.

Control-M has a simple setup. You just need to understand the process. It is based on the logic of the process which is running in the back end. If you understand the logic, then it is very easy to create in Control-M.

The ease of setup depends on the team working on it. If you have the expertise, it is easy; otherwise it will be complex.

We have a team of twenty people working on BMC products including Control-M.

Our relationship with BMC is both transformative and transactional. For the transactional purpose, we work as a reseller selling their licenses. From the transformation perspective, we provide services for consultation and implementation, and we conduct POCs for them.

I will absolutely recommend Control-M. I rate Control-M as nine out of ten from a product perspective, and I give this review an overall rating of nine.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

My main use case for Control-M is serving as a Control-M admin user where I manage Control-M, schedule jobs in it, and maintain the execution and troubleshooting of the jobs.

A specific example of a job I schedule with Control-M includes scheduling SAP jobs, MFT jobs, FT jobs, OS jobs, and Informatica jobs. I schedule many jobs on Control-M for different asset teams.

I have automated many things that were running on Jenkins to Control-M and deployed many automation parts for the scheduling team and admin team into the Control-M domain.

The best features that Control-M offers in my experience include a very easy scheduling component, a highly interactive GUI interface, and a variety of job types that I had never seen in different tools, including competitor tools of Control-M, such as AutoSys, TWS, Tivoli, or Dollar Universe. Control-M is a very easy tool, and it is easy to learn and easy to deploy.

While the scheduling is easy and the GUI is interactive, I find that the setting of jobs and setting up a feature is very easy, and the deployment and promotion of jobs is very straightforward in Control-M.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization by helping us automate many manual things specific to the development team.

The main positive impact of Control-M includes time savings; we have automated many manual things that usually take six to seven hours, and now it is taking less than thirty minutes to one hour. We have reduced our time by almost fifty percent to eighty percent.

Control-M can be improved with a dashboard that should show the job execution time, output, and execution time, including start time and end time, for at least a year, so we could monitor everything on a single dashboard, similar to what can be created on Power BI, which could be integrated with Control-M.

While the functionality of Control-M is very easy already, there is not much to do in the feature part, but the dashboard part showing the Control-M backend could be improved.

I have been using Control-M for ten years.

In my experience, Control-M is very stable.

Control-M's scalability has been good, as it has met my organization's needs as we have grown; the load balancer and load scheduling are very fine.

The customer support for Control-M is very efficient and very fast.

Previously, we were using AutoSys, but we switched to Control-M because AutoSys is more difficult than Control-M, primarily because the GUI is very interactive in Control-M.

I have seen a return on investment from Control-M, which includes it being a money-saver and a time-saver.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Control-M has shown that compared to different scheduling tools, Control-M is definitely a cheaper option, and the licensing part is actually very convenient compared to other tools.

Before choosing Control-M, we evaluated other options including Dollar Universe, TWS Tivoli, and AutoSys, and then we decided to move to Control-M.

Around one thousand users are using Control-M in my organization, with most of them coming from asset teams or different application teams, while around one hundred are from scheduling, operations, and administration.

I require about ten to fifteen staff specifically for the deployment and maintenance of Control-M, and their roles include consultant, scheduler, or administrator.

Control-M is currently used very extensively in my organization, and we do have plans to bring different asset teams onboard on Control-M, as we are helping them with ideas and features of Control-M.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Control-M is that automation is very easy, and we can deploy almost anything into Control-M.

Integrating Control-M with technologies for my DataOps and DevOps processes has been easy, particularly with AWS and different Linux platforms.

It has not been a specific challenge to integrate Control-M with those different Linux platforms or other technologies, as Control-M already has a feature to integrate multiple types of jobs, making it easy.

My advice to others looking into using Control-M is that I would definitely suggest it because its features are very good.

I have given Control-M an overall rating of eight out of ten.

Private Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

My main use case for Control-M is scheduling jobs and maintaining the EM server and the Control-M server, along with giving support to the asset team on troubleshooting of job failures.

We typically schedule OS jobs and AFT jobs in Control-M, and we also have SAP jobs and Informatica jobs running on Control-M.

Regarding my main use cases with Control-M, we are scheduling jobs for the asset team and maintaining the architecture of Control-M.

Control-M offers several great features, with scheduling jobs being a very good feature, while the GUI feature is user-friendly and makes scheduling jobs very easy, saving a lot of time compared to other scheduling tools.

