What needs improvement with BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer?

I think they are going in the direction of managing data that Control-M orchestrates. Currently, it is hard to get data from the process that Control-M is processing. The ease of deploying Control-M depends on the architecture chosen, as some configurations can require more setup.

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 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.

One area for improvement in Control-M could be in the logs, as they only show when the job started and whether it ended successfully or not. Since the Control-M agent is running on the servers, we could pull up logs and display the actual error to aid in debugging.

The area for improvement pertains to the next generation of scheduling tools, particularly integrating the capacity to translate business team feedback into technical jobs. A large part of my role today is transforming business team feedback and needs into technical jobs. However, my main value is to accompany the customer in their technical journey to migrate and manage their enterprise's critical applications. Therefore, the scheduler is primarily a tool for organizing production plans. If it becomes possible for business teams to directly interact with Control-M through an LLM to automatically create jobs with just a review by an engineer, I believe it would save significant time for managed services providers and enhance Control-M's perception among business teams.

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.

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.

BMC is already improving in artificial intelligence and integration with cloud. AI can improve and is definitely an area where BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer continues to enhance.

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer already works great, though there could be improvements for transferring large files, particularly those that are in gigabytes, as it sometimes poses problems.

There is not much room for improvement. It already has a GUI and even a mobile app, although I don't use it. It is adequate for most scheduling needs. Offering it as open source for free would be great, however, that's unlikely.

Most improvements are related to cloud connectivity. It would be beneficial to have cloud integration tools for services like AWS and Azure. Currently, batch flows integrate through modules but don't connect directly, which could be enhanced for better efficiency.

I would love to see REST API integration and more plugins for Google Cloud Platform in addition to AWS and Azure. There are fewer plugins for GCP compared to the other two major cloud providers, which I think would add flexibility for customers whose choice is GCP.

Improvements could be made in naming conventions, such as adding dates and timestamps to filenames after replacing them. While the auto-delete function exists, enhancing it further could be beneficial. For example, when using SSH or WMA connections to transfer files, more detailed logs could be provided, specifying exactly where issues occurred. A pre-transfer check that warns if the file size is too large for the available target server space could be useful. These enhancements are expected to be included in the upcoming 9.0.22 version of BMC Control-M.

I don't see any area where improvements are needed in the product since the tool has a lot of capabilities. One can opt for either a job-based license or a job execution-based license, which sometimes can be troublesome. If the job count exceeds a limit, you may need to procure additional licenses from BMC. I don't see any issue with the product's capability or functionality apart from the aforementioned issue where improvements are needed. The price of the product is an area with certain shortcomings that stem from the expensive nature of the product and can be considered for improvement by BMC.

The solution's price could be better.

The solution should improve the out-of-the box conversion tool for migrations so the percentage result isn't so low. We have many use cases where we migrate from different vendors like Otter. When we see the result for main frames, the percentage is low. A higher percentage would give us more confidence. We want to share good results with our customers. There is no option to deploy agents from Control-M itself so they have to be installed manually and that is time consuming. BMC does provide a separate tool to deploy the software but it would be easier to do from the solution's controller.

It's not something that I use every day. The supervisor of operations uses it, and as long as he's not complaining about it, I'm good. We're only using the functionality that we need to use. However, we've had an opportunity to work with one application owner here who wanted to do some transfers in the cloud and things like that. I know that there were some challenges on that, but they finally got all that set up. There was a learning curve though.

The solution can be improved by upgrading its features to compete with premium software in MFT. Additionally, Math and dollar features, along with product samples and VR functionalities, can be included in the next release.

Before we transfer files we have to make the connection profile first for MFT. If we did not have to do this and send the transfer files directly, that would be useful.

We need the updates to be able to maintain interoperability. We still want to be able to verify testing in production and the environment and want upgrades to go smoothly so as not to disrupt our applications. The more seamless it can be, the better remediation will go. We'd like it to be easier to maintain the administrative side. Transferring files should be easier. There are a lot of dependencies. We'd also like there to be less space consumption. There's a bit of a learning curve for new users. When we pull job applications, if we configure multiple tenants under multiple environments with a single frame while we are logging into the applications, it sometimes freezes and takes too much time.

It can be difficult to stay on the right side of the licensing structure. Obviously, BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer wants to profit from it, so it's difficult for us and not cheap. It's probably more expensive than many of its competitors, but technically, there's really no downside. They have caught up with most things at the moment; for security, they added SSL a few years ago, which helps a lot, and for file transfer, they will probably have to keep upgrading to add new protocols. I am familiar with the password vaulting interface; they could probably add something for that because user IDs are a major issue in Control-M. You can now get systems that identify where the user IDs are, and you have to go there, and if you have the appropriate authorization, you can simply select a user ID and use it for the Control-M job. An interface to password vaulting would be useful, but they may already be doing so. I don't want to say this is a big missing piece only to discover that you did it two years ago. Password vaulting would be a feature that should be included.

This solution could be improved by making it possible to better control GUI when interfacing with other systems. Secondly, this solution is very expensive compared to others in the market. Previously it was the only solution in our country to offer this kind of functionality. However, technology has caught up and many competitors offer the same at a lower price.

Managed File Transfer could be improved with some more cloud features. Things have been moving to cloud, and the modules of AWS and Azure are there in Control-M, but we still end up writing codes to do that. If there were some embedded modules, it would be really helpful. As for additional features, we have been looking to integrate with SharePoint. This feature is not available.

The only improvement I would suggest is the license pricing should be a little reduced. Apart from that, I don't see anything else as a major concern with the tool right now.

The solution used to have a graphical user interface for reporting. That is lacking now and it's unfortunate because customers liked it and it's no longer available. In order to compete with IT service desk management, they need to make the product more lightweight, more of a SaaS-based offering. If that were implemented they'd get back to the top. Currently, authentication and authorization portals are provided only in the case of external uploads but that should change.

Their support can be improved. I would like them to provide support in Spanish and have more knowledge.

At this time, you can receive file transfers but it is not possible to send them. Ideally, we also want to be able to send files using this solution. Scalability is something that needs to be improved.

The structure between the Control-M/Server and Control-M/Agent could possibly be improved. It would also be helpful if the deployment of Control-M/Agent could be simplified. Sometimes you can spend a lot of your day just doing the maintenance work to keep the system running. So that's something that could be improved. I think they could also improve the basic engineering of the server. The product has been around for a long time now, it's 30 years old, so most of the big issues were fixed a long time ago. Any issues now are not serious. The API that they recently introduced is very good and lots of people are using that. It's really about development for the future, which means improving the API. I would go back to the API in terms of additional features, in that they should expand the possibilities of the API. Not everything is possible with the API, and you've got utilities in all the controlling systems that are very powerful, but they're not all opened up to the API yet. I think they should really just expand the API to catch up with the rest of the system.