Control-M SaaS EMEA

I have several use cases for Control-M . I have been implementing Control-M  for a long time in several enterprises in Brazil, and then five years ago I moved to the US. I started working here in the US as well. I have several use cases for insurance companies and bank companies in Brazil, and currently, I am working with Bank Charles Schwab using this tool to transfer internal files between systems and applications.

We also have user-defined transfers to move files to business partners. Overall, I have been using this solution for 17 years and have many use cases to speak of.

When I joined Bank Charles Schwab, Control-M was already implemented, but I also work on implementing Control-M from scratch.

Recently, I did an integration involving Control-M with Pentaho  and Power BI. Even though Control-M did not have the plugin for Pentaho , I managed to run a data pipeline using scripts and successfully integrate it into Power BI dashboards.

In general, the ability to check all your processes in a unified view that Control-M provides is what I appreciate the most about it.

Control-M helps to integrate processes across various applications in big enterprises, making it significantly easier since you have a single point of control and can see failures and impacts on the flow.

Now, with the new plugins that they launch every month, it is easy to integrate with technologies for my DataOps and DevOps processes.

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.

I have been working with Control-M for 17 years overall in my career.

In terms of scalability, I think it is good. I have seen effective escalation when necessary during issue resolution.

I have contacted BMC technical support, especially when I cannot solve certain issues myself, but I have a good handle on it due to my long experience.

The quality of support is fast during production emergencies, but it can take longer when issues are not critical, with interactions sometimes taking several days.

They have limited support for native language issues, which can create challenges for non-English speakers.

Usually, I handle the deployment myself, but I need a team to implement large numbers of jobs after the deployment.

I do not have experience using alternatives to Control-M, as I was directly presented with Control-M when I started working with workload automation.

Control-M tends to be the most expensive compared to other competitors. However, I believe it is worth the price since it delivers the most.

It requires some maintenance on my end occasionally, especially when compliance or security updates are needed.

My main use case for Control-M  is to schedule jobs and automate the workflow. A specific example of a workflow I've scheduled and automated with Control-M  is a batch flow through which a number of customers receive an automated message about their transaction details on their mobile phones using Control-M jobs.

The best features Control-M offers include automating large workflows, allowing us to run jobs on a scheduled time basis, and requiring no manual intervention.

What stands out to me about the automation and scheduling is the error notification service, which I find very helpful because we do not have to monitor our jobs on a daily basis. Whenever there is an error, the team receives notification regarding the job failure, which makes our work easier.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization by saving a considerable amount of time, and manual intervention is not required for most operations because most things are automated with Control-M. I work as part of the batch operations team, and we used to run Indian batches which typically took around two hours on a daily basis. With the help of automating the batch through Control-M, the batch now takes approximately fifteen to twenty minutes to execute and run, which means we save around one to one and a half hours on a daily basis.

Control-M could be improved by offering more additional features and ensuring that more people are aware of Control-M.

I have been using Control-M for five years.

Control-M is stable.

Control-M's scalability is good.

The customer support for Control-M is good.

For the deployment and maintenance of Control-M, we require majorly four teams: one is needed for operations, one is needed for scheduling the jobs, and one is needed for maintaining Control-M.

I would advise others looking into using Control-M that it is a good tool if you want workload automation to be done and if you want to save time. I have given this review a rating of seven out of ten.

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.

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.