What advice do you have for others considering Control-M?

I would rate Helix Control-M a 10 out of 10. I like Helix Control-M.

I rate Control-M eight out of ten. It's a solid application, and the graphical user interface is intuitive. Control-M can be used for different applications with various parameters.

There is always a learning curve any time you are using a new product. Our engineers who are using Control-M are kind of happy with it. There really are no negatives on its learning curve. I am always weary with new products since it is another thing that someone needs to learn, but now there are other products that we don't use because of Control-M. What I would not be open to is bringing in another product, where we need our engineers to know how to work it and make it efficient as well as support other products already in our environment. So, I like that we can get rid of three or four products and replace them with a single product. As long as the learning curve is not too steep, that is an advantage to me. We are looking into using Control-M to deliver analytics for complex data. So, the solution is doing either machine learning or complex analytics on top of the data flow. While we do some analytics, it is not to the extent that we really want to. I would rate this solution as a high seven or low eight (out of 10).

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. Control-M is critical to our business. There are other solutions like Control-M out on the market, but in every recent market evaluation, Control-M has always come out on top. I think they are becoming more cloud-native as they progress with their Control-M Web Services. They're more reliable than the others on the market right now. I would advise anyone to start with a trial version of this product. I think they'll be very impressed with it. We don't use Python to a significant degree at all in our environment. We have been looking into that, but nothing solid yet. We don't use AWS but are looking to get into it in 2024.

I rate Control-M an eight out of ten. It comes down to preference and what you need. There are multiple platforms out there, but I've only used this software. I recommend doing some research and seeking out a lot of opinions. Talk to other folks who worked with other solutions to get a grip and a better understanding.

Control-M is pretty critical to our business as it runs many different business processes every day, and if it wasn't there, we would probably hire many more people, be a lot slower, and be more prone to error. We use a hybrid deployment. We have parts in the traditional data center. We have parts in the cloud. We sometimes have parts that live on containers. They only exist for two minutes. It is very much a hybrid mix of goodies with our deployment. I'd advise potential new users to examine it today and not think about what it did ten years ago. Control-M is an old product. It has been around since we all used mainframes, however, just because something's been around for a long time, doesn't mean it's a piece of junk or doesn't work with modern technologies. It has adapted and grown with the times. Control-M did cloud-based work before many of us were even talking about the cloud. It's hard to get rid of negative perceptions sometimes, however, the best thing for people to do is to head out to the internet, look it up, and go out to GitHub. If you have a technical team, send them out to GitHub. You can download everything in an image or in a container and try it yourself. It doesn't cost you a nickel. I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. The biggest advice I can give is to try it out. Don't only believe what the PowerPoints tell you. There's no excuse that you can't have a deployment running clearly within hours. Be willing to think about how it can solve problems in new ways. Sometimes we try to find a new tool as we have a square problem and we get upset as all the tools we're looking at only have round solutions. Sometimes the reason that it only has round solutions is due to the fact that that's the proper way to solve the problem. You have got to be willing to break down whatever you're trying to do, whatever workflow you're trying to automate or integrate, and take it in pieces. If all you want to do is save yourself a lot of money, use Cron, and use Windows Task Scheduler. However, if you want to take your business to the next level and start to get to the point where you can automate to remediate and audit, that's where tools like Control-M come into play.

I would definitely recommend this solution. Control-M is the place to go if you want to have workflow automation in place. I have previously also worked with the Remedy tool in another organization, and I found it good. It is pretty good in terms of creating, integrating, and automating data pipelines. If you have all the information, it is a straightforward activity. If it is new functionality, then before integrating Control-M with a third-party application, you need to do some work in terms of configuration. It is easy to ingest and process data from different platforms. Its setup takes some time, but once the setup is done, it is pretty easy. We don't use Control-M to deliver analytics for complex data pipelines. We do have analytics, but we have an SAP analytic application called BOBJ BI. We do have a job set up for that. It runs from Control-M, but analytics are shown in the SAP application. Our cloud usage is not much. From the S3 bucket, we are using the file transfer part from the application perspective, but there is not much integration with cloud applications. We only have the MFT plug-in to communicate with AWS S3. Other than that, there is not much interaction with the cloud from the Control-M application side. I would rate it a nine out of ten. It has been good so far. I haven't seen any issue. It is easy to use. I still have a lot to learn about this solution.

