Control-M Managed File Transfer

Control-M 's primary use case for our organization is scheduling jobs. We have daily manual work that previously required regular manual intervention, but by setting up Control-M  jobs, we have eliminated this need and now run setup jobs on a daily basis that saves significant time.

Our team uses Control-M for scheduling jobs based on any requirement given by the business, and when we encounter repetitive tasks, such as extraction of reports from our database, we set up a job accordingly that extracts the required details and delivers them to our business people.

We have a daily batch with upstream and downstream feeds, and we have configured Control-M jobs including File Watcher jobs, pre-processing jobs, and loading jobs. Once loading is completed, we send reports to our downstream using Control-M jobs.

Control-M offers many features that benefit our operations. File Watcher jobs are particularly useful when we are supposed to receive a file that is not received on time, and we can configure alerts to reach out to the upstream people regarding delays.

Control-M also allows for quick delivery of reports across platforms. The cross-platform delivery feature stands out for our team because we are using a CD connectivity setup with Control-M to send reports from our Linux system to the mainframe system.

Control-M has features for holding a job when it fails due to a feed delay from upstream, and we can keep the job on hold until we receive the feed and then rerun it. We also have features for ordering jobs based on our configured calendar system for weekdays and weekends.

Control-M has positively impacted our organization by automating thousands of jobs, eliminating the need for manual intervention, which reduces the chance of human error.

By using Control-M, we save significant time. For example, it takes only two hours to trigger one hundred jobs compared to a full day without it, resulting in a reduction of thousands of errors in a month.

Control-M can be improved by enhancing the user interface, as some other batch schedulers are more user-friendly.

An additional improvement could be the inclusion of daily usage options on the homepage to facilitate regular work.

I have been using Control-M for eight years.

Control-M is stable.

Control-M is scalable, allowing it to cover one team to another. If we set it up for one team, it may take an hour, and for another team, it may take an additional hour.

Customer support for Control-M is very good, with quick responses and effective redressal mechanisms in place.

We previously used AutoSys but switched to Control-M because it is the best in the market, and the transition was smooth.

We have seen a return on investment, as using Control-M saves us seventy to eighty percent of the costs that would otherwise require one thousand dollars.

I have two to three years of experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing related to Control-M.

Before choosing Control-M, we evaluated manual processes and other batch job schedulers, and ultimately chose Control-M for its better results.

Control-M is important for building, scheduling, managing, and monitoring production workflows, making it crucial for our Data Ops and Dev Ops initiatives, as it facilitates the delivery of requirements.

We depend entirely on Control-M as our production starts at midnight and completes within two to three hours, which is crucial for our business.

Many users in my organization use Control-M in various roles, including Consultant Specialist, Senior Consultant Specialist, Lead Consultant Specialist, Senior Software Engineer, Software Engineer, Project Manager, and Senior Project Manager.

Integrating Control-M with technologies for our Data Ops and Dev Ops processes can be challenging, but it plays a crucial role in transitioning to a cloud infrastructure and transferring files from one source to a destination.

The governance and security of Control-M entirely depend on how you configure your Control-M jobs, but I can say it is fully controlled and under compliance.

The reliability and output of Control-M are good, with no deviation expected from how it delivers outputs moving forward.

I advise others looking into using Control-M that it provides the best deliverables compared to other tools available in the market. I have rated this product nine out of ten.

Like any other batch scheduler, Control-M  is what we're really using for the various workflows that we have to either do on a daily or hourly or whatever basis. We run them all through there.

I've worked with other ones, and I think the certain simplicity to how Control-M  lets you set up a schedule or workflow is excellent. It's very easy to build everything together.

Most of my complaints have ever been with support for Control-M, not with the product itself. I can't really think of anything that I strongly dislike about the product.

Sometimes my gripes with the support relate to them being a little slow to get back on either a query or a problem issue. That's my biggest gripe on the support side. There are some people in the support area that are fantastic, and then there are others that feel like I'm being pushed off to the side. I don't know what's going on in the back shop, so I can't say for certain.

I'm currently fighting with support on one issue right now with Control-M, but it's not the overall product, it's just one sub-piece that's being problematic. It's the SAP interface with Control-M.

My usage has definitely been more than ten years. I go back to release three or something.

I've never really seen much of a problem with scalability for Control-M. I'm sure there is an upper limit to how many agents and how many jobs you could run, but I haven't hit that yet. Where I am right now, we load probably about three thousand jobs a day, but we run a lot more than that because you can load a job and run it hundreds of times.

I'm going to give Control-M's support an eight on the scale from one to ten, with ten being the highest. That rating is mostly because of the reasons I've already mentioned.

I've used plenty of alternatives for Control-M in the past. Though some of them don't exist anymore or they probably still do. One of my former employers was a big CA-7 shop on the mainframe side, and on the distributed side, I used the IBM tool Workload Scheduler.

The setup for Control-M is not horrible. Once you get the server built out correctly initially, it installs relatively easily. There are some things in the update format that I don't favor. They used to have an update and migrate model, which would allow you to move from one system to a new system if you needed to upgrade your operating system or switch to a different platform. Going from Windows to Linux, or from SUSE Linux to RHEL  Linux was easy to do. That migrate model was very good, but they went to an upgrade in place model. You can't do it that easily anymore because what you have to do is upgrade in place where you are and then build a new box and then move the data over, which is a bit of a pain. It was one-stop shopping previously. They stopped that at version 9.18.

The implementation is handled by me and maybe one other person who are specifically doing the deployment and maintenance of Control-M.

I don't really have any thoughts about the pricing for Control-M. I don't deal with that, or I haven't in a very long time. I know one of the pricing models is based on workload, specifically how many tasks you load in a day. I don't know if there are any other pricing models other than that. That's the only one I'm familiar with.

