In today’s hyper-connected digital-first world, having reliable phone, internet, and television services is non-negotiable. That means communications service providers (CSPs) must remain on the cutting edge of technology and maintain stellar customer relationships to stay competitive. They do this by leveraging massive amounts of data generated from sources like subscriber information, call detail records, and sales.

The need to operationalize this data puts CSP data and analytics teams on a critical mission: To find ways to use insight-based analytics to support business transformation and create competitive advantages. The executive pressure behind it is strong. CSP data architects and their teams often struggle with deciding which data is needed and how it can be acquired, ingested, aggregated, processed, and analyzed so they can deliver the insights the business demands. Data isn’t a project—it’s a journey, and one that often comes without a roadmap.

Delivering data and analytics capabilities with the scope and scale CSPs need requires the flexibility to accommodate disparate data sources and technologies across varying infrastructure, both on-premises and in the cloud. To meet the demands of executives and business conditions, companies need a robust application and data workflow orchestration platform and strategy. This helps CSP organizations orchestrate essential tasks across the complete data lifecycle, so they can coordinate, accelerate, and operationalize their business modernization initiatives.

One of the biggest challenges on the data journey is not letting all the details and decisions about architecture, tools, processes, and integration distract from discovering how to deliver valuable insights and services across the organization.

All too commonly, organizations get bogged down by foundational data questions like:

Do we have the right framework to manage data pipelines?

What are the best options for feeding new data streams into our systems?

How can we integrate disparate technologies?

How can we leverage our existing systems of record?

Where should our data systems run?

The list goes on and on. As they try to find answers, companies can lose sight of the overall goal of creating systems that will provide better insight and improve decision-making. The details are essential, but so is staying focused on the big picture. The less time planners need to spend on the details of how data will be managed, the more they can focus on finding value and insight in their data.

To deal with the complexity, CSPs need industrial-strength application and data workflow orchestration capabilities. Many tools can orchestrate data workflows. Some of them—such as Apache Airflow—are open source. However, most of those tools are platform-specific, targeting specific personas to perform specific tasks. So, multiple tools must be cobbled together to orchestrate complex workflows across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.

End-to-end orchestration is essential for running data pipelines in production and an organization’s chosen platform must be able to support disparate applications and data on diverse infrastructures. Control-M (self-hosted and SaaS) does that by providing flexible application and data workflow orchestration for every stage of the data and analytics journey, operationalizing the business modernization initiatives every organization is striving to achieve. It offers interfaces tailored to the many personas involved in facilitating complex workflows, including IT operations (ITOps), developers, cloud teams, data engineers, and business users. Having everyone collaborating on a single platform, operating freely within the boundaries implemented by ITOps, speeds innovation and reduces time to value.

Control-M expedites the implementation of data pipelines by replacing manual processes with application and data integration, automation, and orchestration. This gives every project speed, scalability, reliability, and repeatability. Control-M provides visibility into workflows and service level agreements (SLAs) with an end-to-end picture of data pipelines at every stage, enabling quick resolution of potential issues through notification and troubleshooting before deadlines are missed. Control-M can also detect potential SLA breaches through forecasting and predictive analytics that prompt focused human intervention on specific remedial actions to prevent SLA violations from occurring.

Data pipeline orchestration offers CSPs unique opportunities to improve their business by operationalizing data. For example, CSPs can reduce customer churn by leveraging data to identify signals and patterns that indicate potential issues. With that analysis, they can proactively target at-risk customers with retention campaigns and personalized offers. Additionally, CSPs can utilize customer data to optimize pricing, provide targeted promotions to customers, and deliver excellent customer experiences.

Case study

A major European CSP and media conglomerate utilizes Control-M throughout its business to harness the power of data. With more than 12 million customers, the company collects a staggering six petabytes of customer data per night, including viewing habits from television cable boxes, mobile network usage information, and website traffic. Using this information, it creates a 360-degree view of each customer. That means its customer information is never more than 15 minutes out of date, allowing it to provide the best customer service possible. In addition, this information is used to deliver targeted advertising so that each customer sees what is most relevant to their interests.

Control-M manages and orchestrates the entire data science modeling workflow end to end, both on-premises and in the cloud, through technologies including Google Cloud Platform (GCP), BigQuery, DataBricks, and many more. With Control-M, the CSP can use this massive amount of data to understand its customers, provide an optimized customer experience, slash cancellations, and help create new revenue streams.

Conclusion

Turning data and analytics into insights and actions can feel impossible—especially with the massive amount of data generated by a CSP. Control-M orchestrates and automates data pipelines to deliver the insights your organization needs.

