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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With proper planning, setuo is straightforward.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

My use case for Control-M is scheduling batch jobs in the banking sector. Previously, I used it for support jobs, and subsequently utilized it in development activities. When making changes to jobs, we need to locate them in Control-M. We monitor the screen and search for jobs with different filters such as the order date filter. In our project, we use the order date filter because jobs run on every order date. Based on the order date, we navigate to the particular date and verify if our job is running. If it is running, we check the status and review the logs.

Previously I used AutoSys, and when I transitioned to Control-M, it was initially exhausting because Control-M allows longer job names. Based on the job name, we can understand what the particular job is doing. Here everything comes into one number as we are using short job names, which was initially irritating. Once I became accustomed to it, it became simple to organize things efficiently. We can see all the links, predecessor links, and dependencies visually.

When we select a job in Control-M, we can see all the linked connections, including predecessor jobs. Sometimes when a job has multiple dependencies located far from the current location, we need to scroll down to see the linked jobs. We have a feature to right-click and go to the dependent waiting info, but whenever we click on a job, it should visualize the link and display the job name on the particular line it relates to. This would be a beneficial feature to implement.

From my knowledge and job role, business users do not typically use Control-M since they are interested in the end product rather than the scheduling tool. However, they are concerned with ETAs for their reports. When batches get delayed, business users need to determine when their particular report will be ready. Currently, they must ask the technical team for timing updates. If Control-M could develop a portal showing ETAs for business reports, it would eliminate the need to consult the technical team.

In my six years of experience, I have primarily worked with existing jobs. For creating dependencies, the current process requires multiple steps, including going to the predecessor and action items and setting up in two places. Implementation of drag-and-drop functionality would simplify this process. Users could create dependencies by clicking on the source and dragging it to the destination, with additional setups for actions and notifications available through a separate menu.

I have been using Control-M for approximately five to six years in my career.

Regarding stability, in my previous project, I experienced lagging with refresh times of six to seven seconds. In my current project, I feel more comfortable as the refresh time has improved to one or two seconds.

Control-M is particularly suitable for large companies. Many big companies are migrating from AutoSys to Control-M. The graphical visibility of processes is clearer than other job scheduling solutions, which is Control-M's biggest selling point.

I have never contacted Control-M technical support or customer support as the client team typically handles any issues.

I have used AutoSys, where I developed numerous jobs. AutoSys uses dependency configurations that I found easier to set up compared to Control-M.

I cannot speak to the ease or difficulty of Control-M's initial deployment as it was already implemented when I joined the project.

I have limited visibility regarding Control-M's pricing since we use it as clients and work as contractors.

When joining projects, Control-M is typically already implemented, so I have not had the opportunity to migrate from previous solutions.

Regarding Control-M's management and orchestration of workflows across enterprise, we currently use on-premises solutions. In my previous project, we used cloud solutions, but I found the on-premises solution more effective for technical people, while cloud solutions are more suitable for business users. When scheduling is cloud-based, there can be lag time as it takes longer to reflect changes from on-premises to cloud environments. With the current trend moving toward Databricks, cloud implementation becomes a viable option for jobs already running in the cloud. However, for jobs running on an on-premises server, cloud implementation may not be the optimal choice.

I rate Control-M a seven out of ten.

The main use case is to automate business processes from ERPs, SAP, databases, and file transfers. I also use it with DataOps and DevOps. It is very easy because Control-M has native integrations with many tools, and BMC develops more integrations every month, making integration straightforward.

Recently, BMC has focused on cutting-edge technologies, such as cloud, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. These are the latest connectors that BMC has released for these technologies.

Control-M is an orchestration tool that provides a broad and complete vision of your environment. You can integrate many different heterogeneous technologies. The main feature is its role as an orchestrator. It is easy to use and has numerous native integrations. If you need a specific integration for a homegrown application, you can develop a connector for that as well. Control-M can be used with a job as code approach, and it provides audit and governance capabilities on the platform.

I cannot identify areas for improvement at this time because Control-M is a state-of-the-art technology.

I have been using this solution for more than 15 years.

The deployment process is very straightforward. There are two distributions for Control-M: an on-premise offer, which is the classical offer, and Control-M as Software as a Service. While Control-M is easy to implement overall, the Software as a Service approach offers many advantages because customers don't need to worry about infrastructure since BMC handles it entirely. Additionally, customers don't need to perform upgrades and cumbersome initial setups.

The solution is very stable and secure.

The scalability is very good because Control-M implementation can be used in high availability. For on-premise implementation, you can distribute components of Control-M in different machines. The SaaS implementation is also very scalable.

The technical and customer support is excellent. BMC has great development in both areas. The support is accurate, and BMC is always ready to help with queries and complex incidents.

The benefits include achieving digital transformation, accelerating business processes, removing silos, and meeting SLAs at the exact time.

I am not comfortable discussing pricing details. I prefer to focus on technical issues.

