Control-M - Application And Data Workflow Orchestration

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.

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.

Control-M  manages pretty much everything in our hemisphere, helping us meet our financial regulatory obligations, file transfers, running scripts, PowerShell, and SQL, making it critical to our day-to-day operations.

Control-M  supports our DataOps and DevOps initiatives by providing an avenue for our DevOps teams to problem-solve in an easy way, giving them a platform to build on rather than having to start from scratch.

The measurable benefits or improvements we've achieved with Control-M are critical in the finance industry, as it keeps us on target with all regulatory requirements. Without Control-M, I don't know where we'd be, and if we shut it off, the business would probably run for about six hours before we faced serious issues, highlighting its role as a key component to our success.

Control-M has definitely enabled new capabilities and business processes that weren't possible before, allowing us to go to other departments and problem-solve for them, eliminating manual tasks that have been done for years. Departments now benefit from not even needing to look back at whether a task is being done since the information is readily available, providing them more time in their day for productivity and enhancing life for our customers.

Control-M is a great product already, but everything can do with a bit of improvement. Personally, I'd like to see a little bit more color in the web interface, and in terms of its technical ability, the one thing I would be critical about is a bit more user-friendliness with the reports and the way we input information into it.

I've been working with Control-M for three years.

Once we have tested things and gotten them into play, during the three years that I've been working with Control-M, I've encountered only one problem, and BMC's support has been quite good, allowing us to solve that issue quickly and easily.

Once we have tested things and gotten them into play, during the three years that I've been working with Control-M, I've encountered only one problem, and BMC's support has been quite good, allowing us to solve that issue quickly and easily.

The biggest return on investment from using Control-M, from my point of view, is the ease of use and the time it gives our employees back in their day to be more productive.

I would give Control-M a very good rating in building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring workflows. It is pretty easy to use, and we have taken people without any type of formal training and been able to get them into using Control-M fully as a scheduler within weeks, proving its ease of use. In terms of its use for scheduling and building, it provides options, and it comes back to having flexibility, which is appreciated by anyone who has worked in the build area. With all the plug-in options and various job types that you can create, it increases the flexibility and the avenues available for using Control-M as a solution.

I've not had much interaction with licensing. In terms of costs, I think in life you have to pay for what you want, and generally, if you want quality, you've got to pay for it, but in my limited knowledge of pricing outside of Control-M and BMC, I think it is competitive, recognizing there's not a lot out there like Control-M, making it difficult to determine what the price should be as it is a critical piece of work worth its value. I would rate this product an 8.5 out of 10.

Control-M  runs all of our payments, batch, and managed file transfers.

Approximately 250 people use Control-M  on a daily basis. Their main roles include schedulers who create batch jobs, testers, and administrators and operators.

Control-M enables us to better support our DataOps and DevOps initiatives because we have a release system every month, which allows us to work more effectively and we're automating that system with Control-M.

Control-M orchestrates workloads across several environments. Currently, we use it across five environments.

Control-M handles complex data pipelines and analytics processes by allowing us to integrate with different services. For instance, we use it with our Power BI for our reporting tools, and for pipelines for release functions as well.

We only use on-premise for the creation and automation of data pipelines with Control-M. We don't have the cloud yet.

The main features of Control-M that we appreciate the most are the scheduling and the automation capabilities. When it works, it really works very well for us. Another feature that we appreciate is the file watching service because we interact with many different sections who drop files in various locations. It's great to have that feature to kick off batch when a file becomes available.

Control-M's performance in building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring workflows is amazing. I love Control-M and enjoy working on it. I appreciate how it has automated our workflow because before we had Control-M, it was a manual workflow that was open to user error and took much longer to complete because of the manual checks we had to do before we moved on to our next piece of batch. We've been able to automate it and this has enabled us to triple our workflow.

Having more options with regards to scheduling in Control-M would improve it. There are certain scheduling features that aren't available currently in Control-M, which would be nice to be added.

I've been using Control-M for six years.

I assess the stability and reliability of Control-M as very reliable because we very rarely have any downtime. The only time we would ever have any downtime is during our reboots, which we need to do failovers for, and those are very brief. When we are actually doing our batch, I don't remember a time we've had any downtime on our production side.

Control-M scales with the growing needs of my company brilliantly. It's been really good for us. We've added so much to it over the last two or three years. We've added more users, more jobs, and all different types of jobs including OS jobs, MFTs, and file watch, and it's been absolutely no problem for us to add. We've probably doubled our amount of jobs in the last two years, so we've had absolutely no problem with it. It's scaling perfectly.

My experience with customer service and technical support has been positive. Anytime we've had a problem, which is very rarely, or we've had a question, it's always been answered very swiftly or I've looked through the community myself. The community is actually really good, and I really appreciate that side of it because I even contribute on that side. I've never had a problem.

We were using an in-house product for running our batch before integrating with Control-M. Control-M enabled us to automate that batch, but it also enabled us to bring in many more things that weren't currently being done by us.

The biggest return on investment for me when using Control-M is the reduced errors, quicker runtimes for our batch, and making the job easier.