I rate Control-M a nine out of ten. Control-M is flexible. You can use it in Azure, and they have a generic option for the cloud. You can deploy it in your own private cloud or on other cloud solutions like Kubernetes. You can use Control-M for big data applications like IBM InfoSphere. There's a Control-M solution for almost any situation. There is so much to learn on the backend of the business processes. Typically when you see a business process, you only see a workflow, like a flow chart, arrows, boxes, etc. However, there's a whole new world under the hood. It's crucial to dig deeper and learn how to improve the processes. It's like you become the mechanic of your own car. The more you understand the engine, the more you can tweak it to get more speed, gas mileage, performance, strength, horsepower, etc. Control-M almost compels you to learn about that. It's user-friendly, but you need some training. We have a certification from BMC. You need some prior training specifically in Control-M Enterprise Manager to know what you're doing because it's delicate. There are so many ways to customize job creation, automation, monitoring, etc. that you need at least a crash course on creating a job, monitoring, setting up alarms, and building workflows. It should take you no more than a week to get the hang of it, and there's BMC University, where you can get free training to use Control-M. Once you know the basics, Control-M practically handles itself. It's intuitive once you figure it out.

I would advise working with the engineers, reading the documentation, and going into it expecting to set up high availability. Control-M has been around a while. They're very quick to market, and they're very quick to adapt. At this point, they do have offerings, either on the way or recently released, that can support multiple cloud environments. We are currently not using the Python Client, but that is on our board, and I do intend on investigating. We are utilizing some parts of the AWS integration. I would rate it a 10 out of 10.

We do not use the Control-M Python client and cloud data service integrations with AWS and GCP and we do not use Control-M to deliver analytics for complex data pipelines yet. We haven't gone into production yet, so we haven't rolled this out to all our customers. We're still testing the features and we'll be starting the UAT in two to three weeks. Right now, we're still in the early stages of rolling everything out. We've gone through the testing in our development environment and in QA to make sure things are good. Now, we're testing performance in UAT internally, and then we'll have customer validation within a few weeks before we go into production. The solution will play a very critical role in day-to-day operations. However, it'll be at least two months before it becomes critical. Right now, it's still being implemented and evaluated. It is pretty flexible on various cloud solutions, working with different cloud technologies and platforms. I would say potential users should take a look at it. It does provide a lot of flexibility, especially with the application and integration component that they have. The developers seem to really be able to get what they need out of the AI or the application into an integrated product or feature set. Before installing Control-M, have a sit down with the Control-M solutions engineer and make sure you share with them all of the details of what you'd like to accomplish before deploying the solution. My client just said, "We want this" and they didn't give us the details about what they were looking for. We ended up having to redesign a few features, as those items were not clarified as part of the installation. When I was brought on board, the customer didn't mention they wanted HA, so that came later. At that point, we had to reinstall and add more servers. The person who signed the contract was focused on MFTE, which is the enterprise file transfer tool or managed file transfer tool. However, later, the architecture team decided not to use that and go with another tool. Due to that decision, the client could have gone with a SaaS solution instead of the on-premises solution to Control-M and saved a lot of time, money, and hassle on deploying the on-premises infrastructure. So my advice to others is to make sure that the needs and the functional usage of the tool are identified clearly before purchasing or implementing the tool. I'd rate this tool ten out of ten. It does what it says it does.

I would advise others to go for it. It has all the features, and it can meet the requirements of any business. Control-M has matured over the years. It is more feature-rich. It has a better graphical user interface. It is catching up with the latest technology and is going to be cloud-based. YouTube videos and webcasts are helpful for new customers in adopting the application. We have not used Control-M Python Client and cloud data service integrations with AWS and GCP. We have not yet reached that level in this organization. It is just for basic Windows. In a previous company, we used Python and AWS but not in this organization. We generally move to a new fix pack or release after almost a year. We just wait until there are some bugs rectified in an existing new fix pack. We are looking forward to upgrading to version 9.0.20 to be able to use other features. I am hoping that the API has been enhanced in that version. Upgrading to this version will also help our users. They can use their web application and deploy the jobs rather than having a dependency on the scheduling team. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. They just need to focus on and provide more videos on the API side.

