We have done the usual crontab migration. Everything is in crontab or Windows Scheduler. Typically, we end up with a migration, even if it's from a known tool, where we end by exporting it into Excel and converting it into job definitions with a script. We have been involved in that, but nothing using BMC tools.

When I joined the company, I first supported them through the local partner. Because we have such a vast array of scheduling tools, they went through a PoC and business case. We evaluated three or four tools, where BMC Control-M was one. Quite soon, because the company was already using Control-M in Africa and China, they were looking for global solutions to see if it really could create change.  

What it came down to was ease of use, enterprise capability, and BMC was already in the company with ITSM and a couple of other products as well. They had a good relationship with us. We consulted with other customers who have used it as well as references because it was expensive. It was definitely the most expensive solution then, out of the four. However, we didn't want to go five years down the line and then have to change again because of issues.

Previously we were using UC4 for more than 20,000 jobs. But our customers were not very comfortable with the user interface in UC4. Certain things were not appropriate in that tool. Since our decision to migrate to Control-M, our customers have been very satisfied.

Integration is very easy. When I'm thinking about integrating Control-M with anything I'm not worried about it. I know Control-M will definitely have a way to integrate easily. I have used UC4, AutoSys, and Dollar Universe. But when the requirements include integration, I always think of Control-M, because I know the integration will be very easy. I will never go for any of those other tools.

Every few years we go through a reevaluation. We'll go through and look at what's on the market and what companies have come up with or released new versions. We'll go through and we'll say, "Okay, let's compare these, what do we need and what are all the tools offered out there?" We do that roughly every five years and it keeps us on our toes.

The biggest difference as of late is the API and Jobs-as-code. Control-M is light years ahead of others. It is light years ahead of the competitors and what they're offering. Other competitors are starting to get APIs, however, only BMC is working with Job-as-code and is in the lead. To my knowledge, they're really one of the only ones who can define your entire workflow as code.

I was in charge of evaluating all the tools. Because we already had SAP, I first evaluated the SAP tools, such as SAP PI/PO and SolMan. All the SAP tools do these functions. They do them well, but they have limitations. For example, in SolMan, you can monitor and do all the operations, but when it comes to IBP, which is SaaS, it does not work. It is better to not manipulate the programming settings. It is better to leave the standard programming settings because it is simpler.

I was also told to evaluate external tools, so I evaluated Helix Control-M and the IBM solution. Helix Control-M won there. It is the first time that we have used a tool for this type of control. Previously, this work was done manually by a team of people. We used the tools only when monitoring a single platform. For example, for S4HANA, we only used SolMan, but we wanted to integrate several systems and find a solution that does all the activities efficiently and safely.

We also evaluated JAMS Scheduler, which is also a workload automation solution. The pricing for Control-M was better and has good predictive maintenance that is better than JAMS. Control-M is also more integrated with Google for different solutions.

Yes, other vendors were evaluated at that time.  Control-M was selected primarily because of the integration between it and other BMC tools.

N/A

We looked at a few others including IBM's Tivoli and Computer Associates.

The biggest difference is that Control-M is a more mature and growing product. The other ones were very stale. They just didn't seem to be keeping up with the times. Also, Control-M requires a lot less administration than the other products did, and Control-M was a lot easier to learn than the others. The others had a very high learning curve.

You can't compare other tools to Control-M, because Control-M is further ahead of any other tool.

For my current project, the client has always used Control-M.

We did not really look at other options because we had some good information from an external partner about Control-M and that is why we went directly to Control-M.

We evaluate competitors yearly, but in terms of value for money, we always return to Control-M. We get an excellent return on our investment.

We looked at continuing to use the same solutions we had been using, and there were a couple of other cloud-based solutions that we evaluated. One of them was Matillion. The ease of use was one component of our decision, as was the flexibility of scripting with Python. Those were the key differentiators.

At the time we were looking for a product, I looked at five or six different scheduling packages. By far, at that time, Control-M was leaps and bounds above all the rest of them.

Our customer chose this solution. 

We evaluated several options and we found that Control-M was the most complete solution.

I have hands-on experience with Redwood and ActiveBatch solutions. If there are a lot of Windows requirements with Windows jobs, then definitely ActiveBatch is the best solution. If we see there are a lot of SAP-based requirements, then Redwood is the best solution and either Redwood RunMyJob or Redwood CPS work for this. If we see Unix or any other application with jobs, then Control M is the best solution.