I have not considered other solutions while using Control-M.

Control-M's performance has improved our timing and the speed of the releases. It's halved our release speed basically in the last two years.

The measurable benefits and improvements my company has achieved with Control-M include reduced errors, which is the first big one. Before we used the previous in-house software, we would have a lot of manual errors that would have to be changed manually if there was a change in a variable or anything else. Now it's all automated, and the system runs for itself. We've tripled our workflow and we are doing more in less time than we used to previously.

Control-M has enabled new capabilities and business processes that weren't possible before. Our integration with external partners has become easier due to the MFT  capability that we weren't doing before. Now we're able to connect through them. These were manual processes done through moving files manually from one server to another, through different partners, but now we're able to integrate it all as one.

Regarding licensing, we handle licensing through endpoints. We've had to increase our endpoints because we're increasing the amount of workflow we have and the amount of jobs that we have. We've had to increase the number of endpoints we've needed. It's very easy to handle the growth and it's easily done.

I haven't used the Control-M Python client, but I've used a small amount of API.

I have not been using Control-M since I've been in my company because I've been in my company since 2009, and we started using it in 2019.

The impact of the migration to Control-M on our business-critical operations has led to fewer errors and fewer failures. Our biggest success story has been the lack of errors. Even when we do have errors, having the outputs available to us allows us to clearly see what the problem is.

I would rate this review ten out of ten.

Control-M is used to orchestrate workloads across multiple environments including dev, UAT, and production. There are plans to consider moving towards either a hybrid or cloud-based model with the environments in the future.

Control-M handles complex workflows through a variety of job types and multiple job types being able to interact with each other. The complexity can either be in the job flow or the background to when the job runs. For example, using calendars, whether it's multiple types of calendars, a job would only run when jobs from another calendar either have run or haven't run, or a mix of several different options. Calendars is the part of Control-M that is almost a puzzle that you have to solve first. If you can solve those kinds of puzzles, the job builds themselves can do that, which is the easy part compared to the calendars.

Building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring workloads is what Control-M does. After seven years of using it, no limitations have been found. Whatever is asked of it, it can do, and if there's something that cannot be done, the BMC team will find a way of working around it and maybe improve the product to fit your particular situation.

Introducing the Batch Impact Manager job, or as it's known, the SLA management job, into batches has allowed alerting to be scaled up and refined so that intervention can occur when a batch is running late, if a job is running longer than expected, or if there is a failure upstream. This has certainly helped out the batches.

The creation of data pipelines across on-prem and cloud is quite complex. The integrations provided by BMC have made that really easy. Jobs fit together really well with no loss of visibility. Having one UI to see the source of data to the end product is really useful.

The interaction with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure through the Oracle EBS batch has been one of the biggest successes in recent years, with the EBS batch handling the general ledger for Virgin Money and Clydesdale. This is the strongest case.

The features that are most valued within Control-M are the division of the domains of planning, monitoring, forecast, and tools. There is a migration towards the web UI away from the main UI. Managed File Transfer is a favorite feature that has been worked on over the last couple of years, especially going up to either the AWS cloud or to the Azure cloud. Other features that are valued are the integrations coming through the Integrations Factory, such as through Azure Data Factory and Azure Databricks, which have been worked on recently.

These features are valued because they are so versatile. They can do so much within just one job type. For example, the Managed File Transfer job type combines lots of different little bits of technology. You can have a file watcher within the job type, but you could also have a file copy, and there are lots of advanced features beneath the surface, not just doing the file copy.

The best return on investment through Control-M is that single pane of glass, being able to see end-to-end batch from start to finish through one tool.

Control-M can be improved, especially from a financial industry background, with the Data Assurance module. If you put bad data in, you get bad data out. Having something such as the Data Assurance module in place will hopefully prevent any sort of downtime or batch interactions that are unnecessary and having to rerun jobs all the time.

Control-M has been used for seven years.

There have been a few issues in the UAT environment based purely on the infrastructure that it sits on. Anything that is improved in that space is attempted to be replicated in production to avoid any future issues. As far as with the tool itself, there are no issues to report.

Scalability is one of Control-M's best assets. Currently on a license-based model, when getting close to that limit, discussions with BMC about either contract extensions or increasing the license count within that current contract did not seem too difficult to do.

Whenever there is an issue that needs a ticket to be raised, the response time is always really good. There has never been an issue that could not be resolved by the support teams, whether that be a simple fix done by first-line support or whether team calls are needed to demonstrate the problem. There have even been issues where some of the team within the labs have jumped on the call as well and replicated the environment on their systems to understand the problem a lot more. The turnaround time for answers and solutions is really good.

Control-M is the only tool that is aimed to be used. There have been mergers over the last couple of years which have different tool sets, but there has been no competition as to which one is favored. People just want to use their respective tools, and the future will show what happens.

The best return on investment through Control-M is that single pane of glass, being able to see end-to-end batch from start to finish through one tool.

