Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review This is a great tool for bringing data out of your locked, internal systems and getting it into the cloud. It meshes well with Salesforce and is fairly easy to use, helping the transition from other older, more complex tools into a more modern environment. It has lots of competition in this space and some are better than others, but if your data is straight forward and you know it well, Jitterbit will get the job done. If you are not as close or comfortable with your data and need to do some wildly complex migrations, there might be better packages out there for you.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review UI is super easy to understand with a low learning curve so admins can figure it out and maintain it without breaking anything. It's FREE! There's a paid version too but I like that you can use most of the features for free and they're not pushy with buying. There's a great user community that you can google and ask any questions. Most problems I've encountered have been posted and answered already. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Migrating operations from QA to Production work well for initial deployment, however, when migrating an update to an existing job to production, sometimes certain project items are duplicated. This is not the end of the world... the duplicates can be removed, but would be nice if it was not required. I have not found a way to trap under-the-covers SOAP errors (for example, when a query you are running against Salesforce takes too long). You get a warning error in the operation log that the job only pulled a "partial" file, but it does not fail. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review I have been evaluating other tools as a continuous improvement practice. I would like something that would be easier to use for a non-technical user. I work for a small organization and have no back-up for Jitterbit if something happens to me. We don't have the technically savvy employees to understand it.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability We've had issues with a server crashing. The latest issue has the option for high availability which should help with that.
Read full review Performance I've never seen a performance issue with Control-M.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review They have some of the best support of any software vendor that we use. They always get our issues resolved quickly
Travis Terry Performance Testing Engineer / Front End Developer /System Analyst
Read full review Implementation Rating It is a good approach to define a distributed architecture when you have multiple control-m servers.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Evaluated
Dell Boomi and Celigo as alternatives prior to purchasing Jitterbit. We went with Jitterbit at that time because we could handle all changes ourselves without any assistance from Jitterbit, and we liked their size and nimbleness.
Dell Boomi was too big for us, and Celigo at that time did not have a self-service model. Every change had to go through them (although that has since changed). We were not in a position to be able to wait for someone to make changes for us given the rate of change within the business.
Read full review Scalability Control-M doesn't really use that many resources
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Read full review The time it takes to connect systems has reduced by orders of magnitude. Previously, we would custom-develop connectors between various systems and they would all be managed by different vendors. With Jitterbit speed-to-deploy and the efficiency gained by managing all connections in one dashboard has been the greatest piece of the ROI. Read full review ScreenShots