Control-M helps CSPs orchestrate every step of a data and analytics project, including ingesting data to your systems, processing it, and delivering insights to business users and other teams that need to better utilize the refined data. It also brings needed consistency and integration between modern and legacy environments. The benefit to this integration and automation is that you can operationalize data to modernize your business, innovate faster, and deliver data initiatives successfully.

To learn more about how Control-M can help you improve your business outcomes visit our website.

In today’s complex and rapidly evolving digital landscape, organizations recognize business modernization as a key priority to drive growth and innovation. They are embracing a culture of agility and responsiveness that leverages both emerging technologies and tools and agile application and data pipeline development methods to foster customer-centric solutions.

One area of enterprise digital modernization currently getting a lot of attention is the mainframe. As part of their modernization efforts, mainframe organizations are evaluating migrating applications to newer platforms like cloud and containers.

However, while the lure of more agility and flexibility for mainframe applications is a strong incentive, companies face significant risks because these changes can potentially impact critical business services. They’re also seeking to capitalize on these new technology investments while still preserving the knowledge and expertise embedded within existing applications, processes, and workflows that deliver these business-critical outcomes.

Consequently, most organizations with mainframe pursue a strategic migration approach that balances the pace of transition while still retaining the existing components that continue to deliver value and selectively migrating others that are better served by modern environments.

To manage this balancing act, mitigate operational risks, and execute a smooth journey to the desired state, companies rely on two core technology platforms—Control-M, BMC’s application and data workflow orchestration platform, and Micro Focus Enterprise Server, Open Text’s solution for mainframe application replatforming.

Migrating application and data workflows

While mainframe systems are well-known for powering real-time transactions, the majority of their workloads actually run as batch. These batch jobs are integrated into workflows to deliver essential business outcomes such as supply chain execution, customer billing, payments, and end-of-period closing. Over time, the workflows have evolved, often becoming hybrid and complex in nature as they incorporate modern infrastructure and data technologies. While evolving, they have also been adapted to company processes and standards, accumulating best practices, insights, and institutional knowledge.

Migrating these critical workflows of tightly interconnected applications and data sources, and maintaining the associated institutional knowledge, is a key challenge in almost every mainframe application migration. Control-M is an ideal platform in this context. It ensures the integration of mainframe and migrated applications alongside other technologies on distributed systems, cloud, and container platforms. It also preserves built-in knowledge, processes, and standards, and enables a smooth, no-risk migration at the speed the organization desires.

In addition, Micro Focus Enterprise Server is a high-performance, scalable deployment environment that allows applications traditionally run on IBM® mainframes to be moved to other platforms (replatformed), including distributed systems, cloud, and containers, with only minor adjustments.

Managed transformation

Control-M has recently delivered a Micro Focus Enterprise Server integration that enables the centralized orchestration of Micro Focus jobs alongside other application and data workflows. This integration supports managing Micro Focus jobs through Control-M’s interfaces, leveraging the same advanced orchestration capabilities used across mainframe jobs, file transfers, enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, data sources, and cloud and container services.

Control-M’s integration with Micro Focus Enterprise Server, coupled with BMC’s migration tools and support team expertise, positions the combined solution as the go-to migration resource and capability for mainframe modernization projects.

Control-M can easily replace mainframe applications with replatformed Micro Focus jobs, maintaining dependencies, workflow structure, built-in knowledge, and adherence to processes and standards. The change is operationally transparent, as Control-M continues to provide holistic visibility and standardized management of application and data workflows across source and destination environments, delivering consistent business outcomes and value as applications and the landscape evolve.

For existing Control-M customers, replatforming from mainframe to distributed or on-premises servers and/or cloud environments is guided, simple, and secure. The BMC Services organization, including its global partner network, is available to assist customers in migrating mainframe workflows through complete or selective replacement with Micro Focus jobs, providing continuously updated migration tools and sharing their expertise in converting workflows between platforms.

The BMC Services team follows a proven methodology with four key phases:

• Planning: Includes creating a roadmap by assessing applications, dependencies, and environment constraints.
• Development: Migrates applications using migration tools to minimize errors.
• Verification: Compares original and migrated workflow outputs.
• Execution: Deploys workloads once validation is complete.

Proven success

One BMC customer achieving success with such a migration is AG Insurance. To maintain its market leadership, the company is focused on customer and competitive differentiation, adding products and experiences to make it the best choice for customers, distributors, and brokers. The organization has embarked on an ambitious and complex replatforming modernization project to migrate from its mainframe to Windows servers.

