Control-M Reviews

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.

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.

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

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google

Control-M is used as a job scheduler. Initially, when started, it was more or less used as a batch scheduler. It has evolved over time so much that even the name has been changed to Control-M Workload Automation, which completely justifies its name. It is not just a scheduler anymore; it does many more things than just a scheduler.

Control-M, especially, is quick to the market with all the new products that are coming up, be it the integrations or the capabilities that are emerging. Any new technology that comes up in any stream such as AWS or Azure or GCP is addressed quickly. Control-M is very fast to the market when compared to other schedulers or other vendors where they develop these integrations and the rapid release of these integrations. The target is around three to five integration releases within a month, which is best in the market. The support that is received when a case is raised is really quick and very helpful when compared to others.

The best features of Control-M are highlighted by its GUI, which is a game-changer because it is so user-friendly. Any person who is logging into Control-M for the first time will know what each option or the parameter is. It is so self-explained, eye-catching, and very easy to use. Currently, Control-M is moving away from the thick client to the web client, which also maintains the same user-friendliness. Another key feature is that it keeps up to the market standards with respect to security, compliance, and everything. All the capabilities are available, and it is just a drag and drop of each to create jobs. In this DevOps world, integration with the DevOps pipelines is possible where job creation can be automated as well.

It is very easy to integrate technologies for DataOps and DevOps processes as things change, not only for DevOps processes but for any other tools in the market. There are more than 100 plus integrations that are already built within Control-M where you can just drag and drop to create and have a centralized view of all these jobs, be it ETL jobs, data lake jobs, or ADF jobs. Adding these dependencies and having a centralized view is something that Control-M thrives on. If any issues are faced during this process, the support model and documentation around it are very clear and abstract.

Control-M has helped businesses positively, especially when started as a scheduler without exploring most of the modules that were available. Over the last eight years, the first benefit was that when integrating with a DevOps process to maintain version control, a client had an in-built macro or PowerShell script which was incompatible when the version was upgraded. Standardizing it using the Workflow Change Manager, which promotes jobs between environments, was suggested. Control-M's Application Integrator helps to create custom job types rather than using in-built job types, which helped develop around 150 or 200 jobs with that approach. Control-M also offers a conversion tool that allows conversion of jobs from other tools to Control-M without requiring costly professional services.

There are areas for improvement, especially with the transition from the thick client to the web GUI. While Control-M's main game-changer is its GUI, the current web interface is less user-friendly than the thick client. A Windows client option should be maintained for flexibility, as it caters to users who prefer different interfaces.

Control-M has been used for 15 years.

Control-M as a tool is very stable. However, stability can be affected by how the environment is set up, including network stability, storage, and database factors. Control-M itself is robust, and it would receive a rating of 10.

Control-M is a scalable solution, and its scalability would receive a rating of 10.

When a case is raised, the response that is received is really quick and very helpful when compared to others.

Positive

Conversion of jobs from other scheduling tools to Control-M has been done. Jobs have been converted from Dollar Universe and TWS, IWS Maestro as they call it, to Control-M. There is working experience on Maestro and Dollar Universe as well.

Deploying Control-M is straightforward; as long as you know how to deploy it, the first attempt may be more difficult compared to subsequent ones. Documentation and support are readily available, making the overall process easy.

Compared to other vendors, Control-M is quite costly. However, all good things come with a good cost. The features, speed to the market, and quality justify the higher expense. Control-M may need to rethink how to make it more cost-effective because while many clients appreciate the tool and its features, the current economic climate and desire for cost optimization lead some clients to consider other options that may solely meet their scheduling requirements at a lower cost.

Control-M does require maintenance, especially for the VMs in both on-prem and Azure environments, which need to be patched regularly. A separate team handles automated patching, and there is a move away from on-prem to have everything on a single cloud instance.

Maintenance is easy overall; applying patches does not take much time. The technical aspect of upgrading or patching is minimal, but the process around it can take longer. Gathering concurrence from job owners for downtime and executing the patching process usually takes time, even though the actual installation is quick.

