Automation has saved hours of manual scheduling and improves monitoring for complex jobs
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for Control-M is job scheduling. I use Control-M for job scheduling by scheduling jobs for the asset team, like OS jobs, MFT jobs, and AFT jobs. I exclusively use Control-M for scheduling.
What is most valuable?
The best features Control-M offers include monitoring, planning, and forecast. Planning stands out the most for me in Control-M, as it helps me to schedule jobs.
Control-M has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to automate a lot of manual activities, so we are saving time.
What needs improvement?
Control-M can be improved with GUI features such as job failure monitoring, where the duration can be increased from 30 days to one year so that we can monitor long durations of job failures.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Control-M for 11 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability of Control-M is good.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support for Control-M is fine.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I did not previously use a different solution.
How was the initial setup?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing indicates that it is cheaper than other automation tools in the market.
What about the implementation team?
We require five staff members for deployment and maintenance, and they all are consultants.
What was our ROI?
I have seen a return on investment, specifically in terms of money saved. We are saving a lot of time, as many activities that used to take around three to four hours by manual activity have been reduced to 30 minutes to one hour.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing indicates that it is cheaper than other automation tools in the market.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing Control-M, I did not evaluate other options.
What other advice do I have?
My advice to others looking into using Control-M is that it is easy to use, flexible, and stable. The features in Control-M are good, and the GUI of Control-M is actually very fantastic.
Currently, 500 users are using Control-M in my organization, where the majority of them are from the application team and a few are admin and schedulers. Control-M is currently used extensively, and while we do not have plans to increase its usage, we are using Control-M in different domains.
The biggest lesson I have learned from using Control-M is that it makes automation easy. It is easy to integrate Control-M with technologies for my data ops and DevOps processes as things change. I have automated activities on the Linux server while integrating with Control-M.
I would rate this product a 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Have managed daily operations efficiently with strong workflow orchestration and top-tier support
What is our primary use case?
I use Control-M extensively on a daily basis.
What is most valuable?
The best features I prefer about Control-M include self-service and SLA management.
What needs improvement?
In Control-M, the user interface has room for improvement. The user interface can be more friendly and should be more similar to a Control-M/EM client interface. Control-M SaaS is very expensive.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Control-M for 15 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
When comparing Control-M with other vendors, BMC is very stable according to the Gartner report, and it has more than 30 years of product lifetime, making it a very good product.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I would rate the scalability of Control-M as excellent, giving it a 10.
How are customer service and support?
I would rate the technical support a 10.
How would you rate customer service and support?
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
For on-premises, the task pricing is somewhat expensive, but for SaaS, it is very expensive.
What other advice do I have?
Approximately 10 users use Control-M. My relationship with BMC is more strategic and collaborative, as it is more about buying and selling. I am satisfied with BMC as a strategic partner. I would recommend Control-M for other users because for a company, Control-M is an infrastructure, and every company should have one workload automation product. Control-M is the best choice. My clients are enterprise users. I would rate Control-M overall a 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
It provides a centralized view of our enterprise workload
What is our primary use case?
We predominantly use Control-M SAP R3 jobs. That's our primary batch job load with external vendors and internally on our AWS instance. That's our batch load alongside a few custom integrations. They are not public applications. It's all in-house applications. We have integrations and API integrations for the API hubs, which speak to multiple other applications within our next case.
We also use MFT enterprise for secured file transfer and management.
How has it helped my organization?
It isn't the only point of failure, but Control-M handles our business-critical, priority-one applications. We have other options. Control-M runs the SAP side for all batches. The time needed to realize the benefits depends on the scale and complexity.
One use case was in health care and involved shipment orders. With Control-M controlling the workflow, we could effectively monitor it and forecast any delays. This enabled us to deliver critical products in under four hours across hospitals in the network.
We can apply the same standards and run the same set of jobs across environments. Once they are tested in the non-production environment, we can move them seamlessly to the production environment.