CA sent us a proposal and IBM also sent one for Tivoli Workload Scheduler. We saw their presentations and packages, then did some research. We thought Control-M was the best solution based on experience and feedback from others. I had experience on Control-M already. I had been working on it for several years and had a positive experience. The other thing was just ease of use. Tivoli and Unicenter just do not seem as polished. They didn't look as easy to use, especially Tivoli. I think we heard that Tivoli was very clunky and not easy to use.

It was mostly my experience with it. Control-M was easy to use, very stable with no issues, and easy to configure and maintain. Whereas, CA was not as easy to use nor polished. CA also always keeps on buying other companies and incorporating things, so the experience is not as smooth. With Tivoli, we just heard that it was terrible to use and lacked a good interface. We had another Tivoli product from IBM for backups, and it was just terrible.

We have the CA-7 on the mainframe, and I have seen it being used along with Control-M. Control-M seems to offer a much better user interface, mainly because it is graphic and not on the black screen of a mainframe session.

I don't think our data analysts are currently using Control-M. We do have Informatica software in use, which is some sort of data analyst software.

We evaluated other vendors, like CA, but CA was bought by another company, and we have been a little afraid. Our organization always buys with a tender. Our tender had a lot of requirements on it and only Control-M could meet them all. It was a public tender, so we didn't really choose Control-M. We had a huge list of requirements that we really needed for job scaling. Only BMC could do it. IBM Tivoli tried to answer, but it didn't meet all our requirements.

Most tools have a huge GUI. You need to open five to seven windows to go to the parameters. Sometimes you don't have all the parameters in the GUI. With Control-M, it is three clicks and we have all the information that we need. We can see that in Control-M, we can see that all the perimeters are there for one job, like Managed File Transfer. It is very intuitive, and we can understand where to find the parameters to configure.

There are few options like Control-M in the market, and the closest competitors are far more expensive.

I have been exposed to a little bit looking online. We talked to someone through our rep. They were looking at Control-M and some other source scheduler. They went with the other scheduler for some reason. I looked at it online, and thought "Wow, this looks really weird."

Unfortunately, I can't compare it to anything else.

Most of the places I worked already had the solution in place, hence I cannot comment on this.

If it is for scheduling, we only use Control-M in our organization. For non-scheduling solutions, then we probably will look at other solutions that are feasible for us.

Procurement may have looked at other products. But from our perspective, they probably would have scared the living heck out of us if they had told us they were looking at other things.

We evaluated AutoSys and IBM Tivoli Workload Scheduler, but they didn’t offer anything close to the functionality that Control-M offers.

Before choosing this product we looked at Computer Associates (CA Technologies) and Tivoli.

Control-M is light years ahead of any competitor we have looked at.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

I have experience with alternates like IBM Tivoli and another software called JAMS. These are the ones that I have worked on and the features and user-friendliness of both of them is fine. It's such a different level compared to this, so that's the reason I'm sticking to Control-M.

This evaluation was done a year or two before I started working with the product.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

No other options available

In my previous organisation, I have refer Control-M for batch process. But due to pricing client has not agrees and then client has decided to go with Active Batch tool.

We are also evaluating AutoSys and DAC. We have used Control-M only for PoC. We haven't decided whether we are going ahead with it or not. Its pricing is high, and its architecture is old. For our use cases, the architecture was a little bit older as compared to others. AutoSys gives more flexibility. 

We use other tools to streamline our data and analytics projects.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing this solution.

I’ve tried and POCed many other workload automation\batch scheduling tools out there; none of them come close to functionality and ease-of-use as Control-M.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated Redwood, Autosys, and $U (Dollar Universe).

We had another solution in-house because it came to us through an acquisition of some business. So, I dealt with a title scheduler for a couple of years. It was different. It was not as scalable, robust, and more difficult.

Before choosing this product, we only evaluated Control-M.

N/A – We only work with Control-M.

This is the first time for us implementing the solutions using Control-M.

We evaluated other options. The main differences between solutions were their Gartner scores.

We've evaluated many other products along the way... Just about every other major competitor in the market.

We evaluated other options, but now we are consolidating all environments to only use Control-M.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

Before choosing this product, we did not evaluate other options.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options. As a contractor who specialises in Control-M, I tend to work for companies who already use it.

We did not evaluate any other options.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

I was not involved in the process, but the move was from CA7, and I know that ESP, Jobtrac, and Zeke among others were considered.

We evaluated Compugen, CA, and Cisco.

We evaluated OpsWise, TWS, and AutoSys.

CA.

We evaluated IBM TWS and UC4 before choosing this product.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated Autosys.

Yes we evaluated.

CA Workload Automation AE(AutoSys)

IBM Tivoli System Automation

Before choosing this product, I evaluated a lot of options.