My use case for Control-M includes file transfer and workload balancing, but it is mostly focused on workflow management.
Control-M SaaS
BMC SoftwareExternal reviews
External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
Workflow management has become highly reliable and has saved significant scheduling time
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I started using Control-M in 2000.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
From one to ten, with ten being the best, I would rate their technical support about a seven.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
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.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I did not have much engagement in the pricing area.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Effortless Task Management with Moderate UI Improvements Needed
Unified automation has improved cross-application workflows and simplified complex file transfers
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Control-M for 17 years overall in my career.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In terms of scalability, I think it is good. I have seen effective escalation when necessary during issue resolution.
How are customer service and support?
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.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Negative
What about the implementation team?
Usually, I handle the deployment myself, but I need a team to implement large numbers of jobs after the deployment.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Seamless Data Workflow Management
Efficient IT Task Automation with Room for Improvement
Effortless SLA Monitoring and Automation
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?
Control-M is stable.
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?
Negative
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.