We have a nightly process of batch reports. Before Control-M, we spent around 12 hours manually scheduling reports in SAP. After streamlining the process, we reduced manual work to nine and a half hours. The business could update all the processes before midnight.
While it doesn't totally free up IT personnel, it provides visibility into self-service tools where business users can see their pipelines or job streams. It would be read-only access for the business side, but to take action on the job, they still need to contact the IT team.
Control-M doesn't facilitate collaboration between business and IT users, but It provides a better user experience. Both parties can see what they are talking about, so there's no black zone for any of the parties. Before Control-M, the functional team had a particular nomenclature to relate what they had seen on Control-M. With the self-service tool, they can simply relay the job name. The collaboration starts there, and it builds over with a lot of other parameters.
What is most valuable?
Control-M provides a centralized view of our enterprise workload. As the owner, I can access my dashboard and see the status of jobs across the enterprise. It is strong at integrating with different applications and creating a pipeline of dependencies across applications on different operating systems.
When it comes to developments where we have to move across regions or environments, it seamlessly integrates and adapts to different regions. Regarding integration with the DevOps pipeline, it allows us to use a JSON file and promote it across environments easily.
We use Control-M to deploy workflows for DataOps and DevOps initiatives. It allows us to quickly test workflows or configuration changes without much manual effort. We add the JSON file for the conversation parameters and let the system handle the schedule. Integrating other DevOps tools within the journey gives us the management perspective and approval of multiple pipelines.
What needs improvement?
I'm currently working on the SaaS version, but I've also worked on the on-prem versions before. There is a handful of features that haven't been added to the SaaS version, and the BMC knows that. It's a matter of time before they prioritize the missing pieces and bring them into the SaaS version.
For how long have I used the solution?
I started using Control-M back in 2008
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Control-M has the best stability in the market. They claim 99.99 percent availability. It's hardly four hours of downtime throughout the year.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Control-M is infinitely scalable. We only need to add agents. BMC will take care of it if you need anything on the SaaS side, but we can handle the rest using our agent architecture.
How are customer service and support?
I rate BMC support 10 out of 10. They are stringent about their SLA timelines. They respond on time, and if it's a priority one, they will call immediately.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used the SAP Scheduler and adopted Dollar Universe. All our local manual efforts ran in Windows Scheduler.
How was the initial setup?
It was a greenfield approach, and I was there from day one as a consultant. Deploying Control-M can be easy or difficult, depending on what the business needs. It takes a while to understand the infrastructure setup our business needs and the number of jobs we need to run through this application.
It took a while to understand the infrastructure setup we require. We had to understand the number of jobs running through this application and how business-critical they are. The documentation BMC provides is top-notch and covers every step we must follow.
Migrating to Control-M is a bit tricky in terms of preparing the data and having the right tool to convert required parameters into a Control-M-ready job. Control-M has a feature called AMIGO that helps us migrate from the existing source. Converting a job and loading it into our Control-M format isn't straightforward. We must do some prerecorded checks and setups before.
There is some maintenance in the form of updating agents and deploying patches on the SAP application. Since it's a SaaS application, BMC handles most of the maintenance on the server side.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The license model is based on the number of jobs we run on the SaaS application or the number of executions, unlike the on-premise model options. If we have a handful of jobs, it's always good to consider Control-M, but if it's a large number of jobs, Control-M might not be a great option.
Control-M enables us to consolidate our jobs, and it helps us have a uniform approach and schedule. It helps to have the audit logs available. The scheduler space is nice in terms of control.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We attempted to leverage ActiveBatch by Redwood and a few other options, but Control-M had all the features we needed. It gives us a 360-degree view of our implementation across silos. The architectural requirements also vary depending on the criticality of the applications.
Control-M allows us to customize the job templates for any application we need, which covers all our future plans. Its integration speed is excellent because it has templates for every application.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Control-M 10 out of 10. New users will be fine if they follow the Control-M documentation. There's also a book you can buy on Amazon called "Batch Scheduling" that comprehensively covers batch operations and how BMC has evolved over time.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?