Centralized scheduling has streamlined complex production plans and supported multi‑cloud operations
What is our primary use case?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Control-M for 15 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would rate the stability of Control-M as a nine, as I find it to be stable with minimal bugs, glitches, or downtime.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
I would rate the vendor's technical support as an eight.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
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.
How was the initial setup?
Control-M setup is straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
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.
What was our ROI?
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.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Overall, I would rate BMC Control-M as a nine.
Effortless Job Scheduling and Reliable Automation
What do you like best about the product?
I use Control-M to build job chains with clear dependencies and schedules. It helps ensure tasks run in the right order and only when conditions are met. I often review job history and outputs to confirm changes worked as expected after deployments.
What do you dislike about the product?
Some automation features take time to learn, and keeping job definitions consistent requires discipline. A few configuration steps could be simpler.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Control-M replaces manual scripts with structured automation. It improves reliability, reduces failed jobs, and makes automation easier to support and maintain.
Effortless Integration and Centralized Monitoring
What do you like best about the product?
I appreciate how easily it integrates with major leading applications such as SAP, Salesforce, and AWS. Additionally, its centralized monitoring view makes it convenient to access and identify the status of batch executions.
What do you dislike about the product?
Currently, the reporting capabilities are quite limited. I hope BMC will invest more in enhancing the reporting features in the future.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Control-M is currently responsible for automating the majority of our batch executions. In addition, it assists us in triggering our workflows within both SAP and Mulesoft.
Effortless Implementation and Outstanding Support
What do you like best about the product?
Ease of Implementation, Customer Support, Ease of Integration
What do you dislike about the product?
there is no such kind, but we are little late in cloud journey
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
automate so many manual processes and in detailed error visibility to find the process easier
Automation has improved operational visibility and has supported reliable business processes
What is our primary use case?
I work with Control-M from a commercial aspect and engage with IT and operation teams across different industries, which gives me direct exposure to how Control-M is used in real production environments. My role is to deliver tangible value to these teams.
What is most valuable?
The valuable features of Control-M depend on the specific customer needs. Some customers have business-critical processes, strict SLAs, and hybrid or multi-cloud environments where Control-M provides end-to-end visibility of all these processes. Control-M also offers different modules, such as MFT, which allows users to transfer files with the tool. As a commercial professional, I cannot personally attest to specific features since I do not typically use the tool directly, but I can share what customers have told me they value about the product.
What needs improvement?
As a commercial professional, I think one of the downsides of Control-M is that not all people know they can use a tool such as Control-M, and they think that Control-M is going to be very expensive, which is the reason why they don't want to use it or seek more information about it. However, when they are accustomed to using this type of tool or Control-M as a scheduler, they feel better with it and with their role inside their enterprise. For example, if they don't have any scheduler, they don't know that they can use a scheduler to automate different business processes. When they recognize that they can use this type of tool, one of the objectives is to reduce costs. They may spend money in the short term, but in the medium or long term, they will probably have more benefits than risk.
Control-M has everything that a person needs because the problem is not high cost. Control-M is available on-premises and in the cloud, and they are having more apps every week with the app integrator. I don't have anything that I dislike about Control-M. Possible areas for improvement could include documentation, configuration, and pricing. Being more flexible and having out-of-the-box reporting for business stakeholders would be beneficial. Continuing to simplify licensing and packaging for smaller customers would also help improve customer conversations. Reporting is often mentioned as an area where Control-M could continue to evolve. Many customers would appreciate more out-of-the-box business-friendly reports. Control-M has operability with SLA-focused reports, but developing something with less customization would be better.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Control-M for more or less two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I think that some instability is normal because everything is in the cloud, and I can remember a few months when the AWS cloud crashed. If you see the SLA reports or responses from different customers, they are very happy with the tool. Control-M achieves more or less 98% or 99% uptime in the cloud, which is a fantastic rate. I think 100% is impossible to achieve, and 99.8% is a good number.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Control-M, developed by BMC, which was previously part of BMC Helix and is now BMC Software, is focusing on Digital Business Automation processes. They are developing many different modules in Control-M, and the scalability is fantastic. Probably in a couple of years, Control-M is going to be the best scheduler. Currently, they are competing with other schedulers such as Redwood, Broadcom, and Stonebranch, but in a couple of years, maybe one or two years, Control-M is not going to have any competitors.
How are customer service and support?
I have used technical support from BMC when we need to do demos for instances in the BMC tool. The technical support team are very good professionals and they do their jobs excellently. Since I don't use Control-M directly, if I have a problem with Control-M, the technical team from my enterprise would need to talk with the technical team from BMC. I usually talk with the commercial team from BMC rather than the technical team. I talk with the technical team when I need to make a demo, proof of concept, or proof of value, and we need to customize the future instance for the client. If I need to rate the technical support from BMC, I would give them a 10 because whenever I want to do something with them, they answer me, and I am very happy with them.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I don't use any alternative schedulers. I know that you can talk about Redwood, Broadcom, or Stonebranch, but I don't use any one of these schedulers.