Control-M would be recommended if you are looking for a scheduling or workload automation solution and are not overly concerned with cost but want to utilize features to enhance your estate and maintain a centralized view. This review has been given an overall rating of 9.

Other

Microsoft Azure

My main business use case supported by Control-M is performance data generation, which includes all orchestration jobs and workflow processes.

The feature I appreciate most about Control-M is the capability of scheduling jobs automatically, as the dependency and control runs all tasks automatically by themselves.

I value this feature because it frees up a significant amount of time from my daily work, allowing me to concentrate on other more manual tasks.

Control-M supports my DataOps and DevOps initiatives by automating the entire process through the dependency and successor logic.

The biggest return on investment for me when using Control-M is that it helps me automate the manual tasks of my daily work.

My company has achieved measurable benefits with Control-M through automation, which has improved delivery and reduced the possible manual errors that a human can make.

I think Control-M can be improved because we recently moved to Helix, the cloud control, and the latency of the application is substantial; the job is running in the background, but the UI side is very slow on the front end.

Control-M integrates with new or changing technologies within my DataOps or DevOps stack well; the cloud improvement is positive, but now that AI is a significant topic, it could incorporate more AI features. Although they do have some AI functionality in the cloud applications, it is not particularly useful and intuitive.

If I were to estimate the improvement percentage, I would say around seventy percent.

I have been using Control-M for six years.

After moving to the cloud solution, I believe Control-M is much more stable; we have been using it for around two years, and I do not see any downtime. On the cloud solution, I do not observe any downtime; however, on-premises, sometimes the server is not up and the agent is not running.

In terms of scalability, I believe Control-M works well for the work I am performing, around eight or ten because we are heavily using it for morning tasks, data preparation, and preparations early in the morning for the day.

BMC customer service and technical support typically assist us; we usually speak to the relationship manager to raise any concerns or issues that we find, and so far, we still receive the answers we need, although the response may not be as immediate as we expect.

I would rate the customer service and technical support a seven out of ten.

Positive

My company considered switching to other solutions once and attempted to source alternatives, but we ultimately decided to stick with BMC.

The overall experience with the deployment process of Control-M depends on whether we are discussing the application itself or the creation of the job.

I would describe Control-M's performance in building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring workflows as quite good; I have previously used other orchestration tools, and I believe Control-M has much better visualization of workflows in terms of scheduling jobs.

I use Control-M to orchestrate workloads across multiple environments; we have a stream of workflows that connects to AWS, then SQL Server, and our in-house applications and so on, creating a large web of workflows across different kinds of applications.

Control-M handles complex data pipelines and analytics processes mostly through the designer that designs the workflow; we put the complex logic there, and it serves more as a tooling for us to use than Control-M handling all of this.

The creation and automation of data pipelines across on-premises and cloud technologies with Control-M is quite good; so far, I have no complaints with that. Between the on-premises and cloud, we have one less concern about how the application processes on the cloud, but on-premises, we have more freedom in accessing the database and some backend functionality.

My advice for someone or other companies considering Control-M is to check their business requirements and see what Control-M can actually offer because they do have many plugins for different kinds of usage, so it totally depends on what the company wants.

I would rate this review eight out of ten overall.

In day-to-day life, we are currently using Control-M as a workload automation tool, which provides the solution of scheduling jobs, file transfers, and cloud infrastructure jobs.

We use Control-M to get the start/stop status of a VM and to start or stop any VM with the help of Control-M and Azure VM plugins. We are also using Azure Functions and Azure Resource Group managers.

Control-M has a centralized GUI and includes many supportive plugins through cloud infrastructure and file transfer plugins.

One valuable feature is the centralized connection profile, which allows us to browse all connection profiles in a single point of view, despite a specific agent. We can browse through an EM level. The integrated Azure cloud profiles enable us to get the status of our VMs or to stop or start a specific VM without accessing the Azure portal.

Control-M has positively impacted our organization as we transition from legacy systems. We have configured around 70,000 jobs and are currently migrating all jobs from the legacy system to cloud infrastructure. Control-M helps us manage all file backup processes and batch process management, which people previously performed manually. By using Control-M, they are now able to perform these activities in an automated manner.