I am a Control-M consultant working with utilities, banking, and government sectors. In Brazil, Control-M is used by a broad range of companies, including major financial companies, utilities, oil industry, telecom, and retail. Control-M is widely recognized in Brazil for orchestration. BMC continuously improves the tool. The reviewer has given Control-M a rating of 10 out of 10.

I'm not sure about Control-M because it is only for another team member to use. What I can tell you is it is very helpful to use Control-M in the mainframe platform because we can run and schedule many routines at the same time and we can create some scenarios. By these scenarios, we can run a lot of routines. We can build some scenarios and maintain this in the real world in production environment.

Regarding Control-M, what I can mention is I only know about the platform used nowadays for our team, and I believe it is a very archaic model. Probably there is another interface, better solutions and maybe with an interface easier to use on a daily basis. But what we have nowadays is something not so familiar for people that don't have a complete understanding about how to use.

Regarding Control-M, I'm not the one to use it directly, but I know it is a very powerful tool and very dynamic and helps us a lot on a daily basis. I believe the tools to schedule a routine in Control-M are very helpful. On a daily basis, we can use a lot without some problems. It's very easy to use.

It is necessary to take some time to learn Control-M. More or less a month to be familiar with the first steps. As you continue, you will increase your understanding about the feature and probably need more or less six months.

People in the first initial step need more or less one month to be familiar with some commands and start using Control-M tools. To feel comfortable using it on a daily basis without support, it takes more or less six months. This is the appropriate time to be able to use Control-M.

I have used another tool related to Control-M, but it is not so similar. It is something more related about running only individual routines one, two, or three routines at the same time. It is Topaz. It is a tool directly connected to the mainframe as well, but it is more destined to developers to build routines and programs and run these sources. It is not the same, but it is what I use on a daily basis when I need to run routines.

I have never experienced any issues such as lagging or crashing with Control-M.

The scalability of Control-M is adequate. We need to follow some steps to add some routines, but that's acceptable. What I know about this feature is it is reasonable to use when you need to add some new steps, schedule some new routines, or add some files. It is pretty nice and not a big deal to use.

I didn't need to contact the technical support or customer support for Control-M.

I would rate Control-M overall an eight out of ten. I believe you can put my company name as entity data. I'm a software engineer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have used Control-M for database, SAP, web services, and file transfers. Additionally, I use it for normal scripts.

We had a customer who was using cron jobs to handle their workflows. With cron jobs, they faced problems related to SLA. When something failed, it took them time to identify issues, and sometimes they missed incidents which resulted in P1 situations in production environments. They transitioned to Control-M based on its features related to SLA and workflow visibility, which significantly helped them.

The GUI is the best feature, along with the file transfer capabilities. These are the two main components I use on a daily basis. Through GUI or CCM, we get control of all the components, which I really appreciate.

While I cannot specify exact business impact numbers, frequent P1 incidents in the production environment typically indicate monetary losses.

While it can be used for DevOps purposes, we haven't used it for that purpose.

Support is one aspect that they really need to improve. Though we receive support for current versions, the challenge arises when working in large organizations with legacy workflows or applications, typically 10 to 20% of the total.

When these legacy environments have outdated OS and face production issues from a Control-M perspective, BMC support states it's not supported anymore. Recently, we needed documentation for an old component during a production issue, and their response was that they couldn't help as it wasn't supported. Documentation should be maintained for all versions since they provided the application.

I have a total experience of around 19 years, with approximately 13 or 14 years specifically with Control-M. I started with 6.4.

Control-M is pretty stable. There are occasional issues, yet nothing major, and most issues are not caused by the software itself.

In on-premises environments, scalability features are limited. Planning and resource allocation must be done at the start. If workflows increase from 1,000 to 10,000, redeployment of the application becomes necessary. Database and application node planning must account for anticipated workflow volumes from the beginning.

We have approximately 1,000 users.

Support is an area that requires significant improvement.

I haven't migrated from other solutions.

I have limited experience with TWS. The TWS version we used was primarily command-line based, and its GUI capabilities were not comparable to Control-M.

The deployment process is straightforward. The environment's complexity affects deployment time rather than the software itself. Basic DB and Linux box installation takes approximately a week. The planning phase for system connectivity and task execution locations requires additional time.

The system requires maintenance with patches released once or twice yearly.

We are implementing this as a customer.

I can provide a general perspective on ROI. Manual tasks require human effort and are prone to errors, which Control-M helps eliminate. However, I cannot provide specific ROI figures.

Control-M is expensive and not cheap at all.

I have conducted technical assessments for several market solutions, though not in great depth. We explored alternative solutions due to Control-M's high cost rather than its technical limitations. My assumption is that all current enterprise-level scheduling or workload automation software provides similar technical functionalities and features.

We're a customer.

I would recommend Control-M for its performance capabilities. While cost-cutting is prevalent everywhere and Control-M's cost is on the higher side, from a technical perspective, it ranks among the top three solutions.

The review rating for Control-M is nine out of ten.