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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Kofax TotalAgility
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Kofax TotalAgility brings cognitive capture capabilities to the hands of business analysts and non-technical users to solve content-centric challenges, including classification and extraction from financial documents, contracts, forms and other information-intensive documents. With it, the vendor says organizations can accelerate information intensive workflows by applying cognitive capture and artificial intelligence to unstructured data in order to automate and extract information and unlock…
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.
The platform is an excellent solution for companies looking for a workflow automation system that can be used across departments and its return on investment becomes apparent once it is introduced in production for a business. Its ability to route work tasks dynamically between employees and outside parties, implement SLAs, and get information to a back-end source is excellent.
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.
Ease of use. The drag and drop configuration to create the processes makes the product easy to use and configure. Most of the icons are intuitive on what they are and how to use them. The use of the colored icons for each value also helps to know that that value is looking for.
Forms. The capture forms are easy to create and maintain. A new field can be added to the Extraction group and then the capture form is regenerated and that field is automatically added to the form with all the proper attributes. If an additional check box or field is added to the form, that field stays when regenerated. This differs from KTA 6.0.
Kofax has done pretty well integrating all the pieces of Kofax into one product. KC (Kofax Capture), KIC (Kofax Import Connector), KTM (Kofax Transformation Module with OCR), and workflow are all combined into KTA (Kofax Total Agility). This lets all of these features work together in one product. Kofax does keep adding more to the functions that maybe were left out original version. This makes Kofax Total Agility a robust product.
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.
Exception management within the platform can certainly be improved upon. If a job is suspended for any particular issue integrations can be put in place to attempt to handle them but it is kludgy and does not always work as anticipated.
The administration interface is based on Microsoft Silverlight which limits it to certain versions of Internet Explorer and the interface has seen better days. Their other application, Kofax Kapow, has a much more mature and intuitive interface. This supposedly is being replaced in the next major iteration but I have doubts it will be successfully done.
The product is expensive. It is also the Cadillac of workflow platforms with document transformation built in. In many cases the product can do what you want it to do but there may be other more cost effective platforms.
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.
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.
Kofax TotalAgility is a beast of a package that gives you a thousand ways to tackle a problem, but it may not be the best platform for your needs. It is more of an enterprise platform that integrates well with other systems with moderate development time. Other packages may be cheaper, easier, and faster to implement depending on needs.
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
Kofax TotalAgility is very expensive. Some customers have reported that using the KTA workflow has increased productivity and has a good ROI overall. The customers have not shared true numbers for me to give details.
