My main use cases of Control-M involve workload automation, with two key areas being financial reconciliation and supply chain management. In financial reconciliation, a global financial services company pulls data from all its divisions around the world to perform end-of-day, end-of-month, and end-of-quarter reconciliation across a range of technologies, teams, and borders.

In supply chain management, manufacturers with retail stores need to ensure that the right stock is in the right places, which can be complicated. The third main use case relates to integration with SAP, making existing PA environments cheaper and less service-heavy. Those are the three main ones in my customer base.

My customers use Control-M to orchestrate workloads across multiple environments. Control-M orchestration is capable of handling complex data pipelines or analytic processes, which is key for some of our financial services customer use cases and is a relatively core part of their requirements.

My banking customer that moved some capabilities to the cloud uses Control-M for both on-premises and cloud technologies, so that's my awareness regarding the creation and automation of data pipelines across those environments.

The features of Control-M that I find most appealing, and that I've heard customers appreciate, include the file transfer capability, which is very unsexy but fundamentally important. It's what it's all about—extracting data and moving it to different places.

The relationship between Control-M and my clients' DataOps and DevOps initiatives is complex. Most of our customers have their DevOps initiatives somewhat divorced from the Control-M elements. However, this is slowly changing as DevOps starts to incorporate both customer-facing aspects and the internal legacy parts of their business. They are gradually integrating, and that agile way of working is coming closer together.

The measurable benefits or improvements my clients have seen with Control-M relate to compliance, particularly in financial reconciliation. There are significant financial penalties for errors in this area, so it's crucial to develop a robust integration with ITSM systems to ensure that tasks perform as intended and meet the right SLAs.

Control-M can be improved by continuing the trend of being both a mature product and one that is not standing still, as evidenced by the ongoing improvements we've seen. The file transfer piece is particularly popular, and it's essential to keep up with the demands that customers place on it.

I suspect a lot of my customers aren't pushing the boundaries of what Control-M can scale to, but the job scheduler approach allows for immense scalability. Many of our customers are only beginning to explore its capabilities.

I have been selling Control-M for one and a half years.

I don't believe any of my customers have reported issues around the availability of Control-M regarding stability and reliability.

I suspect a lot of my customers aren't pushing the boundaries of what Control-M can scale to, but the job scheduler approach allows for immense scalability. Many of our customers are only beginning to explore its capabilities.

I haven't heard any complaints about BMC's service team support; as far as I know, customers feel comfortable about it. Of course, I can't speak from personal experience.

There is a competitor to Control-M that many of my customers consider; the big one is IBM's IWS. There is some anecdotal evidence of dissatisfaction among customers regarding support since it has moved to HCL. I recently spoke to someone about exactly that scenario.

The overall experience of the migration and deployment process for my customers tends to be a horror show because migrations are critical and touch everything. The biggest challenge people face is unpicking the complexities involved. Thus, it's often hard to simply migrate, especially while maintaining a good relationship with the existing vendor.

On the topic of pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Control-M, everyone moans about it. We work with some customers on optimizing their job structure to deliver proper value for money. This is significant work, as getting value for money is a challenge we constantly address.

The biggest return on investment for users of Control-M in the financial sector can be fairly straightforward: you can easily state how much performing tasks manually would cost in person-hours. By avoiding financial penalties from regulations, the business case essentially writes itself. In manufacturing, it's more complex, as you look at how to minimize manual costs and whether Control-M helps reduce customer churn and ensures stock is in the right location. Extracting this information aids in making the business case.

On the topic of pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Control-M, everyone moans about it. We work with some customers on optimizing their job structure to deliver proper value for money. This is significant work, as getting value for money is a challenge we constantly address.

There is a competitor to Control-M that many of my customers consider; the big one is IBM's IWS. There is some anecdotal evidence of dissatisfaction among customers regarding support since it has moved to HCL. I recently spoke to someone about exactly that scenario.

In my company, zero users interact with Control-M because we don't actively use it; we just sell it. My customer base ranges widely, with some cases having a small batch team of a few dozen users up to hundreds, probably more in rough figures. I wouldn't have huge visibility on that.

