Real users weigh in on the value of Control-M
IT departments are using workflow orchestration tools like Control-M to achieve operational excellence and drive digital transformation initiatives forward. IT Central Station members who use Control-M report that they’ve been able to solve critical business challenges while leveraging new best practices and technologies around DevOps, data, and the cloud to spur innovation. Here are just a few examples:
Simplifying complex workflow orchestration
IT can be challenging, and things aren’t getting any easier as companies move into multiple clouds and platforms. “We had multiple scheduling solutions across several platforms,” explained Don W., an Operations Manager at a large retailer. He added, “Going to Control-M consolidated all of them and allowed us reactivity… based on the completion of processing.” A Team Lead at a transportation company with over 5,000 employees had a similar perspective. He said, “We value Control-M mainly for the ability to control multiple nodes in a coordinated manner.”
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a critical part of the workflow orchestration picture. IT teams are obligated to keep workflows running at an agreed-upon rate of performance. They have contractual mandates for uptime and job execution. Control-M has been extremely helpful in this area, as Jim P., E-Business Engineer at a financial services firm, related. He said, “Control-M has improved application reliability and the SLAs in our company by quite a bit. You can see if problems are coming. If we have an SLA in a couple of hours, we know well before that couple hours if processing is behind, and it allows us to take some preventative action.”
A Digital Solutions Manager at a transportation company with over 10,000 employees described the SLA value of Control-M by observing, “It’s a tool which allows us to do scheduled work. It allows for notifications when jobs aren’t running within that scheduled time frame. This improves the opportunity to meet SLAs.” For Don W, SLA value came from Control-M’s Batch Impact Manager, which “proactively warns when processing is behind and SLAs are in jeopardy of being missed.”
Auditability also emerges as a factor in the effectiveness of a workflow orchestration tool. The Manager of Digital Solutions at the transportation company related, “It creates an audit trail for jobs that we run off of it.” For him, “The opportunity to automate work so you have an audit trail, especially with governmental requirements in a regulated industry, such as the airline industry. It’s really important that we have that audit trail.”
Scaling in production
Control-M users praise the solution for its ability to work at scale across multiple areas of IT, including software development, databases and applications in production. For example, according to a Senior Operations Analyst at an insurance company, Control-M “has definitely helped development. Now we have multiple developers running their jobs and it gives them a lot of flexibility.” A Control-M Tech Lead at a financial services firm similarly felt that “the most valuable feature is the Autoedit variable resolution in planning.” As he put it, “This feature allows developers to better understand the schedule and allows them to correct any potential issues in advance.”
Paul W., VP Control-M Scheduling at a financial services firm, commented on how Control-M saved his team time. He said, “Instead of 800 applications internally doing their own thing, we centralize it into one location where there are notifications. Taking the power of economies of scale into one point of focus, it saves us money for sure. We turned a company of mom-and-pop little fiefdoms all over the place into a company where things are centralized in one location.” A System Admin and Architect at a financial services firm simply said, “I would recommend it for the scalability and dependability.”
Orchestrating data and analytics workflows
“We’ve had massive growth in the last year to two years because of company acquisitions,” noted Paul W. Because of this, he said, “We’ve added a lot of big-data processing and a lot of other processing and [Control-M] handled it quite well. We really haven’t had any serious outages in quite a long time, even through the large growth we’ve had. We’ve doubled the work and it’s handled it seamlessly.” A Database Security Specialist at a large manufacturing company shared, “Control-M has been there on back of all automated work lists by providing consistency, timely execution, and removing chances of human errors.”
A Production Engineer at a small tech services company put it this way: “We have many feeds coming in from different companies which are used by the business for various reasons and we must collectively have a central point to gather the files and feeds. We also use Control-M for encryption, decryption, and sending data across to different business users that begin at a point of time and making sure that we are not missing unnecessarily. We have a lot of business which depends on feeds which, if not properly processed, affect the stock exchange. Control-M acts as a mediator in between that and provides it in a very efficient way.” He further praised Control-M because, as he said, “This has reduced a lot of manual intervention required as a business.”
To learn more about what IT Central Station members have to say about Control-M, click here.
IT Central Station: The Guide to Selecting a Workflow Orchestration Product
These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.
See an error or have a suggestion? Please let us know by emailing blogs@bmc.com.