The GUI helps my team day-to-day by making job scheduling very easy, as we can use planning tabs or the back-end of the job through drag and drop, and after adding a few job details, we are ready to proceed. The monitoring tab is also very useful for monitoring daily or scheduled jobs, and the forecast feature is excellent for predicting how jobs will execute in the future.

The reporting feature serves us well for extracting reports on job executions and past executions.

Control-M has positively impacted our organization as we have saved a lot of time and money by utilizing its features, which we found to be very convenient compared to other workload automation tools.

We are saving a lot of time as earlier we had numerous manual activities that usually took four to five hours to perform, and since automating those tasks in Control-M, we now execute them within two hours, effectively saving two hours per batch execution.

The reporting feature has limitations with job execution, and I believe there should be integration with Power BI or any visualization tool to provide a detailed summary of each job instance on a single dashboard.

Control-M could have more types of jobs that could be integrated with it, but for now, the features are adequate.

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

Control-M is stable in both production and non-production environments.

Control-M's scalability is convenient, easy to use, and flexible with various integrations.

The customer support for Control-M is convenient, providing us with 24/7 assistance for architecture and job execution issues.

Previously, we were using AutoSys, but we found AutoSys not user-friendly based on feedback from the asset team, prompting us to switch to Control-M, which is better suited for our organization.

Control-M is deployed in my organization on a private cloud.

We use AWS as our cloud provider.

We require around five to six staff for the deployment and maintenance of Control-M, all of whom are Control-M admins assisting in deploying Control-M for various asset teams and maintaining their services.

We have seen a return on investment due to money and time saved as we automate tasks in Control-M, allowing us to reduce staff numbers as well.

The pricing for Control-M is genuinely fair compared to other workload automation tools in the market, and its features add value, making us satisfied with its pricing structure.

We evaluated AutoSys before choosing Control-M as our solution.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using Control-M is that automation is very convenient, with workload automation and job scheduling being easy and maintaining jobs in Control-M being very manageable.

My advice for others considering Control-M is that it is definitely a reliable option since it is convenient, flexible, and stable.

Control-M is extensively used as we have deployed it for many asset teams, and we plan to increase its usage as we are in discussions with different teams to migrate their manual activities into Control-M.

I would rate this review as a nine out of ten.

Private Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

My use case with Control-M is for job automation and job scheduling. Instead of making 10 different technologies where we need to run jobs, automation allows us to reduce the number of people needed. Cost-cutting is significant; instead of 10 people, we can handle the work with only one or two people.

The best features in Control-M that I like the most are job scheduling and monitoring.

Earlier, I worked for many clients, and currently I am working for Zurich, Japan. There, we used different vendors such as Infosys, Cognizant, DXC Technologies, and two others. The project operates 24/7 as an insurance project where transactions happen during daytime, so we need to run jobs during nighttime as well to upload data, take backups, and complete other necessary tasks. Instead of managing this manually, I have automated everything related to job scheduling and job configuration.

The areas that have room for improvement are the GUI to make it more user-friendly. The interface is very easy, very good, and secure. Currently, I have not found any significant improvements needed. Every year the versions improve, and everything is progressing well.

I have been working with Control-M for almost 16 years.

Control-M is a stable product, and I would rate it 10 as a stable product.

The scalability is an eight out of 10. It is easy to upscale or downscale.

I can give the technical support a nine out of 10.

Positive

With Control-M, I compare the solution with other solutions I have worked on such as TWS (Tivoli Workload Scheduler), CA7, AutoSys, Tivoli DC (Tivoli Workload Dynamic Schedule), and Job Scheduling Console. I find that Control-M is more secure compared with the firewall system.

Deployment is very easy with no issues.

For the clients, they have to buy licenses, which are reasonable.

With Control-M, I would recommend implementing this product. It is a more secure solution.

The solution requires easy maintenance because most of the time we take care of it on weekends like Saturday and Sunday, or during public holidays.

There is nothing difficult about integration. It is very easy to integrate technologies for data ops and DevOps processes.

Currently, I am taking care of almost 10,000 jobs in an insurance company.

I would assess the BMC service team for helping map out migration as effective. For migrations, we perform them in development first. We configure the jobs in development, then move to SAT testing, UAT testing, and ST testing, and then to pre-production and production. If there are more jobs, we do migrations on weekends, on Saturday and Sunday, or at midnight one day before.