Control-M has definitely reduced the time required for job execution. Since we had 70,000 jobs that people were performing manually before Control-M, they are now specifically scheduled and available as on-demand jobs. They can run the jobs whenever they want, which has helped us reduce the time span and the manual efforts people spend on these tasks.

The configuration process could be improved as it is a lengthy, complex process. The installation might be simplified.

Additionally, the BMC support process might be streamlined. The complexity of the setup and the delayed support we receive from BMC are areas for improvement.

I have been using Control-M for seven years.

Control-M is stable. We are using the HA environment, so we are satisfied with the high availability.

In our organization, around 2,000 to 3,000 people are using Control-M, and they have many roles depending upon the application.

The BMC support process might be streamlined.

The configuration process could be improved as it is a lengthy, complex process. The installation might be simplified.

A total of 25 staff members are required for deployment and maintenance. In the organization, they are segregated as a manager, deputy manager, assistant manager, or senior supervisor.

I would suggest using Control-M because it provides vast capability with much more integration with cloud and native technology. Control-M should be considered by others looking for workload automation solutions.

The support requirements depend on the deployment capabilities. Whether it is a large deployment or a small deployment depends upon the deployment criteria and its size.

Since our company policy prevents us from using any external AI, I am not able to comment on its AI capability. We have not yet used Control-M AI, so for this reason we are not able to provide any comment on this functionality.

Some parts of Control-M are configured in a private cloud and some are in our on-premises environment. This constitutes a hybrid deployment. We have been using Control-M from the initial days. I would rate this solution a 7 overall.

Hybrid Cloud

Microsoft Azure

In our project, we are using Control-M for job scheduling and monitoring. We have data workflows and many other components that we can manage from a business point of view. We can manage processes across on-premises and all kinds of environments.

Control-M is the easiest tool available because we can accomplish what we want. We can automate processes and reduce manpower, which is the primary benefit. We can manage all workflows across different cloud environments with the help of batch scheduling, automating, and controlling jobs. It is easy to handle if you are confident with scheduling and related components. We can improve Service Level Agreements and SLA management.

Integrations are available through API and Control-M automation API to build, run, and manage workflows. We can integrate with CI/CD pipelines. As an automation solution, Control-M provides cost and licensing benefits that are good for our ownership considerations. Flexibility is also available. Job failure monitoring includes email notifications and alerts. Some users feel that the interfaces, both web and desktop, could be more streamlined.

IBM workload automation is another tool, but we are satisfied while using Control-M and comparing it to other solutions. IBM is primarily suited for mainframe integrations only, whereas Control-M is a workload automation platform where we can implement job as code and use it easily.

Deployment and agent upgrades are straightforward with Control-M. If you want to upgrade one agent version or the client version, Control-M is easier to manage compared to other tools. If we have Java capabilities, we can easily perform these upgrades. Moving to Oracle 19c would be beneficial. TLS protocols are in place while fixing vulnerabilities. TLS 1.2 and higher versions are good, and we could upgrade to TLS 1.3 for better security.

From a security perspective, communication protocols like TLS are available. SAP optimization would be beneficial if possible. Improving the overall application path would enhance the solution further.

We have been using Control-M for four years.

We experience all kinds of stability issues, and they are difficult to manage.

Compared to all other tools, the scalability is moderate only.

We are receiving all the good support we need. Even when we encounter issues with vulnerabilities that we cannot fix internally, the vendor provides excellent response times and support. Everything has been positive.

Positive

We have used other vendors in the past, including solutions from Azure, AWS, and Salesforce.

We have achieved nearly 30% return on investment.

Nearly 100 users are using Control-M in our organization. We previously used BMC Eclipse, which is a Software as a Service solution, for three years. Control-M has enabled us to transition from mainframe to the cloud environment with Azure. We are using this on a video conference basis. My overall rating for Control-M is 8 out of 10.

Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is extensively used by our clients mainly in the BFSI sector, where we see around 5,000 to 10,000 file transfers for a few critical customers. We use it for data from their vendors who provide inputs for their end clients, including insurance agents who provide data in these files, facilitating both B2B and B2C processes.

Regarding the usability of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer, I have been using it since 2009, and I have encountered no issues. I appreciate that no code is required, it is centrally managed through account management, validations are in place, and file transfers are tracked in an audit through which account they occur. It is one of my favorite solutions, existing since 1980, and I have written a lot of papers on Control-M, including one on my LinkedIn called 'A Leader's Journey' before BMC published the journey of Control-M.

My impressions of application workflow orchestration with BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer are that it is a fantastic tool I have been using for 16 years. I have even received appreciation from the development team in Israel, stating that no one has used the solution to the extent that my team and I have for one of our customers. The orchestration process allows easy accessibility to different applications, and it facilitates configuring with drag-and-drop functionality to set dependencies.

If you can share an email, I can provide pointers on potential improvements for BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer, focusing on customer-centric enhancements. For example, providing checksums for file metadata in reports could significantly help with file transfers.

I have been working with BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer for more than three to four years.

Regarding stability, there were some issues reported during implementation and usage by our customers, but I would rate it an eight out of ten.

The scalability of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is impressive due to its ability to handle large quantities of data and files, but there are certain features that could be added to make it a game changer.

From a support perspective, BMC technical support needs improvements. There are novice users needing help, but for customers such as us, who have been using the solution for over a decade, the response needs to be more timely and efficient, utilizing L2 and L3 support effectively.

Neutral

The initial setup process for BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is very simple for us, as it requires a component to be deployed in the DMZ, from where the file gets transferred centrally to the server.

We are the premium partners for BMC products implementations, recognized as Bihom partner of the year multiple times. I have deployed BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer since 2011 for our customers, and it has been working flawlessly, with people speaking highly about the solution as the heart of their organization.

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer has indeed helped our clients reduce IT operation costs. For instance, I implemented it for one of the largest banks in 2012, which reduced their loan process sanction from four days to just two hours, and now it completes in 30 minutes. Additionally, the timeline for the policy dispatch to insurance end clients, which initially took up to ten days, now happens in two hours.

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer has some competitors in the market, but according to the Forrester and Gartner reports, nobody is even close to this solution, and I prefer not to use open source options.

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is my favorite product, so while I would typically rate it around 9.7 or 9.8, I would ultimately assign it a rating of 10.

On-premises

My use case for Control-M is orchestration.

The best features of Control-M are that it is easy to use; even a non-technical person can learn it in a couple of days with normal documentation and a few videos. Just two days should be sufficient to pick it up. Users do not need to be technical to use the tool, and it is easy to implement and deploy.

Integrating Control-M with other technologies for DataOps and DevOps is easy; we export the jobs we create in a non-prod environment and, on the runtime, we know what variables need to be replaced, and we replace those variables to deploy to prod since Control-M is just an XML file, which is very easy to search and replace.

Control-M is extensively used in our projects. When we start a project and it becomes an enterprise tool, we are required to use it. If there are any failures, we can tag them with an incident, making it easy for maintenance, monitoring, tracking, and deployment since everything is in one place.

The area that has room for improvement in Control-M is a better dashboard. For example, sometimes we have up to 100 Control-M jobs, and there is no dashboard to know how many jobs are in progress, completed, or waiting for files. That requires us to create an additional dashboard on top of the Control-M metadata.

I've been using Control-M since I started my career in data warehousing in 2011 or 2012 since there are more jobs, more tables, and more data loads in data warehousing.

When it comes to stability, I would rate it as good, an eight out of ten.

The scalability of Control-M is good; we create different servers for different projects instead of putting all jobs on one server, and I would rate scalability as an eight out of ten.

The technical support from Control-M is good; I normally never ask the Control-M team for help as it hasn't gotten stuck for me, however, they are supportive, and I would rate it an eight out of ten.

Positive

We have used different orchestration tools, however, I am not aware of the specific tools you mentioned.

The deployment of the solution is easy.