Control-M has been integral to this transformation. As part of the replatforming project, AG Insurance migrated more than 80 million lines of code through Micro Focus application modernization solutions. To minimize risk and facilitate planning and implementation, the migration was accomplished through several sequential iterations, each with its own testing and validation cycles. During the iterative application migration process, Control-M was essential to the testing of parallel workflows, including migrated and non-migrated applications across the mainframe and the new distributed platform, and verifying that the business results they produced were identical.

Control-M continues to be the strategic orchestration framework driving all of AG Insurance’s applications and data workflows and enabling new possibilities.

Contemplating mainframe migration?

If you are one of the many mainframe-driven enterprises contemplating or actively pursuing a modernization program, Control‑M and Micro Focus Enterprise Server offer a compelling, integrated capability to manage your journey. Together, the solutions can help you adapt workflows and services with operational transparency so your organization can achieve a seamless transition from the mainframe while preserving your vital institutional knowledge and experience.

The migration can be approached through a managed methodology that leverages both Control-M’s expertise in migrating mainframe application workflows and Micro Focus’ expertise in migrating mainframe applications to mitigate risks and allow customers to migrate at their own pace.

For more information on how Control-M and Micro Focus Enterprise Server can advance your mainframe modernization initiative, download this whitepaper.

No company is immune from the challenges posed by the near-constant digital disruptions in its markets. Despite their wealth of customer knowledge, history, and accumulated brand power, established businesses often struggle to compete in a world driven by customers’ almost unlimited access to information, buying channels, and brand influencers.

The size and longevity of these businesses can turn against them when their data and customer knowledge is siloed across a highly complex web of applications, data, and infrastructure, making it difficult to unlock useful insights and get applications into production to drive business modernization and innovation and deliver new digital business outcomes.

To achieve the agility needed to gain actionable insights and customer centricity, and modernize their business, organizations must give their decentralized digital product and data engineering teams easy access to an end-to-end orchestration framework. And that framework must deliver complex application and data pipeline workflows in production with reliability, scalability, security, and compliance built in.

That’s why I’m excited to announce that BMC is enhancing freedom within the orchestration framework with Control-M 21.1!

This latest release introduces new features to help IT operations (IT Ops) teams continually adopt more modern technologies, and address the challenges of the market, by:

• Expanding the orchestration framework
• Increasing operational efficiency
• Improving self-service and collaboration

Expanding the Orchestration Framework

Control-M 21.1 helps organizations speed up their modernizations efforts by delivering data-driven business outcomes faster. Together with continuously delivered integrations, it offers new cloud, data, and machine learning integrations. It also enhances capabilities of Application Integrator.

New features include:

• Oracle Cloud Storage integration—The number of cloud storage providers that are natively supported has been increased to include Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage, so IT Ops teams, data teams, and cloud engineers can now transfer files to and from it, facilitating the orchestration of modern workflows.
• Improved database native plugin capabilities—The database plugin will now support the Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) driver with Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2/1.3 encryption and new editions of Microsoft SQL and SAP® Adaptive Server Enterprise. It will be decoupled from the Application Pack for easy deployment.
• New integrations—Control-M 21.1, together with continuously delivered integrations, expands the orchestration framework by natively connecting new data, cloud, and machine learning applications. In addition, it expands existing integration capabilities to allow users to leverage new application versions and functionalities
• Enhanced Application Integrator Control-M Application Integrator can now track job status after a manual abort operation and retrieve output for a step that is still executing, providing more precise monitoring of custom integrations.

Increased Efficiency, Security, and Optimization

Control-M 21.1 improves operational efficiency with new features that allow IT Ops, data teams, and cloud engineers to accelerate business outcomes, comply with regulations and security standards, and enhance overall performance, including:

• Expanded Manage File Transfer and capabilities—Users can now transfer multiple files simultaneously, enable server-side encryption at rest when transferring files to and from Google Cloud Storage and Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3, and use Secure Shell (SSH) public-key authentication.
• Expanded Managed File Transfer/Enterprise capabilities: Managed File Transfer/Enterprise administrators can now assign default home folders for individual external users, grant external users specific access-level permissions to folders and subfolders, and even delegate folder management to external users. This helps organizations protect external partner data from unauthorized access and ensure compliance with established business processes. Administrators will also be able to better filter, block, and control access based on IP addresses.
• New Workflow Insights dashboard—Workflow Insights users have access to a new dashboard that provides detailed visibility into user actions to elevate automation and reduce human interaction. The dashboard details the top 10 user actions, and provides insights into user actions by client type (AAPI, web, desktop) and by application, sub-application, host, and more.