I have heard of the Control-M Python client or API very recently. My experience selling the Control-M Python client or API is relatively new to me. It's not entirely new, but it hasn't come up much in my customer base. However, as DevOps and Control-M are becoming better together, I am seeing more of that.

Regarding metrics or data on how my customers perceive Control-M, I don't have any off the top of my head, and I probably would be privileged to know.

My advice to a company considering Control-M is to bring us in to help with the assessment work. Go through a value stream exercise to clarify what you're trying to accomplish and examine the entire end-to-end process. Control-M and workload automation is a solved problem; it's something you should buy rather than build yourself. That would eliminate undifferentiated heavy lifting. Certainly, we can assist clients with automation and value chain assessment, especially beyond the BMC space, which often presents a messy and complex landscape. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.

My main business use case supported by Control-M is performance data generation, which includes all orchestration jobs and workflow processes.

The feature I appreciate most about Control-M is the capability of scheduling jobs automatically, as the dependency and control runs all tasks automatically by themselves.

I value this feature because it frees up a significant amount of time from my daily work, allowing me to concentrate on other more manual tasks.

Control-M supports my DataOps and DevOps initiatives by automating the entire process through the dependency and successor logic.

The biggest return on investment for me when using Control-M is that it helps me automate the manual tasks of my daily work.

My company has achieved measurable benefits with Control-M through automation, which has improved delivery and reduced the possible manual errors that a human can make.

I think Control-M can be improved because we recently moved to Helix, the cloud control, and the latency of the application is substantial; the job is running in the background, but the UI side is very slow on the front end.

Control-M integrates with new or changing technologies within my DataOps or DevOps stack well; the cloud improvement is positive, but now that AI is a significant topic, it could incorporate more AI features. Although they do have some AI functionality in the cloud applications, it is not particularly useful and intuitive.

If I were to estimate the improvement percentage, I would say around seventy percent.

I have been using Control-M for six years.

After moving to the cloud solution, I believe Control-M is much more stable; we have been using it for around two years, and I do not see any downtime. On the cloud solution, I do not observe any downtime; however, on-premises, sometimes the server is not up and the agent is not running.

In terms of scalability, I believe Control-M works well for the work I am performing, around eight or ten because we are heavily using it for morning tasks, data preparation, and preparations early in the morning for the day.

BMC customer service and technical support typically assist us; we usually speak to the relationship manager to raise any concerns or issues that we find, and so far, we still receive the answers we need, although the response may not be as immediate as we expect.

I would rate the customer service and technical support a seven out of ten.

My company considered switching to other solutions once and attempted to source alternatives, but we ultimately decided to stick with BMC.

The overall experience with the deployment process of Control-M depends on whether we are discussing the application itself or the creation of the job.

I would describe Control-M's performance in building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring workflows as quite good; I have previously used other orchestration tools, and I believe Control-M has much better visualization of workflows in terms of scheduling jobs.

I use Control-M to orchestrate workloads across multiple environments; we have a stream of workflows that connects to AWS, then SQL Server, and our in-house applications and so on, creating a large web of workflows across different kinds of applications.

Control-M handles complex data pipelines and analytics processes mostly through the designer that designs the workflow; we put the complex logic there, and it serves more as a tooling for us to use than Control-M handling all of this.

The creation and automation of data pipelines across on-premises and cloud technologies with Control-M is quite good; so far, I have no complaints with that. Between the on-premises and cloud, we have one less concern about how the application processes on the cloud, but on-premises, we have more freedom in accessing the database and some backend functionality.

My advice for someone or other companies considering Control-M is to check their business requirements and see what Control-M can actually offer because they do have many plugins for different kinds of usage, so it totally depends on what the company wants.

I would rate this review eight out of ten overall.

Control-M is a scheduling tool that I have been using for the last three years. Earlier I used Autosys as a primary scheduling tool. When I started Control-M, it was a new experience because Autosys was over the cloud and we used to log in to the browser. Control-M is specifically for the application where we are using it now. The good thing is that there are so many connectors available.

