Control-M Reviews

We are a cloud service provider, and we have been using Control-M for integrating and automating the orchestrating applications in the data workflow in our production. This is the main use case for our flow.

We are using its cloud version, Helix Control-M.

Helix Control-M has helped us schedule the jobs and manage our workload. We save time in running the jobs. There is no impact on the software even if I schedule a hundred jobs at a time. It can accommodate all kinds of jobs. It helps to meet our large-scale requirements.

Helix Control-M’s ability to build, schedule, manage, and monitor application and data workflows in production is good. It is pretty straightforward. It integrates well with different applications, such as AWS, GCP, and various cloud providers, enabling job scheduling directly from the Helix Control-M interface without any agents. Integration is very easy.

We have a single pane of glass for scheduling and viewing job status. We get all the details in one window. We can schedule everything in one window. We did not have any downtime with the Helix Control-M. All the jobs have been running perfectly. Everything is smooth and straightforward.

We are mainly using the AWS Cloud, and we also have some GCP services. We can monitor all the details under the History tab. We can see all the past jobs. 

Helix Control-M gives our company’s business users visibility and control over their jobs and frees up IT personnel for other tasks.

Helix Control-M is very critical for our business. We rely on it. We do not want any other scheduler. It provides us with everything.

Helix Control-M has contributed to the overall stability of our applications and improved user experience. It has taken away some of the administration work.

The flexibility of Helix Control-M allows us to manage tasks efficiently. The user interface is comprehensive and lets me view all my jobs on one page, monitor everything, and access the job history. The UI is superb and flexible to use.

Scheduling multiple jobs at a time is a standout feature. 

There should be an expansion in storing more data as it currently provides data storage for only up to 60 days. 

There can be some complexities with the UI part, especially with the advanced features. Other than that, it has been pretty good.

I have been using it for almost two and a half years.

The stability of the Helix Control-M solution is good. I would rate it an eight out of ten for stability.

We also have access to their support. If we face any issues, we get support from them. Everything is good and working as expected.

Helix Control-M is scalable. It is being used by many people in our organization.

We have more than a hundred jobs running, and we have almost eight people managing it. We also have 3-4 end users using it.

The technical support is very polite, helpful, and available 24/7. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

Before Helix Control-M, we used different solutions. We previously used IBM Workload Automation but switched to Helix Control-M because it provides a comprehensive solution for everything and is very manageable without needing a dedicated person. Anyone can learn it. Its learning curve is very small.

The migration to Helix Control-M was straightforward. We did not face any issues.

The initial setup was straightforward. It took about three or four months to settle down. It is also not difficult to maintain.

We received support from BMC tech support and did not require any third-party consultants. We had six or seven people for the deployment of the solution.

The main return on investment with Helix Control-M has been a reduction in downtime and minimization of manual interventions, which has improved our operational efficiency.

The pricing is moderate, not too low or too high compared to other solutions.

We evaluated multiple solutions, including ActiveBatch, before choosing Helix Control-M.

The pricing was similar, but we found Helix Control-M better in terms of job automation and features. Their support was also very good. We got help from them with the orchestration and migration.

Before implementing the solution, thoroughly try out how it works in your current environment. 

My overall rating for Helix Control-M is an eight out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

I work with Control-M from a commercial aspect and engage with IT and operation teams across different industries, which gives me direct exposure to how Control-M is used in real production environments. My role is to deliver tangible value to these teams.

The valuable features of Control-M depend on the specific customer needs. Some customers have business-critical processes, strict SLAs, and hybrid or multi-cloud environments where Control-M provides end-to-end visibility of all these processes. Control-M also offers different modules, such as MFT, which allows users to transfer files with the tool. As a commercial professional, I cannot personally attest to specific features since I do not typically use the tool directly, but I can share what customers have told me they value about the product.

As a commercial professional, I think one of the downsides of Control-M is that not all people know they can use a tool such as Control-M, and they think that Control-M is going to be very expensive, which is the reason why they don't want to use it or seek more information about it. However, when they are accustomed to using this type of tool or Control-M as a scheduler, they feel better with it and with their role inside their enterprise. For example, if they don't have any scheduler, they don't know that they can use a scheduler to automate different business processes. When they recognize that they can use this type of tool, one of the objectives is to reduce costs. They may spend money in the short term, but in the medium or long term, they will probably have more benefits than risk.