There are a lot of schedulers out there. I don't have firsthand experience with many of them, but I know from working in the field, production support, that BMC is at the top. Using Control-M to manage and orchestrate workloads across our enterprise is critical.

We really haven't taken advantage of some of the features that Control-M offers yet. The main thing I'm thinking of is SLA management. We haven't implemented that yet on a lot of our business-critical workflows because we just lifted and shifted everything into Control-M from the old app. As of today, things are pretty much equal until we are able to implement some of those additional features. There are capabilities that Control-M offers that are good and I can see it being a very good product. BMC, as a company, has some maturing it needs to do in a lot of its processes. They have a very good sales team, but a lot of things after that can use some work. We definitely haven't bailed on it, but I've heard a little bit, back and forth, from people at BMC that they might not be too upset if they lost us as a customer because we've been having so many problems. We've been on them about helping us get this environment corrected and functioning as we expect it to. But in a year from now, it's possible we could be in a really good place. I'm excited to see where it all goes.

I would recommend this solution because of the ease of use. To work with it, you do need to understand it and know how to configure it. But, once you do, you can take advantage of many features that are helpful.

My advice for anybody who is looking to use Control-M is to have a lot of money. It is a good solution but it is expensive compared to others. I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

My advice for anybody who is considering Control-M is that I recommend it. Although it's not perfect, it is relatively easy to use and maintain. I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It just works. Control-M is very good. You only need to look at something else when an application gives you problems. However, in our environment, it is stable and just works. We haven't even bothered looking at anything else. I can highly recommend it. It is very easy to learn. It is very stable. It has multiple interfaces, e.g., you can use it on your desktop, access it via the web interface, or access it on a mobile. The support that you get is actually quite good. It is a tool that I highly recommend. For what we require it to do, it does exactly that and more. We have a system administrator, a chief scheduler, who is my supervisor, and two operators, including me. The four of us are power users who have scheduling capabilities in Control-M. We have different people on our BI team. Overall, 10 people have various levels of access. We have tried Control-M as part of your DevOps automation toolchains. We are only getting into DevOps now as a company. We are still playing around with it. Currently, we are still fairly separate as far as DevOps is concerned. My department is basically the middleman between dev and operations. Whatever dev wants, we will create those jobs and test them. Once they want to send them into production, they let us know, and it then goes to operations. We are the center for those types of things. Because we went into lockdown and the financial impact of the lockdown, projects were placed on hold. This year, they were& still on hold. Probably sometime next year, we will be starting on those projects again. I would rate Control-M as eight out of 10 because the reporting needs improvement.

I have been working with Control-M for 30 years. So, I have seen other products. It is very easy to automate our daily manual jobs. It is not at all complex to set up the product. It is also very easy to teach to another person. It is not complex like other schedulers. It is a very easy tool. So far, we have only been using its Windows client. We have now started to use its web interface. We are also starting to use the DevOps technology with Control-M. We have migrated from Control-M 9.18 a month ago. We will start using centralized profiles. We will also start to work with Manage File Transfers (MFT) B2B. It is a new feature that we will start using to improve our customer delivery processes. I would rate Control-M a 10 out of 10.

Make sure that you spend enough time to design and build your environment, both high availability and failover are critical to overall success. Because we rely on Control-M so heavily, it needs to always be available. Control-M is critical to the success of our business, we cannot accept downtime. We do everything we can to keep the system running 24/7, 365. For example, we have invested additional time and resources to fully automate our monthly server patching. Now we can patch our environment with zero impact to jobs. Another piece of advice, use BMC as a partner for professional services, especially when doing your initial implementation. It is a big endeavor and BMC can help you be successful. Lastly, spend time training your staff on how to use and administer the product. Control-M is a powerful but complex application. It requires skilled and knowledgeable operators and admins to keep the system working well.