Although I have one year of Autosys experience, Control-M presents a vast opportunity for us as a developer. Currently, I am in a data warehousing project where all the tools are legacy tools such as Informatica, SalesScript, Control-M, and database. When we are moving to the cloud, Control-M is still valid and relevant. We are transferring our data to the cloud and using Control-M as a scheduler. We are not using native cloud scheduler to date because all the developers here are accustomed to it.

We are almost using around 60 to 70% of the features. Control-M is providing us with so much capability to use during our daily problem-solving.

The good thing is that there are so many connectors available. Control-M provides lots of features, and we are almost using around 60 to 70% of them. Control-M is providing us with so much capability to use during our daily problem-solving.

When I joined this project and was very new to Control-M, there was one problem that even the seniors were facing sometimes. Suppose you are using Informatica; there are lots of Informatica developers in the market or some other tools that are very known to everyone. Even though Control-M is used by lots of people, the documentation in the beginning was very hard to search for on Google. This is why we had to reach out to people who were experienced, and it was a tough job for us because a few functionalities are not properly written in the documentation.

Another area of improvement is related to multiple versions of Control-M being used. In dev, one version exists, and in production, one version exists. In production, the stable version is used. Sometimes when we change over, there are multiple domains in Control-M such as Planning, Monitoring, History, and Forecast Tools. When we hop from one domain to another, sometimes we open a job, and the detail dialog box or detail window is not able to open.

Some features which are hidden are not properly documented in Control-M itself, or maybe documented but not properly given or described with examples. This is a problem. Sometimes we are forced to connect to senior developers who have used it for five to six years or more to learn about it.

I have been using Control-M for the last three years.

There is no maintenance on my end. In the last three years, I have seen two upgrades that were done by the admin team. Control-M is using the new versions, and as a developer, I am using it.

Control-M processes about 10,000 jobs starting every day in our production environment, and adding new jobs is very simple. We don't feel any pressure on Control-M because it is processing multiple jobs in parallel.

Regarding contacting technical support about Control-M, we tried, but at that time, we didn't get any response. We reached out to our client head, described our problem, and received assistance.

As a developer, I created an account in the BMC community to get help support. We post there nearly because sometimes we need solutions very quickly, and we don't have time to connect with the guys in the Control-M help desk.

Earlier I used Autosys as a primary scheduling tool. When I started Control-M, it was a new experience because Autosys was over the cloud.

Regarding the initial installation and setup of Control-M, I still have not installed it. I need to connect with one of my friends who are working in the ops team, as I am in the developer team. We never install Control-M here in this project.

I need to connect with one of my friends working in the ops team, as I am in the developer team. They have the access to install, uninstall, or configure anything.

Regarding pricing, I cannot comment. As a developer, this is not in my hands, and it was decided by the client.

If Control-M is selling their product to new customers who have never used anything, then who will support the new customer? The customer may not have the senior engineer who has used Control-M earlier, so the documentation matters. Control-M can improve this in the way that others have; for example, Databricks, Google Cloud, and Azure have so much documentation.

Whatever we wanted, we have it. Control-M is not executing anything; it is just a scheduler. It schedules an Informatica job, and Informatica is running on its operating system, managing all the logs, and showing us that the job is completed. I have not seen any lagging. This can be answered by the ops team better because as a developer, I own a few applications, and when they start and end, my duty is done. Overall, I would give Control-M a rating of eight out of ten.

I'm not sure about Control-M because it is only for another team member to use. What I can tell you is it is very helpful to use Control-M in the mainframe platform because we can run and schedule many routines at the same time and we can create some scenarios. By these scenarios, we can run a lot of routines. We can build some scenarios and maintain this in the real world in production environment.

Regarding Control-M, what I can mention is I only know about the platform used nowadays for our team, and I believe it is a very archaic model. Probably there is another interface, better solutions and maybe with an interface easier to use on a daily basis. But what we have nowadays is something not so familiar for people that don't have a complete understanding about how to use.

Regarding Control-M, I'm not the one to use it directly, but I know it is a very powerful tool and very dynamic and helps us a lot on a daily basis. I believe the tools to schedule a routine in Control-M are very helpful. On a daily basis, we can use a lot without some problems. It's very easy to use.