Control-M has everything that a person needs because the problem is not high cost. Control-M is available on-premises and in the cloud, and they are having more apps every week with the app integrator. I don't have anything that I dislike about Control-M. Possible areas for improvement could include documentation, configuration, and pricing. Being more flexible and having out-of-the-box reporting for business stakeholders would be beneficial. Continuing to simplify licensing and packaging for smaller customers would also help improve customer conversations. Reporting is often mentioned as an area where Control-M could continue to evolve. Many customers would appreciate more out-of-the-box business-friendly reports. Control-M has operability with SLA-focused reports, but developing something with less customization would be better.

I have been using Control-M for more or less two years.

I think that some instability is normal because everything is in the cloud, and I can remember a few months when the AWS cloud crashed. If you see the SLA reports or responses from different customers, they are very happy with the tool. Control-M achieves more or less 98% or 99% uptime in the cloud, which is a fantastic rate. I think 100% is impossible to achieve, and 99.8% is a good number.

Control-M, developed by BMC, which was previously part of BMC Helix and is now BMC Software, is focusing on Digital Business Automation processes. They are developing many different modules in Control-M, and the scalability is fantastic. Probably in a couple of years, Control-M is going to be the best scheduler. Currently, they are competing with other schedulers such as Redwood, Broadcom, and Stonebranch, but in a couple of years, maybe one or two years, Control-M is not going to have any competitors.

I have used technical support from BMC when we need to do demos for instances in the BMC tool. The technical support team are very good professionals and they do their jobs excellently. Since I don't use Control-M directly, if I have a problem with Control-M, the technical team from my enterprise would need to talk with the technical team from BMC. I usually talk with the commercial team from BMC rather than the technical team. I talk with the technical team when I need to make a demo, proof of concept, or proof of value, and we need to customize the future instance for the client. If I need to rate the technical support from BMC, I would give them a 10 because whenever I want to do something with them, they answer me, and I am very happy with them.

Positive

I don't use any alternative schedulers. I know that you can talk about Redwood, Broadcom, or Stonebranch, but I don't use any one of these schedulers.

I don't have a lot of contact with deployment. Probably if I think about some customers, they tell me that there is also interest in simplifying upgrades and environment standardization, particularly for organizations with multiple Control-M instances. If you talk with a small customer, they are going to be happy with deployment, upgrades, or the environment.

Control-M has an upgrade more or less every year or every two years. If you want to use the latest upgrade, you need to upgrade your tool.

The implementation team depends on the person doing the deployment.

The current pricing is good. Other vendors such as Broadcom are increasing their prices, so right now, Control-M is not one of the highest-cost schedulers. My customers have never told me anything negative about the pricing or licensing. BMC can be very amenable with the pricing of the tool. I have small customers, and I think that is a good point of view because they think they can't have the budget for a tool such as Control-M, but they do have the budget. Control-M is a tool for every kind of customer. You can sell Control-M for 15K on-premises and you can sell it for 7 million or 11 million. I think that people need to change their thinking because Control-M is not just an expensive tool. It is a tool for everyone, for every enterprise.

I would rate Control-M at nine.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using this solution for 20 years.

There are no complaints regarding stability.

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

Control-M is a scheduling tool that I have been using for the last three years. Earlier I used Autosys as a primary scheduling tool. When I started Control-M, it was a new experience because Autosys was over the cloud and we used to log in to the browser. Control-M is specifically for the application where we are using it now. The good thing is that there are so many connectors available.

Although I have one year of Autosys experience, Control-M presents a vast opportunity for us as a developer. Currently, I am in a data warehousing project where all the tools are legacy tools such as Informatica, SalesScript, Control-M, and database. When we are moving to the cloud, Control-M is still valid and relevant. We are transferring our data to the cloud and using Control-M as a scheduler. We are not using native cloud scheduler to date because all the developers here are accustomed to it.

We are almost using around 60 to 70% of the features. Control-M is providing us with so much capability to use during our daily problem-solving.

The good thing is that there are so many connectors available. Control-M provides lots of features, and we are almost using around 60 to 70% of them. Control-M is providing us with so much capability to use during our daily problem-solving.

