Introducing BMC CONTROL-M 6.4

	“Over the past 24 months I have been fortunate enough to meet personally with many of you to discuss your ideas for the future direction of BMC CONTROL-M. Many of you have also participated in our customer surveys, seminars, and customer advisory board, allowing our team to collect valuable product feedback. I would like to extend my thanks for your participation in this important process, and share some key new features with you as we release the BMC CONTROL-M 6.4.   The enhancements listed below only cover a fraction of the new features and functionality built in to BMC CONTROL-M 6.4. I encourage you to attend a BMC CONTROL-M 6.4 "What’s New" webinar and find out what it can do for you. I am confident that you will find BMC CONTROL-M 6.4 compelling and powerful, catering to your current and future workload automation requirements.” Gur Steif VP, BMC CONTROL-M&D

Workload Lifecycle Management
Workload Lifecycle Management provides end-to-end change and version control capabilities to cross-platform, cross-application workloads. BMC CONTROL-M 6.4 is equipped with built-in version control for job definitions, allowing you to easily track and report on changes with the highest degree of granularity. Whether changes were made to the main job attributes, conditions, or auto-edit variables, information about the change will be retained and presented upon request. We have also included a powerful comparison tool, allowing you to quickly single out the changed attributes and restore a previous version if needed.

Virtualization
BMC CONTROL-M 6.4 enables virtual workloads that do not depend on a static hardware configuration. By embedding batch files, shell scripts, and JCL in the job definition, jobs can be routed to any available server and not just servers that host the code that needs to be scheduled. Virtual workloads are highly portable and highly resilient to changes in the physical environment. In collaboration with Agentless Scheduling, BMC CONTROL-M extends virtualization capabilities to further reduce costs and deployment time.

Business Service Management (BSM)
BMC CONTROL-M/Forecast and BMC Batch Impact Manager 6.4 provide new tools and statistics that enhance business service metrics and forecast reporting. BMC CONTROL-M/Forecast 6.4 allows you to predict post-processing behavior based on non-zero job return codes, as well as simulate changes in node-ids. BMC Batch Impact Manager 6.4 comes with new reports and tracks and records runtime statistics based on operational calendars.

Usability and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
BMC CONTROL-M 6.4 extends the capabilities of cyclic jobs and they can now use variable run-time intervals for greater flexibility; field lengths of job attributes have been significantly extended, allowing the use of more descriptive job characteristics. Product screens also include smart filtering that shortens access time to job information.

As the database remains a centerpiece in the architecture of BMC CONTROL-M, CONTROL-M 6.4 brings forward a lightweight alternative to traditional relational databases that requires very little ongoing maintenance. PostgreSQL is now included in the installation package, available for distributed system deployments on Windows, UNIX, and Linux.