It is necessary to take some time to learn Control-M. More or less a month to be familiar with the first steps. As you continue, you will increase your understanding about the feature and probably need more or less six months.

People in the first initial step need more or less one month to be familiar with some commands and start using Control-M tools. To feel comfortable using it on a daily basis without support, it takes more or less six months. This is the appropriate time to be able to use Control-M.

I have used another tool related to Control-M, but it is not so similar. It is something more related about running only individual routines one, two, or three routines at the same time. It is Topaz. It is a tool directly connected to the mainframe as well, but it is more destined to developers to build routines and programs and run these sources. It is not the same, but it is what I use on a daily basis when I need to run routines.

I have never experienced any issues such as lagging or crashing with Control-M.

The scalability of Control-M is adequate. We need to follow some steps to add some routines, but that's acceptable. What I know about this feature is it is reasonable to use when you need to add some new steps, schedule some new routines, or add some files. It is pretty nice and not a big deal to use.

I didn't need to contact the technical support or customer support for Control-M.

I would rate Control-M overall an eight out of ten. I believe you can put my company name as entity data. I'm a software engineer.

My use case for Control-M is orchestration.

The best features of Control-M are that it is easy to use; even a non-technical person can learn it in a couple of days with normal documentation and a few videos. Just two days should be sufficient to pick it up. Users do not need to be technical to use the tool, and it is easy to implement and deploy.

Integrating Control-M with other technologies for DataOps and DevOps is easy; we export the jobs we create in a non-prod environment and, on the runtime, we know what variables need to be replaced, and we replace those variables to deploy to prod since Control-M is just an XML file, which is very easy to search and replace.

Control-M is extensively used in our projects. When we start a project and it becomes an enterprise tool, we are required to use it. If there are any failures, we can tag them with an incident, making it easy for maintenance, monitoring, tracking, and deployment since everything is in one place.

The area that has room for improvement in Control-M is a better dashboard. For example, sometimes we have up to 100 Control-M jobs, and there is no dashboard to know how many jobs are in progress, completed, or waiting for files. That requires us to create an additional dashboard on top of the Control-M metadata.

I've been using Control-M since I started my career in data warehousing in 2011 or 2012 since there are more jobs, more tables, and more data loads in data warehousing.

When it comes to stability, I would rate it as good, an eight out of ten.

The scalability of Control-M is good; we create different servers for different projects instead of putting all jobs on one server, and I would rate scalability as an eight out of ten.

The technical support from Control-M is good; I normally never ask the Control-M team for help as it hasn't gotten stuck for me, however, they are supportive, and I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We have used different orchestration tools, however, I am not aware of the specific tools you mentioned.

The deployment of the solution is easy.

Regarding the duration of deployment, if everything is proper, I don't see a big challenge. Normally, it takes a day if you have the code ready and follow the process and checklist.

The return on investment seen with Control-M is significant; in my experience, we run more than 100 to 150 jobs a day, and to monitor those jobs, one or two people should be enough since it triggers emails for failures and allows us to view logs within Control-M itself.

I'm not sure about the pricing of Control-M. I didn't get involved at the pricing level.

When comparing Control-M with other solutions, I see that everywhere, orchestration tools are simple, and while they come with basic monitoring and alerting functionalities, the decision to use Control-M often comes down to cost, licensing, and maintenance.

My relationship with BMC is good.

I recommend Control-M if there are no other tools available as it is easy to use, with easy maintenance and a centralized monitoring system, alerting system, and incident creation.

Overall, I would rate Control-M an eight out of ten.

My use case for Control-M is that it's a job scheduler for some jobs regarding data warehouse jobs and billing tasks for a telecommunication company, mainly monitoring jobs.

The best features of Control-M that I most appreciate are the integration and unification of different systems, such as BMC Remedy, integration with alerting systems, and the unification for the dashboard—something akin to one dashboard to monitor everything, which is very good. It can communicate with different platforms such as cloud, different systems, and OSes. I also appreciate the visualization; when we are designing a tree, a job tree, the option to visualize the dependencies and the mapping is very user-friendly.

Control-M has positively impacted my organization, particularly in the flexibility it offers in scheduling jobs. It has a nice feature called Calendar Integration that integrates with the company calendar to allow for the holidays and special events regarding the organization, not only the public calendar, but specifically for the organization.

