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 Oracle BPM is well suited to organizations and environments that have a good understanding of their business processes and organizational structures. Trying to introduce a tool such as Oracle BPM into the organization without a good grasp on how the business operates is a recipe for disaster as the implementation will uncover all of the dirty secrets of an organizations business processes and bring them to light. BPM is not to be utilized for smaller service orchestrations or technical service implementations, these should be handled by the Oracle SOA Suite using the BPEL process manager, leaving BPM to handle the organizational business processes, referring to and including lower level services and BPEL processes as needed.
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 Oracle BPM [Suite] can support unlimited number of cases. No limitations in cases raised. Oracle Weblogic can handle multiple traffic. [It] can handle lots of heavy load[s]. Oracle BPM has extensive integration with database[s]. Huge number[s] of customization can be created. 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 Oracle BPM is left behind by other tools more modern in terms of user experience, usability and ability to integrate with everything else. To really harvest the potential of Oracle BPM you need to do it in JDeveloper and with ADF. This restricts its usage to very technical people. The administration of the Oracle BPM tools has really put a burden on our team. It is running on Weblogic and we experience issues very often either with performance or with a bad configuration of the system. As with all Oracle products, the price can be an issue for smaller shops. 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 In many scenarios it should have provided more features. It took a lot of effort while debugging, making it difficult to maintain.
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 Not easy to debug errors.
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 Implementation Rating It is a good approach to define a distributed architecture when you have multiple control-m servers.
Read full review Overall satisfactory
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 We evaluated Bonita and found that it might fit a smaller-sized company better; we found that Oracle
BPM Suite scaled much more evenly. We almost went with one of the competitors, but in the end chose Oracle
BPM Suite after we factored in the cost of VMware licensing. There are literally tons of analytics on the back end which are great for upper management, but not so much for average users, but this fits our business model quite well.
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 You'll most certainly need a deep dive and extensive training before your users can even think of using the product and they are very expensive. Lack of documentation makes it very difficult to manage the application if any error is encountered which will result in you ending up hiring a dedicated person to look into the application once it's deployed. For a very large org., if properly implemented and used, it can help identify the cost-intensive and inefficient processes. Read full review ScreenShots