My advice would be to try and utilize as many features as you can. Don't get overly creative with things because that can just confuse other people. If there are other users getting in there, you want to definitely have a standard workflow on how jobs should be created, organized, and make sure that you keep track of what's being changed so that if something were to fail it's easily trackable. It's a very robust application and there is a lot that can be sent to it and sent out of it and you do not want it to get into the wrong hands because you can do quite a bit with it. I would rate Control-M an eight out of ten.

Control-M is very critical for anyone who is using it.

I definitely recommend Control-M. It is quite stable, scalable, and the ease of administration is good as well. We are running jobs on some organization-level applications. In the future, we could integrate with more applications. We are still looking at streamlining our data and analytics projects with Control-M. I would rate Control-M as an eight out of 10.

Always make sure that you have at least double checked everything, because Control-M does everything you tell it to do and exactly as you tell it. Therefore, make sure you are giving the right orders. Working with Control-M has been pretty complex, but that has been mainly due to our corporate policies since we are located in Finland and in the banking sector. So, there are hundreds of things that we had to consider. While it has been a complex process, it has been more because of our corporate policies rather than Control-M. Once we decided everything, and everything was approved, just taking Control-M into use has been a pretty straightforward process. Definitely take the scheduler course provided by BMC. That was hugely helpful for all of us. Trying to learn Control-M on your own will be a tough path to walk. We have Control-M on the mainframe. As the mainframe will be taken down in a few years time, we have to replace the mainframe scheduling agent with something else. That will be Control-M. Our dev teams are running their own fields. Once they are ready, they go through systems to store into production, then we can automate it. However, during DevOps and other testing phases, we may not use Control-M at all. I would rate Control-M as a nine out of 10.

DevOps automation toolchains are in our roadmap for next year. We want to use Centralized Connection Profiles in the future. I would rate it as nine out of 10.

Control-M helps us to proactively monitor things and see what is coming up and what is happening. Based on that, we can take steps for resolution. But I don't think Control-M itself has the ability to proactively fix issues. Overall, it's a good automation tool. And it gives us a single view of the customer. I would advise going with something like it. I'm not going to advise about any particular solution. All these tools are very powerful and give you a single view.

I think that every single company should have Control-M installed, because it is really important and useful for everyone. I would rate this solution as a 10 out of 10.

We're customers and end-users. We're using the latest version of the solution. By far, BMC, from what I have seen, is the industry leader and they are the Cadillac of scheduling. I've worked with a lot of different scheduling systems over the years. When I first got into IT, years and years and years ago, as a JCL programmer, basically you had access to the scheduling system and you took care of the jobs. When jobs failed, you would do the restarts on them, do whatever fix needed to be done, and get them restarted, and get them to rerun. That was on a mainframe. I've used Cron, and I've worked with a number of different schedulers. In the Windows world, other than AT scheduler and Control-M, that's about all I've ever used. I did review five different products back when we put this in. Having worked with so many products, and with this one for so long, I can advise that new uses should follow the installation instructions and notes. They're very simple, very straightforward. I would advise others to not get scared off by the price as, initially, the pricing seems rather steep, compared to some of the others. However, they all have their pricing quirks, and they're all making money in one way or another. The way they make their money is based on the way they license it. The per-job style actually works out very well. I'd rate the product at a perfect ten out of ten. It has been one of the most stable products that I have supported, and I have supported a lot of different products. I've had fewer problems with it than I have with just about anything else I've supported.

I would highly recommend this product. Its setup is complex, but once the setup is done, it hides away all the complexity. The end-user will have a very clear and intuitive interface to define the workflows. It is very easy to use. I would rate Control-M an eight out of ten.

We are a customer and end-user. We use the latest version of the solution. We try to stay on the most advanced option. It is deployed both on-premises and on the cloud. We also use various clouds, including public and private. IBM Workload Scheduler and Control-M are far superior to any of the other products on the market. In general, I'd recommend TWS or IBM Workload Scheduler to other organizations. I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. It's a top-of-the-line product.