There are some areas in Control-M that have room for improvement, particularly some constraints regarding the scripts, such as limitations in how they can be executed and integrated; it's not the normal scripting way in some cases. It's not in all cases, but in some cases, there are limitations and constraints in running the scripts.

Additionally, Control-M requires some hardware resources in terms of system requirements; it consumes some hardware resources.

I have been using Control-M for about five years or more than five years.

The stability of Control-M gets a nine from me; although we faced one issue during this year regarding its stability, nine is good for it.

Scalability for Control-M is good; I would rate it an eight due to the high license cost, but it's scalable.

I would rate the technical support for Control-M a nine.

I have seen a return on investment with Control-M; we have the real-time alert feature. Our administrators get alerts for any job failures or emails for any issues, which saves our business. We also have reporting tools embedded in Control-M to generate daily reports and keep historical data. All of this handles our job, mainly the monitoring and automation for the scheduling. That's why we are using it.

My thoughts on the pricing of Control-M are that the cost of the license is very high. You have to implement some cost-saving measures, such as cleaning up jobs that are not required anymore on a monthly basis, in order to control the license, as the license is very costly.

Additionally, there's a dependency on training; on a yearly basis, or whenever there's a new version, we need to schedule training and an official training from an accredited course center or from BMC itself, which is very costly.

I haven't dealt with other solutions or vendors on the market, but I can say Control-M is better than good when it comes to automation.

There is a good feature about the drag-and-drop; we can easily create and modify jobs with drag-and-drop in the interface, which makes it easier and user-friendly. BMC is a good strategic partner; they are helping us in mapping out our migration strategy, and we have a team from their side that supports us in our job. They know our case and they are specialized in our system, following up on our system.

I recommend Control-M to other users because it's user-friendly, it has a unified dashboard, and it's easy to schedule and use. However, there are certain limitations, especially for larger organizations, to afford the cost of the license and the cost of training. For a small organization, I wouldn't recommend it, as it would be very costly for them.

I would rate Control-M an eight out of ten, considering I have some concerns about the cost and the training, which is also related to cost.

I have used Control-M for database, SAP, web services, and file transfers. Additionally, I use it for normal scripts.

We had a customer who was using cron jobs to handle their workflows. With cron jobs, they faced problems related to SLA. When something failed, it took them time to identify issues, and sometimes they missed incidents which resulted in P1 situations in production environments. They transitioned to Control-M based on its features related to SLA and workflow visibility, which significantly helped them.

The GUI is the best feature, along with the file transfer capabilities. These are the two main components I use on a daily basis. Through GUI or CCM, we get control of all the components, which I really appreciate.

While I cannot specify exact business impact numbers, frequent P1 incidents in the production environment typically indicate monetary losses.

While it can be used for DevOps purposes, we haven't used it for that purpose.

Support is one aspect that they really need to improve. Though we receive support for current versions, the challenge arises when working in large organizations with legacy workflows or applications, typically 10 to 20% of the total.

When these legacy environments have outdated OS and face production issues from a Control-M perspective, BMC support states it's not supported anymore. Recently, we needed documentation for an old component during a production issue, and their response was that they couldn't help as it wasn't supported. Documentation should be maintained for all versions since they provided the application.

I have a total experience of around 19 years, with approximately 13 or 14 years specifically with Control-M. I started with 6.4.

Control-M is pretty stable. There are occasional issues, yet nothing major, and most issues are not caused by the software itself.

In on-premises environments, scalability features are limited. Planning and resource allocation must be done at the start. If workflows increase from 1,000 to 10,000, redeployment of the application becomes necessary. Database and application node planning must account for anticipated workflow volumes from the beginning.

We have approximately 1,000 users.

Support is an area that requires significant improvement.

I haven't migrated from other solutions.

I have limited experience with TWS. The TWS version we used was primarily command-line based, and its GUI capabilities were not comparable to Control-M.

The deployment process is straightforward. The environment's complexity affects deployment time rather than the software itself. Basic DB and Linux box installation takes approximately a week. The planning phase for system connectivity and task execution locations requires additional time.

