Control-M - Application And Data Workflow Orchestration

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.

I mainly use Control-M  for scheduling jobs according to my requirements, which allows me to include holidays or exclude Saturdays, Sundays, or any specific time.

I also use cyclic jobs that run in a recurring period and can set up prerequisites before the job runs.

I can implement a File Watcher to establish a rule that a particular job can only run after the upstream job is completed.

I have created several new jobs using these capabilities.

Within Control-M , I use smart folders and jobs, and I can approach scheduling the way I want, so I have used it fully from start to end.

Control-M is straightforward for building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring production workflows.

I use the XML side for configuration, which requires importing, and I find it user-friendly.

Control-M has been used for building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring production workflows, especially at JPMorgan Chase Bank where most production support is monitored through Control-M.

I worked as a developer, developed jobs, and sent them to production, and the process was seamless.

My favorite feature about Control-M is the rule-based calendar feature.

The initial deployment of Control-M is straightforward, as it involves a simple installation of a Control-M agent within the server.

Control-M demonstrates strong scalability.

My application alone uses approximately 65 jobs, and for each folder, there are thousands of jobs that can load immediately in production.

When using a filter, the search is quick, and overall scalability has been excellent.

After migrating to Control-M, the positive effect on business-critical applications is evident: whenever a job ends successfully or fails, notifications are sent immediately.

These notifications go to EventBridge, alerting the team to any critical jobs.

High-priority jobs trigger alerts to engage developers immediately, ensuring there is no delay in response.

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.

I have been using Control-M for approximately eight to nine years in my career.

Regarding stability, I do not experience any lagging, crashing, or performance issues with Control-M.

Control-M demonstrates strong scalability.

My application alone uses approximately 65 jobs, and for each folder, there are thousands of jobs that can load immediately in production.

When using a filter, the search is quick, and overall scalability has been excellent.

I have never contacted technical support or customer support from BMC regarding Control-M because we have sufficient in-house expertise to share knowledge about it internally.

I started on TWS, Tivoli Workload Scheduler, which is an older tool with a poor user interface.

After transitioning to Control-M, I have been very satisfied with it.

I have not identified pain points until now because the use cases I addressed were fully satisfied by Control-M's capabilities.

Whatever use cases I needed, they were fulfilled by the product.

I used Tivoli Workload Scheduler earlier, but now the company has standardized on Control-M without using any other schedulers.

The initial deployment of Control-M is straightforward, as it involves a simple installation of a Control-M agent within the server.

Only one person is required for deployment, and it can be completed without needing a team.

For both job deployment and software installation, one person typically handles it, as we use an automation process with no manual work, making it a self-service operation.

I have personally used TWS as an alternative to Control-M.

I prefer Control-M over TWS.

The biggest difference between TWS and Control-M is that TWS has a poor user interface, while Control-M has an excellent user interface and alerting capabilities.

TWS requires monitoring on one page without navigation directions, whereas Control-M uses smart folders with parent and subfolders, maintaining a clear graph structure and allowing the creation of custom workspaces.

Regarding data pipelines, I have not explored integrating them via Control-M.

Non-technical users or business users do not need to use Control-M, as they primarily rely on developers or application support.

Currently, all employees at JPMorgan use Control-M for everything except mainframe jobs, which are monitored and developed through Control-M.

For maintenance, a patching team manages it, and I do not experience any downtime with Control-M.

I might not notice maintenance communications since they could be performed behind the scenes or during off-business hours.

I would rate this review an 8 out of 10.

The use case for my clients involves everything, as it depends on the customer environment and the platform. I have managed around 60 business cases during the last five to seven years. My customers use Control-M  for the management of the production plan to manage other internal applications, cloud services, or infrastructure services. The minimum infrastructure I integrate or manage is around 1,000 jobs per day, and the maximum is around 200,000 per day.

Integrating data ops and DevOps processes for my clients is straightforward.

The scale I work with depends on the service. In the Silkan organization, we have six different houses with different practices. For time and materials services, integration is relatively easy because we work with the customer's technical team to advise and implement the tools based on the previous production plan. The customers I deal with are generally from the CAC 40 in France and are typically very large companies like those in the SBF 120 or SBF 250. For managed services, I engage with companies that have between 500 to 5,000 employees and just below 2 billion in turnover per year.

I work with all industries and do not have a specific sector.

The best features and what I appreciate about Control-M  are the power of the tool, the ability to manage different applications, and to have a comprehensive overview of the production plan. Another aspect that my technical team appreciates is the continuous improvement of the tool because we know that more than 200 developers enhance the tool every year. Additionally, I have skills for other schedulers, but my main partner is truly BMC for the quality of the support, the tools, and the relationship with the alliance team.

Deploying Control-M is straightforward, and while the installation can be completed in less than one day, the migration and full integration require visibility on the production plan to estimate the time needed effectively. For different volumes, such as a production plan for 1,000 or 100,000 jobs, the time management varies significantly.

Maintaining Control-M is easy, and it does not require complex updates or renewals.

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.

I have been working with Control-M for 15 years.

I would rate the stability of Control-M as a nine, as I find it to be stable with minimal bugs, glitches, or downtime.

In terms of scalability, I would give it a seven.

The reason for my seven rating is due to the challenges when I have various environments across different continents and countries. I have to duplicate environments and handle multiple issues. Network problems, even short cuts, can cause some complications. Scalability involves delivering services globally, which customers demand, and while synchronization works well when confined to a single country with one or two environments, more complex arrangements can introduce challenges.

I would rate the vendor's technical support as an eight.

When comparing BMC Control-M with other products, I note that there are other technologies I manage, such as Vtom and Dollar Universe. However, I focus on managing alliances, so BMC remains my only partner for scheduler tools, although I know the technical team oversees various schedulers.

Control-M setup is straightforward.

I do not typically work with the BMC technical team to create migration strategies, as my experts manage, design, and implement the tools for my customers independently. My relationship is mainly focused on licensing pricing, daily sales meetings, and an annual technical summit to discuss features and future developments of Control-M.

Control-M represents good value. It is important that you understand my limits on Control-M because I sell it for my customers. I have some knowledge about the licensing and the relationship with the partner team of BMC. The main people who manage the alliance with BMC are my associates, including Antoine Bitran, who will have more information about Control-M. Regarding the technical part, I have a few people internally, around 15 experts who are Control-M certified, who handle the technical aspects. On my side and regarding my job, it is more about the relationship, the knowledge, and the feedback about customer satisfaction.

I would recommend trying the BMC cloud environment as the best way to experience Control-M. Implementing a few jobs using a free demo license for a few days or weeks is advisable, though it really depends on the customer's maturity, size, complexity, and criticality of the application, making it a nuanced recommendation.

Overall, I would rate BMC Control-M as a nine.