Control-M - Application And Data Workflow Orchestration

My use case for Control-M  includes file transfer and workload balancing, but it is mostly focused on workflow management.

I love Control-M 's reliability and ease of use. It offers ease of adaptability for upgrades, and the GUI features have been enhanced for better readability. Their reporting improvements are notable, and they developed software that helps manage licensing effectively.

Control-M is incredibly reliable, rarely having issues from an administrative standpoint. The high stability means I am rarely surprised by problems. Additionally, time-saving is significant; previously, scheduling involved paper and took much longer. Control-M reduced the scheduling time drastically, taking only about five to ten minutes to add a new job to the workflow.

One area that has room for improvement is support. Early on, support was fabulous, with efficient issue resolution processes. However, since approximately 2015, support has been lackluster, relying too much on email. I would suggest a return to hands-on support engagement.

Aside from the support aspect, I cannot think of anything else that needs improvement.

I started using Control-M in 2000.

Regarding stability, I would give Control-M a ten. Control-M is such a reliable piece of software. I rarely, if ever, have to do anything from an administrative point of view. When someone calls me with a Control-M problem, it surprises me as it is mostly stable.

Control-M is scalable. The easiest way to express this is regarding licensing; as you are scaling up, you should keep up with your licensing. BMC does an annual review, and your account representative will reach out for a licensing software run that generates a report using all Control-M components.

From one to ten, with ten being the best, I would rate their technical support about a seven.

Concerning Control-M, I previously started out with scheduling package software back in the old Uccel, which was bought by Computer Associates and called CA-7.

Installing Control-M was really quite easy; you simply download it and do the installation. The biggest thing is the front-end work prior to installation, such as deciding which database you will use.

My relationship with BMC is probably transactional. I rarely have to reach out to them.

The BMC service team could be better at being more involved in mapping out migration strategies, though they have a really good process called AMIGO that yields positive outcomes.

In terms of time savings with Control-M, I spend maybe thirty minutes a week, if that, on Control-M compared to other software products I have dealt with.

I did not have much engagement in the pricing area.

Regarding other solutions, Redwood was the only one I was familiar with. I saw a demo on that before 2010 when management was looking at maybe replacing Control-M.

Deployment is on a Windows platform in a high availability environment.

I would recommend Control-M to others looking to implement it, but it is essential to ensure it fits your environment, so doing a proof of concept is always beneficial.

In our project, we are using Control-M  for job scheduling and monitoring. We have data workflows and many other components that we can manage from a business point of view. We can manage processes across on-premises and all kinds of environments.

Control-M  is the easiest tool available because we can accomplish what we want. We can automate processes and reduce manpower, which is the primary benefit. We can manage all workflows across different cloud environments with the help of batch scheduling, automating, and controlling jobs. It is easy to handle if you are confident with scheduling and related components. We can improve Service Level Agreements and SLA management.

Integrations are available through API and Control-M automation API to build, run, and manage workflows. We can integrate with CI/CD pipelines. As an automation solution, Control-M provides cost and licensing benefits that are good for our ownership considerations. Flexibility is also available. Job failure monitoring includes email notifications and alerts. Some users feel that the interfaces, both web and desktop, could be more streamlined.

IBM workload automation is another tool, but we are satisfied while using Control-M and comparing it to other solutions. IBM is primarily suited for mainframe integrations only, whereas Control-M is a workload automation platform where we can implement job as code and use it easily.

Deployment and agent upgrades are straightforward with Control-M. If you want to upgrade one agent version or the client version, Control-M is easier to manage compared to other tools. If we have Java capabilities, we can easily perform these upgrades. Moving to Oracle 19c would be beneficial. TLS protocols are in place while fixing vulnerabilities. TLS 1.2 and higher versions are good, and we could upgrade to TLS 1.3 for better security.

From a security perspective, communication protocols like TLS are available. SAP optimization would be beneficial if possible. Improving the overall application path would enhance the solution further.

We have been using Control-M for four years.

We experience all kinds of stability issues, and they are difficult to manage.

Compared to all other tools, the scalability is moderate only.

We are receiving all the good support we need. Even when we encounter issues with vulnerabilities that we cannot fix internally, the vendor provides excellent response times and support. Everything has been positive.

We have used other vendors in the past, including solutions from Azure , AWS , and Salesforce .

We have achieved nearly 30% return on investment.

Nearly 100 users are using Control-M in our organization. We previously used BMC Eclipse, which is a Software as a Service solution, for three years. Control-M has enabled us to transition from mainframe to the cloud environment with Azure . We are using this on a video conference basis. My overall rating for Control-M is 8 out of 10.

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.