Control-M does require some maintenance on your end, as with any software. There are fix packs released or patches, and you need to be aware of that. BMC is very good about notifying you when they post out new patches or fix packs. It usually requires a downtime, but it's a very short downtime. It takes longer to take the product down than to apply the patch for Control-M. You have all the processes to shut down, apply the patch, and bring them all back up, and the up and down takes longer than the actual patch application sometimes. I would rate this review a nine out of ten.

We use Control-M  for enterprise workload automation, cross-platform job scheduling, and orchestration of critical banking processes. One of our most important use cases is End-of-Day (EOD) processing, where Control-M coordinates and monitors complex job dependencies across IBM i, Linux, Windows, databases, and core banking applications. It provides centralized visibility, improves operational efficiency, and reduces manual intervention and operational risk.

Control-M has significantly improved our visibility into end-to-end business processes that span multiple platforms and systems. It has enabled faster identification and resolution of process execution issues through centralized monitoring and alerting. Additionally, by automating tasks that were previously performed manually, Control-M has substantially reduced operational errors, increased process reliability, and improved overall operational efficiency.

Control-M  is a very robust solution. The product is stable and robust, providing reliability in operations.

One area where Control-M could be enhanced is by providing native scripting capabilities directly within the platform. Today, when we need to perform complex logic, data manipulation, or multi-step workflows, we must develop scripts externally (for example in Bash, Perl, Python, or other languages) on the target execution server and then invoke those scripts from Control-M. It would be valuable to have a built-in scripting environment that allows users to develop and execute workflow logic directly within Control-M, without relying on external scripts or operating system dependencies.

For example, a workflow could execute a query against an Oracle database, process the results, generate an Excel report, send it by email, and then trigger additional processes on other platforms such as IBM i (AS400), Windows, Linux, or cloud environments—all orchestrated through a native Control-M scripting language.

This functionality would reduce implementation complexity, improve portability, simplify maintenance, and provide greater flexibility for advanced process automation.
Additionally, greater access to variables, conditional logic, and workflow programming constructs within the platform would make Control-M even more powerful for organizations managing complex enterprise workloads.

Another area for improvement is licensing flexibility. Some capabilities that many customers may consider part of the core workload automation experience, such as extended log retention and archiving, currently require additional licensed components. A more integrated approach could provide greater value and simplify adoption.

One improvement that could be made to Control-M is the way jobs captured through SBMJOB on IBM i (AS/400) are handled. On the Extractor side, it would be helpful to have a more flexible and efficient way to manage extraction rules.

On the Interceptor side, having a single folder per AS/400 library is not very practical. It makes it more difficult to organize jobs, use conditions effectively, and manage our workflows, especially when they are affected by the New Day process

Our institution has been using Control-M since late 2022. However, I have been familiar with the product and its capabilities since 2010 through my professional experience managing enterprise workload automation and job scheduling environments.

Control-M is very stable for us and very robust.

Control-M has proven to be highly reliable and capable of supporting large-scale enterprise workloads. From a scalability perspective, I would rate it around 8 out of 10.
The platform scales well in terms of the number of jobs, workflows, and systems that can be managed centrally.

However, when integrating new applications or platforms, significant development effort is sometimes required on the target systems. Complex automation scenarios often require external scripts or custom integrations, which can increase implementation and maintenance effort.

For this reason, while Control-M is highly scalable from an operational and workload management standpoint, I believe there is room for improvement in simplifying integrations and providing more native workflow development capabilities. Reducing the dependency on external scripting would make onboarding new systems faster and further enhance the platform's scalability.

We typically work through our implementation partner, who serves as our primary point of contact for support and manages most interactions with BMC on our behalf.

Overall, I would rate BMC's technical support 7 out of 10. The support quality is generally good, and issues are ultimately addressed. However, we have observed longer-than-expected response times in some cases, particularly when incidents require escalation to higher support tiers. The escalation process can be slow and sometimes extends the overall resolution time.

Despite this, the expertise of the support teams has been satisfactory, and we have no major concerns regarding the quality of the technical assistance provided.

Yes. Prior to adopting Control-M, the institution used HP Operations Orchestration  for the automation and orchestration of core business processes, as well as IBM Advanced Job Scheduler for IBM i workload scheduling. We transitioned to Control-M to consolidate workload automation across multiple platforms, improve end-to-end visibility, enhance monitoring and dependency management, and provide a more centralized and scalable enterprise scheduling solution.

The initial implementation was relatively complex. A significant part of the effort was not the Control-M installation itself, but the application and process changes required to adapt our existing workloads to operate within the Control-M framework.

Many of our existing processes had to be modified to integrate with Control-M, which increased the complexity of the initial deployment. This was especially true for legacy applications and workloads that were not originally designed for centralized workload automation.

However, once the foundational integration work was completed and standards were established, onboarding new applications and developing new automated workflows became much easier and more efficient. Today, implementing new processes is significantly more agile than during the initial adoption phase.

Yes. As the customer, we worked with a BMC Business Partner that provided both the software licensing and the implementation services. Our experience was positive overall, as they supported the deployment, knowledge transfer, and initial configuration activities, helping us successfully adopt the platform within our environment.

Control-M does not sell any perpetual licenses right now. I have to constantly renew my contract as a software subscription license. I think the pricing is a little high, but the solution is very robust and stable. I mean, I am paying for a Mercedes, and I am getting a Mercedes. My overall rating for Control-M out of ten for the solution overall is a seven. It is pricey, but it is stable. On the other hand, I have to work a lot to adapt my software to run with Control-M.