Control-M vs. Redwood Finance Automation

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.

Incentivized

I have used Redwood Finance Automation for all of these scenarios: transform and prepare the journal entries, SAP document posting, reversals, attachments, job status, error notifications, live tracking, error handlers, resubmission, data transformation, chain diagram of the robotic process development, can use multiple systems, merging, group, Excel conversion, and data storage. Difficulty in REL expressions to use in development for non-IT users. Data transformation requires many steps to add or delete the columns and it has some limitations.

• 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.

• It helps through processes standarization
• Implementation of SOX controls
• Takes over more repetitive and time-consuming activities to focus on added value ones

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Business users are not able to understand the errors without IT knowledge
• Better to have more features in data transformer (like Excel Pivot)
• Train all types of users on basic REL expression language to use in development

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We've had issues with a server crashing. The latest issue has the option for high availability which should help with that.

Incentivized

I've never seen a performance issue with Control-M.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It is a good approach to define a distributed architecture when you have multiple control-m servers.

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.

Incentivized

It is very well integrated on SAP enviroments.

Incentivized

Control-M doesn't really use that many resources

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• We have removed the robot from user in terms of people transformation
• Time saving especially at month end to review the financials
• We have identified more improvement opportunities with RFA as per the available features