Control-M from BMC is a platform for integrating, automating, and orchestrating application and data workflows in production across complex hybrid technology ecosystems. It provides deep operational capabilities, delivering speed, scale, security, and governance.
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Denodo
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Denodo is the eponymous data integration platform from the global company headquartered in Silicon Valley.
Control-M is a reliable and well-developed product with excellent vendor support that updates and expands the software often and offers a cloud-based deployment choice. When there are many Batch processes in IT operations that need to be monitored and controlled to ensure IT services, Control-M is ideally suited for centralized workload automation and task management.
Denodo allows us to create and combine new views to create a virtual repository and APIs without a single line of code. It is excellent because it can present connectors with a view format for downstream consumers by flattening a JSON file. Reading or connecting to various sources and displaying a tabular view is an excellent feature. The product's technical data catalog is well-organized.
Control-M provides a single, centralized interface for monitoring and managing all batch processes in the organization. Nothing is hidden or left unattended in a timely manner.
The proper use of the BIM component has allowed the change of paradigm in the operation, adopting a proactive management instead of the typical reactive management in the event of production failures.
The use of Forecast and production simulations allows you to identify bottlenecks and focus first on managing those failures that have the greatest impact on production SLAs.
Control-M/Change Manager has arrived to shorten development cycles from requirements gathering to production testing. It has been a utility that monetizes the development of Jobs meshes.
The GUI is capable of efficiently handling more than 80,000 jobs per day. This is certainly a challenge in designing a good user experience. I don't know if there is a reasonable limit to this. One of my clients runs more than 80,000 Jobs daily and the GUI remains smooth all the time.
Job-As-Code is a DevOps accelerator that has just begun to be adopted. Its implementation will make workload management even more cost-effective.
As with most of the mainframe software products, documentation seems to be the weak link for the products - written by people and for people who already know what they need to do, not for people who are trying to figure how to use the product.
We are a large JES3 mainframe shop. As with all vendors who still provide software for mainframe systems, software is generally designed and developed for JES2 and is frequently not fully tested in a JES3 environment before being shipped out.
Caching - but I am sure it will be improved by now. There were times when we expected the cache to be refreshed but it was stale.
Schema generation of endpoints from API response was sometimes incomplete as not all API calls returned all the fields. Will be good to have an ability to load the schema itself (XSD/JSON/Soap XML etc).
Denodo exposed web services were in preliminary stage when we used; I'm sure it will be improved by now.
Export/Import deployment, while it was helpful, there were unexpected issues without any errors during deployment. Issues were only identified during testing. Some views were not created properly and did not work. If it was working in the environment from where it was exported from, it should work in the environment where it is imported.
It is a great product plain and simple. We've had Control-M for 20+ years and the support that BMC Software provides is really second to none. There is always a situation that someone can think of where I have to say, "No we can't do that", however I'm confident that we've been able to meet and most of the time exceed our end user expectations with what the product can offer them.
Control-M's overall usability is very good because it is simple to use. Control-M SelfService is an easy tool to give to some of the users who want to use a web interface. The training curve for most users is very short and most of the functions are very simple to figure out.
Denodo is a tool to rapidly mash data sources together and create meaningful datasets. It does have its downfalls though. When you create larger, more complex datasets, you will most likely need to cache your datasets, regardless of how proper your joins are set up. Since DV takes data from multiple environments, you are taxing the corporate network, so you need to be conscious of how much data you are sending through the network and truly understand how and when to join datasets due to this.
Although the product is very stable there have been a few incidents when I needed support. I have worked with technicians from all around the globe because of the rolling support. This gives me the quickest support when I need it most in those early hours of the morning. The technicians I have worked with have been very knowledgeable and if necessary got help when needed.
We last reviewed the market in 2001 (schedulers are long-term commitments!) and Control-M edged (by a very narrow margin) the Tivoli alternative, with Dollar Universe (now part of Automic) back in third place. We also tested the Tidal Software scheduler (now part of Cisco) but I cannot see that listed here. Control-M won out through reliability and cross-platform support. Since we made our choice it has become clear that Control-M has moved ahead of the alternatives.
I would expect this product to give a positive return on investment. Running jobs in cron for example would require a lot more scripting effort to ensure that the proper notifications are done on failures. With the built in functionality in Control-M the effort would be greatly reduced