Deployment takes approximately one or two days and depends on the job types. Installing Control-M can take up to one or two days maximum. For scheduling, we need to configure different agents in different vendor systems such as UNIX systems, Informatica systems, or Tandem systems. For these configurations, we need to install the agents and define them in Control-M.

To make the solution a 10, there could be more automation. I would rate this review overall as a 9.

Public Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

My main use case for Control-M is scheduling jobs, monitoring the jobs, and monitoring application scripts that are working fine or not through Control-M, along with doing some automation. File transfer is the core focus of my main use case, while we have some other SAP jobs that trigger the job at a certain time frame from a SAP point of view.

The best features Control-M offers are ease of use, with everything very clear, including the agent-less scenarios, the Control-M Configuration Manager which provides a detailed view, and a very user-friendly scheduling system.

Ease of use in Control-M means we have everything on the GUI, so we do not have to jump to different locations to find out the issue or problem; we can find everything on a single screen and for scheduling, it has all the options needed, you just need to know the basics to figure out anything you want to do.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization greatly as we are running more than 5,000 jobs, including around 5,000 MFT jobs that transfer files from SharePoint to another server or between servers, helping us automate manual processes and reduce timeframes. Previously, while doing file transfers, we had to check for at least a two-hour timeline, but now through Control-M, we do it automatically with no manual intervention, reducing it to 45 minutes.

I believe Control-M can be improved as there is news about shutting down its GUI; I believe the GUI is more impactful than the web version, so continuing to use the GUI would be more useful. In addition to the GUI changes, introducing more types of jobs, such as for cloud usage, would be more helpful and versatile.

I have been using Control-M for more than six years now.

Control-M is stable.

Control-M's scalability is good; it was a very easy process and did not require much work.

The customer support for Control-M is great.

Positive

Previously, we used Cisco Tidal but switched to Control-M due to limitations with Tidal, such as agent-less scenarios not working properly and missing functionalities.

We have two teams using Control-M: L1, which monitors job failures and takes requests from application teams to run certain jobs, and L2, which is responsible for scheduling jobs and configuring agents from Control-M, along with L3, which creates the environments.

We require an L3 team of three people for deployment and maintenance; they mainly take care of deployments and maintenance without taking much time due to the guidelines provided by BMC, with roles including SMEs and Control-M administration experts.

I have seen a return on investment, as the MFT jobs reduce the time frame from two hours to 45 minutes, allowing us to utilize that time for other platforms, technologies, or automation processes.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing of Control-M is that it is very minimal and optimal, making the cost good.

My advice to others looking into using Control-M is to go for it without any hesitation or questions, as you will not regret it due to the many options for automation and the time frame reduction along with reduced manual efforts. I would rate this review at 9 out of 10.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I have multiple use cases in Control-M. I have used MFT, SAP R/3, SAP BW, the File Watcher, the Informatica module, and OS scripts. I have used almost most of the modules in Control-M.

I have worked with multiple companies over the past eight years. In one of the companies, we are the partner, and in one of the companies, currently we are the customer for Control-M.

In Control-M, what I appreciate the most is the visualization and the orchestration it provides to us. I have used other scheduling tools also, such as Autosys and cron jobs. Control-M has multiple features, including one in the MFT where we can perform seamless file transfer. I have not seen this kind of file transfer without a script, with just the help of a GUI. We can perform the file transfer with multiple domains, multiple platforms, and multiple servers. I feel this is excellent. We can even integrate Control-M to ServiceNow, where it is a ticketing partner. If the job fails, it will directly create incidents, P2, P1, and so on. The integration is seamless. I really appreciate these features in Control-M.

Year on year, I am seeing upgradations from Control-M. Earlier when I started my career, I was using Control-M version 7. The GUI was adequate. However, now every year, they have upgraded their tool. They have even released the web version of Control-M with browse-only access for others. I am purely the scheduler and administrator of Control-M. Control-M is my day-to-day activity. I go to clients to gather business requirements and pitch how we can integrate Control-M into their processes. I can see that Control-M is performing well. We have seen many new features. Recently, they have integrated AWS where we are performing file transfer directly from AWS S3 to other partners. I feel this is a good tool, and they are evolving. They are enabling us to evolve better as well.

I can say around twenty to twenty-five percent productivity increase has been realized, and even the margins have been increased. The resources have also been reduced with the integration of Control-M to other ticketing tools and other systems. I can see at least fifteen to twenty percent of the company's revenue has been increased at the infrastructure level by using Control-M.