When I joined this project and was very new to Control-M, there was one problem that even the seniors were facing sometimes. Suppose you are using Informatica; there are lots of Informatica developers in the market or some other tools that are very known to everyone. Even though Control-M is used by lots of people, the documentation in the beginning was very hard to search for on Google. This is why we had to reach out to people who were experienced, and it was a tough job for us because a few functionalities are not properly written in the documentation.

Another area of improvement is related to multiple versions of Control-M being used. In dev, one version exists, and in production, one version exists. In production, the stable version is used. Sometimes when we change over, there are multiple domains in Control-M such as Planning, Monitoring, History, and Forecast Tools. When we hop from one domain to another, sometimes we open a job, and the detail dialog box or detail window is not able to open.

Some features which are hidden are not properly documented in Control-M itself, or maybe documented but not properly given or described with examples. This is a problem. Sometimes we are forced to connect to senior developers who have used it for five to six years or more to learn about it.

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

There is no maintenance on my end. In the last three years, I have seen two upgrades that were done by the admin team. Control-M is using the new versions, and as a developer, I am using it.

Control-M processes about 10,000 jobs starting every day in our production environment, and adding new jobs is very simple. We don't feel any pressure on Control-M because it is processing multiple jobs in parallel.

Regarding contacting technical support about Control-M, we tried, but at that time, we didn't get any response. We reached out to our client head, described our problem, and received assistance.

As a developer, I created an account in the BMC community to get help support. We post there nearly because sometimes we need solutions very quickly, and we don't have time to connect with the guys in the Control-M help desk.

Neutral

Earlier I used Autosys as a primary scheduling tool. When I started Control-M, it was a new experience because Autosys was over the cloud.

Regarding the initial installation and setup of Control-M, I still have not installed it. I need to connect with one of my friends who are working in the ops team, as I am in the developer team. We never install Control-M here in this project.

I need to connect with one of my friends working in the ops team, as I am in the developer team. They have the access to install, uninstall, or configure anything.

Regarding pricing, I cannot comment. As a developer, this is not in my hands, and it was decided by the client.

If Control-M is selling their product to new customers who have never used anything, then who will support the new customer? The customer may not have the senior engineer who has used Control-M earlier, so the documentation matters. Control-M can improve this in the way that others have; for example, Databricks, Google Cloud, and Azure have so much documentation.

Whatever we wanted, we have it. Control-M is not executing anything; it is just a scheduler. It schedules an Informatica job, and Informatica is running on its operating system, managing all the logs, and showing us that the job is completed. I have not seen any lagging. This can be answered by the ops team better because as a developer, I own a few applications, and when they start and end, my duty is done. Overall, I would give Control-M a rating of eight out of ten.

On-premises

Other

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hybrid Cloud

Control-M serves as our main business use case for business application batch job scheduling. Control-M is not a user-interacted system; it is a batch scheduling system where our applications interact with Control-M rather than users. We do not use Control-M as a DevOps tool, but we utilize it for all our applications, which are batch-based applications. Control-M orchestrates workloads across multiple environments. Control-M is handling complex data pipelines and analytics processes effectively.

The features of Control-M that I prefer most are Control-M/EM, Control-M/Server, and Control-M/Agent, which make up the Control-M batch scheduling system.

Control-M is easy to use because our key application is a batch-based application, so Control-M performs the job for us by handling all the automation and related tasks.

The measurable benefits my company has achieved with Control-M include improved SLA and reduced errors, as manual batch job runs lead to numerous errors and failure to meet the SLA.

Since we have been using Control-M from day one for batch scheduling, we do not have a percentage showing improvement because we have not used manual scheduling at all.

Regarding AI or automation, we would appreciate the opportunity to explore the AI functionalities because the application we are currently using does not support AI. It would be beneficial in the future if Control-M were to have AI capabilities.

I have been using Control-M for around eighteen years.

Control-M is a stable product stability-wise, and we do not encounter many issues. The only problem occurred when we upgraded to the latest version, which resulted in CPU spikes in Java, and this was resolved with support and a patch.

The support for that issue was adequate. We called support and eventually received a solution after reaching out multiple times, and the issue is now fixed.

Control-M's scalability is adequate. It is a scalable product, and we have not over-engineered it, so it meets our business needs.