The system requires maintenance with patches released once or twice yearly.

We are implementing this as a customer.

I can provide a general perspective on ROI. Manual tasks require human effort and are prone to errors, which Control-M helps eliminate. However, I cannot provide specific ROI figures.

Control-M is expensive and not cheap at all.

I have conducted technical assessments for several market solutions, though not in great depth. We explored alternative solutions due to Control-M's high cost rather than its technical limitations. My assumption is that all current enterprise-level scheduling or workload automation software provides similar technical functionalities and features.

We're a customer.

I would recommend Control-M for its performance capabilities. While cost-cutting is prevalent everywhere and Control-M's cost is on the higher side, from a technical perspective, it ranks among the top three solutions.

The review rating for Control-M is nine out of ten.

In my company, we use Control-M as the main scheduling and automation tool for ETL processes. It orchestrates data flows from AIX servers to Linux and Windows platforms, integrates with Informatica PowerCenter for data transformation, and also manages dependencies with several network-based applications.

Control-M has significantly improved our organization by providing centralized scheduling and monitoring of ETL workflows. It allows us to automate complex job dependencies across different platforms, including AIX, Linux, and Windows. With Control-M, we can integrate seamlessly with Informatica PowerCenter for data transformation, ensuring that data pipelines run consistently and on time.

The first aspect is in real-time monitoring. Control-M has good visibility of thousands of jobs, and normally runs at the scheduled time. Control-M scheduling has always executed according to a different schedule, except when incidents occur, such as storage vapor.

I think Control-M has room for improvement because it should refresh more frequently.

I have been working in my current position for four months as a monitoring operator.

I would rate the stability of Control-M a 9.5 out of 10.

I would rate the scalability of Control-M at 9.5 out of 10.

I would rate technical support for Control-M at nine point five because it provides separate level error classification, which is a very important feature. The separate level error classification helps in determining the severity of issues.

Many engineers in our organization use Control-M, including both vendors and internal employees, approximately 100 in total.

I would rate Control-M overall a nine out of ten.

In my job, we mainly use BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer for processes like recharge and billing requirements and customer data management, which we handle using Control-M MFT and scheduling jobs.

Based on my experience, BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer provides significant benefits for our company by facilitating communication and data transfer between numerous databases and servers, ensuring we maintain only the necessary files while removing old ones. When commuicating between one server to another, from one team to another, MFT helps a lot.

The advanced feature of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer is what I find most valuable, as it allows for numerous operations, such as stopping the entire processing if the source file fails and replacing the destination with new files if there's a failure.

The solution has definitely improved application reliability and SLA in our company, as SLA is crucial in my organization, helping to reduce the SLA and maintain the MTTR.

The usability is quite good for tracking a large number of files. To try tracking a large number of files from source to destination, it's it takes a lot of efforts if done manually. So MFT helps a lot with automating that process.

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer already works great, though there could be improvements for transferring large files, particularly those that are in gigabytes, as it sometimes poses problems.

I have been working with BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer for four or more years.

I would rate the stability of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer an eight out of ten, with two points off due to issues with transferring gigabyte files.

In terms of scalability, I would rate BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer a nine out of ten for its ability to scale and expand.

For BMC technical support, I would rate it a seven out of ten. Sometimes the support is not readily available, and they often request the same information multiple times, with delays in providing solutions.

I don't have experience with competitor products, as my experience is solely with BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer.

We do the deployment process of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer in-house, and our team recently developed a BladeLogic job that automates Control-M agent deployment, fulfilling all prerequisites such as FS need, FS size need, and Java need.

The deployment process, in general, is simple. You can upgrade as well quite easily.

We handle the implementation in-house.

BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer has definitely helped to reduce IT operations cost, as maintaining files manually takes a lot of human time, and this automation significantly alleviates that burden.

The pricing for licensing has increased. I'd rate the pricing three out of ten.

Regarding workflow orchestration, I haven't quite used that part of BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer yet. I am totally satisfied with the functionality of the BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer product.

I would definitely recommend BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer solution to other users.

Overall, I would rate BMC Control-M Managed File Transfer an eight out of ten.