How was the initial setup?
I don't have a lot of contact with deployment. Probably if I think about some customers, they tell me that there is also interest in simplifying upgrades and environment standardization, particularly for organizations with multiple Control-M instances. If you talk with a small customer, they are going to be happy with deployment, upgrades, or the environment.
Control-M has an upgrade more or less every year or every two years. If you want to use the latest upgrade, you need to upgrade your tool.
What about the implementation team?
The implementation team depends on the person doing the deployment.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The current pricing is good. Other vendors such as Broadcom are increasing their prices, so right now, Control-M is not one of the highest-cost schedulers. My customers have never told me anything negative about the pricing or licensing. BMC can be very amenable with the pricing of the tool. I have small customers, and I think that is a good point of view because they think they can't have the budget for a tool such as Control-M, but they do have the budget. Control-M is a tool for every kind of customer. You can sell Control-M for 15K on-premises and you can sell it for 7 million or 11 million. I think that people need to change their thinking because Control-M is not just an expensive tool. It is a tool for everyone, for every enterprise.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I would rate Control-M at nine.
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Unified Job Management with Seamless DevOps Integration
What do you like best about the product?
Control-M Provide single point of control manage scheduling monitoring jobs on various platforms. even now it supports for hybrid and multi-cloud environment. it provides well integration with Devops tools. Control-M having a great user community and customer support.
What do you dislike about the product?
Although Control-M is great tools, it gives great flexibility, but there is slight dislike about the high price modeling.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Control-M solve several critical problems in workload automation and orchestration. it provides end to end orchestration across on premise, hybrid and multi-cloud platform, and ensuring jobs and business requirement runs smoothly without manual intervention.his reduces operational complexity and improves reliability for critical workflows.
Centralized Orchestration and Visibility Make Control-M Stand Out
What do you like best about the product?
I like below things of control-m
1.Centralized Orchestration
2.Dependency Management
3. Audit and Compliance
4. Visibility and Alert Mechanism
What do you dislike about the product?
I dislike below number of things of control-m .
1.Licenscing cost
2.Complex Setup
3.High Resource utilization .
4.Upgrade and Patch Management
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
1. I would said the main problem that control-m solving for me is that as administrator we need to maintain the kpi of sox report and controlm's audit and annotation mechanism help us to provide the audit details .
2. Its cross platform support things multiple hosts jobs can be run and managed in one workflow
3.SLA Management keep us alerting if a job delay is there .
Centralized Workflow Management with Seamless Multi-Cloud Integration
What do you like best about the product?
Integration with multi cloud platform and a number of different applications which gives a centralized view of entire workflows.
What do you dislike about the product?
- Their inability to support scheduling Legacy app servers.
- Pricing is on a higher side.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
- Helps maintain SLA for workflows.
- Helps identify the issues more quickly.
- Proactive alerts for Critical batch chains.
Streamlined Automation with Control-M, Needs UI Enhancements
What do you like best about the product?
I really like the Control-M API because it minimizes manual intervention for activities in Control-M. The Control-M BIM, SAAS portal, and Reporting feature are very helpful in my daily activities. The Simplified Control-M App view for jobs, SLA, and automation is also something I appreciate. It was easy to search for any job, get notified about job failure and delay.
What do you dislike about the product?
The execution of jobs based on loops needs improvement, and there's a need to check both the application and Control-M UI for root cause analysis. Managing cloud-related jobs alongside on-prem jobs is a bit cumbersome. The UI could be more user-friendly by providing more convenient options, like searching for agentless hosts connected via an agent and finding specific agents linked to agentless hosts. Additionally, the centralized connection profile lacks sufficient information in the initial view, requiring further exploration to find details about the host where MFT/DB is installed.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Control-M avoids manual intervention during activities and automation, provides quick information on critical chain failures and delays, and simplifies job searching while notifying failures and delays. The Control-M API minimizes manual tasks, and its BIM, SaaS portal, and reporting features aid daily activities.
Centralized Batch Scheduling with Robust Features
What do you like best about the product?
I like Control-M's ability for Hybrid Multicloud orchestration, which helps in managing a mix of old mainframes and modern cloud infrastructure within our bank. The Job As Code feature is beneficial as well. The Centralized Visibility and Auditing capabilities are also valuable, providing a centralized place to connect our systems, audit, monitor, and execute tasks effectively.
What do you dislike about the product?
It's quite complex at the learning stage, especially for beginners. Also, the cost is high. If I have a chance to improve it, my focus would be first on the native reporting tool, which definitely needs some enhancements.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I use Control-M to reduce manual effort, system overload, downtime, and high operational cost. It centralizes job scheduling, provides hybrid multicloud orchestration, and offers centralized visibility and auditing, connecting our old and new IT infrastructures efficiently.