We provide direct feedback to our support partner for Control-M, so nothing comes to mind at the moment. I consider the current support to be adequate.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate customer service and technical support as seven. A score of seven is decent enough. I am not saying Control-M support is a perfect ten, but I consider seven to be a good rating.

Positive

It has been a long time since we looked at other solutions, so I do not remember what we considered.

We do not handle Control-M deployment ourselves. We simply install it, and it is a stable environment, so we do not keep deploying it regularly.

BMC's service team supports our deployment and migration strategy well, with professional service and good support during our recent upgrade.

The biggest return on investment when using Control-M is ensuring that all batch jobs for our business applications meet the agreed SLA, which justifies our investment since we use this tool for a critical application.

Control-M is not inexpensive. Looking at other tools in the market, they are offering competitive prices, but Control-M, as a BMC product, is definitely not inexpensive, and BMC could improve their pricing strategy.

We have looked at other products when considering switching, but I cannot name them. I do not see a major difference between the products we looked at while considering Control-M. Pricing-wise, the other products were less expensive.

I would rate Control-M as a seven as a product. My advice to other companies considering Control-M is based on all our lessons learned, especially regarding issues we encountered during migration and implementation, which should be taken into account. I have assigned a review rating of seven to Control-M.

Public Cloud

Other

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have 50 to 60 users.

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

Positive

This is the first solution that we have used.

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

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

We implemented it in-house.

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

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

It is a little bit expensive.

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

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

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

Public Cloud

Control-M is used for scheduling, specifically scheduling application jobs. We have always been using Control-M, as we inherited it. We work with all technologies within the business using Control-M, including WebMethods, Axway, and IBM MQ. In the managed file transfer space, using Control-M, I find that it is not as user-friendly as other products available for MFT.

The best features in Control-M are its ease of use and robustness; it is very feature-rich, which is what we use it for—scheduling. It is easy to integrate Control-M with technologies for our DataOps and DevOps processes as things change. The integration aspects of Control-M are out of the box, so they are straightforward to use. From using Control-M, I have seen improvements as they grow with the versions; with the newer versions come enhanced functionalities, such as the latest version allowing access through a web GUI instead of the client GUI that you have to install, which is quite helpful because you can access it from anywhere.

We are not on the latest version of Control-M; we currently have version 20 and 21.

I have been using Control-M for 10 years.

Regarding stability with Control-M, I would rate it nine out of ten for downtime, bugs, and glitches.

Control-M is very scalable, and I would rate it a nine.

I would rate the vendor's technical support for Control-M as a nine.

Positive

We have tried to look at other products, but there is no other product out there that does what it needs to do as Control-M does, which is why it is still around—it simply does what it needs to do.

The deployment of Control-M was quite complex to get in, but once it is in, it does what it needs to do. It took weeks to get Control-M deployed.

Control-M requires maintenance from our end, as we have to perform patching whenever needed, but that does not happen very often—probably once a quarter. Patching for Control-M is easy.

I have definitely seen a return on investment with Control-M in terms of time and resources, but I cannot speak to the financial aspect—I do not know. I would estimate that I have saved perhaps 20% to 30% on time and resources using Control-M.

From what I know about pricing, I would probably put Control-M in the expensive category, but you do pay for what you get; you are paying for a premium product.

We looked at AWS products for scheduling with Control-M; I cannot remember the actual name of the scheduling tool at AWS, but it is nowhere near as advanced as what we need.

Approximately 100 users work with Control-M. They are not all Australia-based; some users are from India, so we have offshore resources as well. My relationship with BMC is both transformative and transactional. Regarding the transformative aspect, I have impressions of BMC as both because we partner with them; we might not be strategic partners, but we value their advice all the time—not just product advice, but sales as well. We consider ourselves a partner with the vendor, but I do not know if we are officially a signed partner; we are a partner at the base level. When I refer to our relationship with the vendor, we are considered an entry level partner; we are not a reseller, so we cannot resell their products, but we are partners and we consult while using their products internally and with customers to support their customer base. Our clients are generally enterprise businesses. I would recommend Control-M to other users; I know they are going all web-based, which they believe is the best way to go, but I can tell you that everybody I have spoken to has said the contrary—they actually prefer the client GUI that you can install, which is easier to use and more feature-rich, while the web GUI is very hard and difficult to navigate through. I have rated this review a nine out of ten overall.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)