Advice for customers or potential customers of Control-M would be to just try it out. BMC can offer you a trial and then you can make use of it, put it through its paces, ask any questions you want of the support teams, and you will be pleasantly surprised. This review has a rating of ten out of ten.

My main use cases of Control-M  involve workload automation, with two key areas being financial reconciliation and supply chain management. In financial reconciliation, a global financial services company pulls data from all its divisions around the world to perform end-of-day, end-of-month, and end-of-quarter reconciliation across a range of technologies, teams, and borders.

In supply chain management, manufacturers with retail stores need to ensure that the right stock is in the right places, which can be complicated. The third main use case relates to integration with SAP, making existing PA environments cheaper and less service-heavy. Those are the three main ones in my customer base.

My customers use Control-M  to orchestrate workloads across multiple environments. Control-M orchestration is capable of handling complex data pipelines or analytic processes, which is key for some of our financial services customer use cases and is a relatively core part of their requirements.

My banking customer that moved some capabilities to the cloud uses Control-M for both on-premises and cloud technologies, so that's my awareness regarding the creation and automation of data pipelines across those environments.

The features of Control-M that I find most appealing, and that I've heard customers appreciate, include the file transfer capability, which is very unsexy but fundamentally important. It's what it's all about—extracting data and moving it to different places.

The relationship between Control-M and my clients' DataOps and DevOps initiatives is complex. Most of our customers have their DevOps initiatives somewhat divorced from the Control-M elements. However, this is slowly changing as DevOps starts to incorporate both customer-facing aspects and the internal legacy parts of their business. They are gradually integrating, and that agile way of working is coming closer together.

The measurable benefits or improvements my clients have seen with Control-M relate to compliance, particularly in financial reconciliation. There are significant financial penalties for errors in this area, so it's crucial to develop a robust integration with ITSM  systems to ensure that tasks perform as intended and meet the right SLAs.

Control-M can be improved by continuing the trend of being both a mature product and one that is not standing still, as evidenced by the ongoing improvements we've seen. The file transfer piece is particularly popular, and it's essential to keep up with the demands that customers place on it.

I suspect a lot of my customers aren't pushing the boundaries of what Control-M can scale to, but the job scheduler approach allows for immense scalability. Many of our customers are only beginning to explore its capabilities.

I have been selling Control-M for one and a half years.

I don't believe any of my customers have reported issues around the availability of Control-M regarding stability and reliability.

I suspect a lot of my customers aren't pushing the boundaries of what Control-M can scale to, but the job scheduler approach allows for immense scalability. Many of our customers are only beginning to explore its capabilities.

I haven't heard any complaints about BMC's service team support; as far as I know, customers feel comfortable about it. Of course, I can't speak from personal experience.

There is a competitor to Control-M that many of my customers consider; the big one is IBM's IWS. There is some anecdotal evidence of dissatisfaction among customers regarding support since it has moved to HCL. I recently spoke to someone about exactly that scenario.

The overall experience of the migration and deployment process for my customers tends to be a horror show because migrations are critical and touch everything. The biggest challenge people face is unpicking the complexities involved. Thus, it's often hard to simply migrate, especially while maintaining a good relationship with the existing vendor.

On the topic of pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Control-M, everyone moans about it. We work with some customers on optimizing their job structure to deliver proper value for money. This is significant work, as getting value for money is a challenge we constantly address.

The biggest return on investment for users of Control-M in the financial sector can be fairly straightforward: you can easily state how much performing tasks manually would cost in person-hours. By avoiding financial penalties from regulations, the business case essentially writes itself. In manufacturing, it's more complex, as you look at how to minimize manual costs and whether Control-M helps reduce customer churn and ensures stock is in the right location. Extracting this information aids in making the business case.

On the topic of pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Control-M, everyone moans about it. We work with some customers on optimizing their job structure to deliver proper value for money. This is significant work, as getting value for money is a challenge we constantly address.

There is a competitor to Control-M that many of my customers consider; the big one is IBM's IWS. There is some anecdotal evidence of dissatisfaction among customers regarding support since it has moved to HCL. I recently spoke to someone about exactly that scenario.

In my company, zero users interact with Control-M because we don't actively use it; we just sell it. My customer base ranges widely, with some cases having a small batch team of a few dozen users up to hundreds, probably more in rough figures. I wouldn't have huge visibility on that.

I have heard of the Control-M Python client or API very recently. My experience selling the Control-M Python client or API is relatively new to me. It's not entirely new, but it hasn't come up much in my customer base. However, as DevOps and Control-M are becoming better together, I am seeing more of that.

Regarding metrics or data on how my customers perceive Control-M, I don't have any off the top of my head, and I probably would be privileged to know.

My advice to a company considering Control-M is to bring us in to help with the assessment work. Go through a value stream exercise to clarify what you're trying to accomplish and examine the entire end-to-end process. Control-M and workload automation is a solved problem; it's something you should buy rather than build yourself. That would eliminate undifferentiated heavy lifting. Certainly, we can assist clients with automation and value chain assessment, especially beyond the BMC space, which often presents a messy and complex landscape. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.