Control-M vs Microsoft BizTalk

• Control-M Advanced File Transfer is a very useful add-on, allowing for a wide variety of file transfers to be configured "out of the box" and then used as part of the standard batch flow. This module is not included in the base price but is available at a relatively small additional cost.
• Using Control-M's GUI (the Enterprise Manager) allows for efficient management of the enterprise and can tie up a lot of "loose ends". Often the first point of tracking problems is to check with the Control-M guys!
• BMC is definitely moving the product forward, the new module "Application Integrator" is very helpful in building and deploying your own bespoke Control-M jobs and allows for closer and more secure integration.
• Although Control-M does open up the enterprise in an operational sense, the security settings (should you choose to implement them) are robust.

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• It is very user friendly. Users can change rules during run time and change workflow.
• Huge capacity for queueing messages. It supports all types of adapters like Oracle, Salesforce, SMTP, FTP, etc. Also users can built custom adaptors.
• If users want to dynamically deploy their solution without any downtime, this is a perfect solution. BizTalk will be a good fit, especially for public-facing websites.
• Well-proven in the market. I used it when developing a website for Virgin Trains, catering more than 800K user requests per day.
• Helps in load balancing.

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• Single Major Action per job: this statement needs to be clarified. There are ways to do more than one action per job, and there are pre and post job commands available in most templates. Also some templates like FTP can have many instructions built in, like deleting source files after transfer (these are part of the positives). But basically you can only do one major action, like call one web service, or call one stored procedure per job. I believe this limitation is due to their licensing model, to ensure you will run as many jobs as possible.
• The only other negative is a necessary corollary of a having a powerful product. The learning curve is not simple due to the power of the product. I would recommend dedicate training for the primary operators and users of the product.

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• Microsoft BizTalk is over engineered for some situtations
• Microsoft BizTalk can be frustrating to use as it forces you to use the GUI as opposed to code
• Microsoft BizTalk is very resource intensive to create integrations

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• Troubleshooting has improved with multiple groups as they are easily able to determine if data loss/job failure is the reason for a data issue.
• Conversion took significantly longer than was originally estimated by BMC so we had to run two platforms for almost 9 months. This definitely slowed down efficiency as many users did not know which tool to utilize for data load trouble shooting for close to a year.
• Being able to communicate with users across the globe in a universal language and time reference has vastly decreased data issues and greatly improved proficiency in getting new jobs implemented quickly and without problems.

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• A positive impact has been the quicker turnaround time of a part request and that part showing up in SAP using Biztalk as middleware.
• A somewhat negative impact has been the somewhat insufficient error logging/message capture settings that Biztalk provide. This has caused occasional delays when attempted to create parts for the business.
• A somewhat negative impact has been the need to have a specialized developer who understands Biztalk to troubleshoot issues with the Biztalk and SAP interaction when creating parts, and when adding new fields to the parts.

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