I would recommend it. Control-M is the complete package to manage a work environment. I would rate Control-M an eight out of ten.

I would recommend this solution. It has good stability and integration capabilities. It is also easy to use and easy to implement. I would rate Control-M a ten out of ten.

We're BMC partners. We have a business relationship with the solution. While we typically handle on-premises deployments, we also deal with the cloud. I would recommend the solution. My recommendation is based on the stability, the constant evolution, and the capabilities of the integration with other software. The implementation is easy. It's easy to use and easy to implement then it's worth the expenditure. Overall, I would rate the solution ten out of ten. We've been very happy with it.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate Control-M a nine out of ten.

My rating for this solution is five out of ten. It's not bad, but it's not good either. There's a lot of room for improvement and I think it can be more user-friendly. In the next version I would like to see something with integrated mobile device management so that I can keep track of software and devices, having it all in one software for our help desk. I think it would be very useful.

You can try it without buying it. I would suggest checking out the workbench at: jobsascode.io This is a free version of the Control-M package that is perfect to take for a spin.

I like this solution, and my advice is to go for it :)

Do your due diligence. Look around at what is out there. However, I would 100 percent be behind Control-M. It's a great company. Their support is good. The product is great. It's a good investment. It will keep growing and cover any needs that we have. This product can do everything I need and can help me do anything I need to do to schedule for real time information, supplying things, and batch jobs at night. We are automating more things. I sometimes hear an application team say, "We are running this manually, and we want to make it automated." I will make a few jobs to save them from doing what they are doing manually and automate it. I am always looking for more things to automate. The people who are in development of this product seem like they are very forward thinking, and always thinking, "What can we do next?" I think that is great.

We are not yet using the solution's application workflow orchestration. We are not using it for business modernization initiatives yet. We don't use any other BMC products. We're not fully entrenched in Control-M yet.

Because we have been so pleased with this product, I would encourage others to look into this product with a view on what are their needs. Ask the right questions of either their sales rep or technical person from BMC to understand how this tool would work successfully for them, because it's been so successful for us. Because we've had it for so long, and it's been such a stable product, some of our folks on the distributed side of things need to learn how to use Control-M effectively in regards to output when tasks or jobs fail. They need to give us smarter outputs, so we can resolve things more quickly.

I would recommend it for the scalability and dependability. The software is constantly being improved and new add-ons are being created. It is a robust tool that's stable. It is well-supported, especially compared to a lot of other options out there. We have had massive growth in the last year to two because of company acquisitions. We have added a lot of big data aspect processing and a lot of other processing. It has handled this quite well. We are just starting to go into a bit of the DevOps, Workload Change Manager, and Helix Chatbox. Even though we don't chose to use their wide scope of products, it is one of the things that is a real positive about BMC. They can handle everything a corporation could throw at it, which makes the experience of working with them a lot better. We learn things everyday about the product and its available features. We work in an IT environment with inquisitive people. There are millions of options available, parameter-wise, within the system. I learn something new everyday by working around smart, intuitive people.

You have to talk about it more in terms of how Control-M fits into the scale of other products which BMC offers for what you're doing. It's got Helix, cloud management, ITSM, etc. BMC offers the whole scale - everything. We don't choose to use it all. But from another prospective, it's a real positive that they have this scope, that they can handle everything a corporation could throw at it. I would like to see us use more things such as Helix. From that perspective, I would recommend it because of all the product offerings and because a lot of the approved vendors, which work directly through BMC, really make the experience a lot better. We learn things every day about the product and the availabilities. We work in an IT environment with inquisitive people. There are millions of options available, parameter-wise, within the system and I learn something new every day, by working around smart people and intuitive people. In terms of how the solution affects business modernization initiatives, this is all somewhat new for us. We're starting to go into a little bit of the DevOps and the Workload Change Manager, and the cloud chat-box. We're just starting to get into things like that with BMC Control-M. I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. We've had massive growth in the last year to two years because of company acquisitions. We've added a lot of big-data processing and a lot of other processing and it's handled it quite well. We really haven't had any serious outages in quite a long time, even through the large growth we've had. We've doubled the work and it's handled it seamlessly. It's just that the reporting aspects are poor, because management always wants to know things. It's hard to get at tangible numbers without doing a lot of additional work outside of the system.