With DevOps, I feel it is somewhat challenging. We have to use Control-M APIs. I do not see a simple drag and drop interface, similar to what we use for Control-M job creation. It is not that straightforward when we have to integrate with other APIs such as Git and other partners for DevOps, Snowflake, and all. I do not see it is that easy, but we can integrate. We need an API that is more user-friendly. I suggest that BMC provides plug-and-play APIs so that we can integrate with multiple applications.

In Control-M, the area that needs improvement is related to the cost. I have checked with other customers, and the licensing cost is somewhat heavy compared to other competitors. A few of the customers are transitioning away from Control-M because those tools are not yet as sophisticated. However, due to the cost and purchasing structure in their businesses, they are moving towards other tools. I recommend BMC to reduce the licensing cost. That is one of the major drawbacks of BMC. Regarding maintenance, I have heard that in the SaaS model, they are only performing administrative functions. However, the current three-layer architecture of BMC is somewhat complex. For beginners, they will not understand the Enterprise Manager, the Control-M servers, and the Control-M agent points. If BMC integrates Control-M EM and the servers in one part of the architecture, it will be helpful. It will make it easier for everyone to use Control-M.

I have been using Control-M for the past eight to nine years.

I can rate the stability an eight. I do not see many unstable issues. I can say it is most of the time stable. If it is unstable, it is because of our Control-M server issue, not the BMC issue. Due to the high CPU utilization of our servers or any kind of network issues within our internal on-premises servers, it will go down. However, I do not see any issues from BMC.

I can rate the scalability one hundred percent. It is a scalable solution. However, at the end of the day, it is a matter of licensing cost, whatever we are paying to BMC. They are charging upwards of fifty dollars per job or twenty-nine thousand dollars per year. It is a scalable solution.

My impressions of BMC as a strategic partner or a trusted advisor are positive. They are prompt in providing solutions. Whenever we have a P1 or P2 incident raised to BMC, they will mostly resolve it within the ETA. A few things they still need to upgrade. They will send those queries to their R&D, and they will get back to us. However, overall, with the licensing or with customer interaction or those kinds of things, we can trust them for a few more years.

I can rate the technical support a seven. I rate it a seven because a few of the technical staff who attend to our queries do not have the knowledge about major issues. If there is any major impact or major issue, they will also not know about it. They will say they will check with R&D and they will get back. The ETA will be somewhat high for P2s and P3s. Only for P1s, they will come on the call and they will try to resolve. I cannot say they are the worst or the best. They are adequate.

Positive

I one hundred percent recommend Control-M to our customers, the clients, and the multiple companies I have worked with. I will recommend BMC as an advanced scheduling tool for orchestration. There are areas of improvements for BMC as well. As the trend is going towards AI now, I have heard they are working on it, but we have not seen that in our versions of Control-M. However, as the trend is going towards more AI and generative AI, if they release anything related to AI in Control-M, such as a chatbot or something where if a job fails, a chatbot can tell how it has failed, that would be beneficial. We are spending half an hour to one hour to find the root cause of how a Control-M job has failed. If they do something about it, that would help significantly. We have multiple AI solutions coming up. If we can schedule those AI solutions through Control-M as well, it will be at par with the industry standards now. Otherwise, it will become legacy. I recommend this to all my customers because I feel this is one of the best advanced scheduling tools I have used. I can see very few competitors to Control-M as of now.

The solution was a partner purchase from one of the clients I am working for. They have purchased it. We also have an AWS module they have purchased from BMC.

The deployment has presented challenges a few times due to the compatibility issues of Control-M software with the other servers. It might be due to the Java version or some glitch in the patches we are receiving from BMC. A few times it is challenging. It is not straightforward. We need experienced resources or a proper administrator to redeploy this kind of thing.

My current relationship with BMC is both transformative and transactional. I am involved in both the licensing and technology upgrades. Recently, I have attended one of their roadshow events in Bengaluru. We are constantly in touch with the BMC customer. They have one dedicated customer support manager for our team. We will be in touch with them for any of the features or any cost or anything related to renewal of the licenses and everything.

My organization has more than one hundred employees. In only one office, it is one hundred. If I consider my overall company who are using Control-M, it is around one thousand plus employees using Control-M.

I have provided this review with an overall rating of seven.