Regarding the duration of deployment, if everything is proper, I don't see a big challenge. Normally, it takes a day if you have the code ready and follow the process and checklist.

The return on investment seen with Control-M is significant; in my experience, we run more than 100 to 150 jobs a day, and to monitor those jobs, one or two people should be enough since it triggers emails for failures and allows us to view logs within Control-M itself.

I'm not sure about the pricing of Control-M. I didn't get involved at the pricing level.

When comparing Control-M with other solutions, I see that everywhere, orchestration tools are simple, and while they come with basic monitoring and alerting functionalities, the decision to use Control-M often comes down to cost, licensing, and maintenance.

My relationship with BMC is good. 

I recommend Control-M if there are no other tools available as it is easy to use, with easy maintenance and a centralized monitoring system, alerting system, and incident creation. 

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

On-premises

Microsoft Azure

Control-M's primary use case for our organization is scheduling jobs. We have daily manual work that previously required regular manual intervention, but by setting up Control-M jobs, we have eliminated this need and now run setup jobs on a daily basis that saves significant time.

Our team uses Control-M for scheduling jobs based on any requirement given by the business, and when we encounter repetitive tasks, such as extraction of reports from our database, we set up a job accordingly that extracts the required details and delivers them to our business people.

We have a daily batch with upstream and downstream feeds, and we have configured Control-M jobs including File Watcher jobs, pre-processing jobs, and loading jobs. Once loading is completed, we send reports to our downstream using Control-M jobs.

Control-M offers many features that benefit our operations. File Watcher jobs are particularly useful when we are supposed to receive a file that is not received on time, and we can configure alerts to reach out to the upstream people regarding delays.

Control-M also allows for quick delivery of reports across platforms. The cross-platform delivery feature stands out for our team because we are using a CD connectivity setup with Control-M to send reports from our Linux system to the mainframe system.

Control-M has features for holding a job when it fails due to a feed delay from upstream, and we can keep the job on hold until we receive the feed and then rerun it. We also have features for ordering jobs based on our configured calendar system for weekdays and weekends.

Control-M has positively impacted our organization by automating thousands of jobs, eliminating the need for manual intervention, which reduces the chance of human error.

By using Control-M, we save significant time. For example, it takes only two hours to trigger one hundred jobs compared to a full day without it, resulting in a reduction of thousands of errors in a month.

Control-M can be improved by enhancing the user interface, as some other batch schedulers are more user-friendly.

An additional improvement could be the inclusion of daily usage options on the homepage to facilitate regular work.

I have been using Control-M for eight years.

Control-M is stable.

Control-M is scalable, allowing it to cover one team to another. If we set it up for one team, it may take an hour, and for another team, it may take an additional hour.

Customer support for Control-M is very good, with quick responses and effective redressal mechanisms in place.

We previously used AutoSys but switched to Control-M because it is the best in the market, and the transition was smooth.

We have seen a return on investment, as using Control-M saves us seventy to eighty percent of the costs that would otherwise require one thousand dollars.

I have two to three years of experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing related to Control-M.

Before choosing Control-M, we evaluated manual processes and other batch job schedulers, and ultimately chose Control-M for its better results.

Control-M is important for building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring production workflows, making it crucial for our Data Ops and Dev Ops initiatives, as it facilitates the delivery of requirements.

We depend entirely on Control-M as our production starts at midnight and completes within two to three hours, which is crucial for our business.

Many users in my organization use Control-M in various roles, including Consultant Specialist, Senior Consultant Specialist, Lead Consultant Specialist, Senior Software Engineer, Software Engineer, Project Manager, and Senior Project Manager.

Integrating Control-M with technologies for our Data Ops and Dev Ops processes can be challenging, but it plays a crucial role in transitioning to a cloud infrastructure and transferring files from one source to a destination.

The governance and security of Control-M entirely depend on how you configure your Control-M jobs, but I can say it is fully controlled and under compliance.

The reliability and output of Control-M are good, with no deviation expected from how it delivers outputs moving forward.

I advise others looking into using Control-M that it provides the best deliverables compared to other tools available in the market. I have rated this product nine out of ten.