Do the trial demo. Reach out to others via the BMC community forums. I don't believe a license is required. It's just a sign on. There are multiple vendors who are resellers or BMC partners who will provide you with input. All you have to do is ask. Feel free to ask others. The people who I have dealt with have always been forthcoming with information. They will tell you what they see as a plus or minus. It has helped us streamline some things in IT operations, which is probably a slight improvement. We haven't seen any negative impacts. I've used it in different forms and versions for about 20 years now. I'm pretty familiar with it from an operations standpoint. The tool itself is a ten, and the customer service behind it has made that even more so. It's worked pretty well. I haven't been able to take a lot of advantage of some of the new features, so I haven't been able to expand on those. For what we do now, it chugs along pretty well.

My advice would be to go ahead with Control-M. Get a lot of input from their technicians. Work with them. They're very good, and very helpful. I've learned a lot because I came from the mainframe area, personally, where now I'm working with all this Windows and agent technology I never knew before. We do not have Managed File Transfer yet, but we do want to get to it. We like what it offers, above advanced file transfer. We're looking forward to implementing that. I'm going to give it an eight, only because I don't have anything else to compare it with.

We use Control-M with two administrators on average, sometimes three. With self-service, it's about 15 people who use the self-service option of it for end users, if not more. I would like to suggest that Control-M implement a more modern way of using new tools. They should look at what they implement to determine if it is a legacy type or a batch type, then it would work better. If they intend on moving to more modernized tools, then this approach might not be best for them. Control-M is really good for legacy, corporate enterprise but less optimal for modern, open source environments. Overall, the main great improvements needed in Control-M is for better self-service. Give it more functionality for this self-service. The tool itself needs better out of the box connectivity to additional standard market tools. I would rate Control-M at a seven or eight out of ten because it fits legacy stuff but once you're stepping into modern environments then you find yourself struggling. Control-M is a workhorse, but it's not 100% perfect.

For those who want to implement, there are a few cons. Cost-wise it is not very simple for every business to implement it. So they should really plan if they are going to use it extensively. If not, they should think twice about it. If they are thinking of implementing, though, they should analyze the business and check which controller modules will really help them enhance their work and ultimately transform their work into an automated solution, which in turn will reduce their cost. I would really suggest someone who is planning to use Control-M or wants to deploy is first to check which modules are really required and also what kind of licensing makes sense for their business. If its a very large enterprise then it would be great to use a premium based license. If not, it's better to use a job count based license. So that is a point which they should check before implementing.

Your process, standards, and control libraries: It's really important to have an advanced strategy around how development is going to take place. If each team is doing their own thing, it's hard to manage it. My most important criteria when selecting a vendor, in this case, since it's a mature product, would be ease of migration and, obviously, reduction in cost. I rate it a nine out of 10. What would make it a 10 would be a reduction in the cost and, even more so, the intelligent automation. The ability to do some machine learning and dynamically reduce the amount of time that the automation is taking is more important than cost at this point.

If you can afford it, it's good. If you do have an unlimited budget, or budget is not the main concern, and you want stability then I would say go for this. It's easy to use, it's easy to install, it's easy to run, it's easy to operate. I have a student assistant who had six hours of e-learning and she can run the system. That's good. Yes, you need the right student assistant but she doesn't have any IT background. It's very easy to use but also an expensive product. In terms of criteria when selecting a vendor, if I am to decide the vendor, it would be the biggest bang for the buck and then it would be quality, stability, and support. That is my job as manager of the IT department and therefore I have to ensure that we are getting the most value for the money. The only reason I am rating it eight out of 10 is simply the cost. From a technical point of view, we could actually make the same jobs run from the DOS prompt, with the same stability. I think that we are paying a lot for having self-service, for having nice monitoring. I think we're paying a lot for that.