Improved User Experience

Control-M 21.1 provides non-IT users with greater freedom and an improved self-service experience through enhancements that shorten learning curves and improve productivity. IT Ops can also refine the framework boundaries with new granular access controls.

New features include:

• Expanded web interface—The Control-M web interface has been expanded to include capabilities such as job templates, workload policy, change history, folder timeline view, variable simulation, and more. These features give non-IT users more freedom and control to access, manage, and report on their workflows.
• Web interface enhancements—In addition to the new features, the web interface has been enhanced for faster navigation. A new application menu allows users to separate application areas for a narrower focus, and the search bar offers direct search capabilities against the support center. In addition, users can now right-click to perform in-context actions as well as define workflow links by setting the event source, event target, and much more.
• Additional access control options—When defining user roles, IT Ops can add role-based controls to history reports and service level agreement (SLA) management report objects.

Remaining agile could make the difference between succeeding and being left behind. Control-M 21.1 can help you expand your orchestration framework; increase security, efficiency, and optimization; and improve the experience of your users inside and outside the business.

For more information about Control-M 21.1, check out the release notes and the “what’s new” section to see a complete list of features.

As customers’ access to information expands, businesses face the ever-increasing challenge of digital market disruptions. It can be difficult to compete, especially for established companies. Although these companies have deep customer knowledge and data spread across a complex web of systems-of-record and systems-of-engagement, they often struggle to find the agility required to unlock it. That leaves them unable drive business modernization, spur innovation, and deliver new digital business services. To achieve the agility required to meet their customers’ needs, businesses must provide decentralized digital product teams easy access to an end-to-end orchestration platform to deliver complex application and data pipeline workflows in production.

BMC Helix Control-M is a SaaS platform for integrating, automating, and orchestrating application and data workflows across a complex and changing technology ecosystem. It provides the benefits of SaaS consumption with deep operational capabilities, delivering speed, scale, security and governance in production.  Too often, companies rely on many siloed automation and orchestration tools to run their business applications. BMC Helix Control-M simplifies workflow complexity with a single end-to-end enterprise view across on-premises and multi-cloud, interfaces for developers, data and cloud engineers, IT Operations, and business users alike. It offers users a wide variety of out-of-the-box integrations for the most important modern application and data technologies, all delivered in a SaaS user experience for highly decentralized, self-service consumption.

The latest release of BMC Helix Control-M adds even more capabilities that help IT Operations:

• Solve complexity problems by expanding the reach of the orchestration framework into modern technologies
• Deliver better business results faster by increasing operational efficiency
• Accelerates digital business outcomes by eliminating the barriers between IT and the business with improved self-service and collaboration

Expanding orchestration framework

BMC Helix Control-M accelerates cloud production by integrating new elements of modern multi-cloud infrastructures under its orchestration umbrella. Users can transfer files from cloud storage platforms in one simple step with enhanced security. Data engineers can orchestrate their Airflow-based pipelines from within the BMC Helix Control-M orchestration framework, and take advantage of the broader orchestration and all the advanced capabilities provided by BMC Helix Control-M. The platform also integrates with many data services from AWS, Azure, Google, Talend, Informatica and more. View a complete list of cloud services integrations here.

Control-M workflow integrating disparate technologies supporting business services

Increased operational efficiency

BMC Helix Control-M responds to the ever-present demand to produce more value with the same amount of time and team members by introducing features that help IT Ops to eliminate redundant, time-consuming tasks and risks. These capabilities enable deep control of operations. BMC continues to deliver crisper concepts, such as bridging or folder references, to describe customer needs naturally. Support for evolving security methods and standards is very important to remain compliant.  The goal is to allow operations to say “yes” with confidence without becoming a top expert, and, with the ease of SaaS, for operations to have a human-friendly experience that can weather the demands for additional growth and evolution.

IAM Role authentication method added for AWS jobs.

Improved self-service and collaboration

BMC Helix Control-M helps IT Operations empower business users, developers and engineers with self-service capabilities, within the framework of organizational best practices they design. That means IT Operations can now delegate more tasks to other users. Additionally, they can more easily define the organizational standards that users must adhere to so users can collaborate with freedom while minimizing the risk of disruption.

Site standards specify which rule has been violated

Business users, developers, and engineers can access the resources and information they need through a personalized and secure self-service experience, delivered through interfaces with which they are most familiar.

• Engineers and developers can complete their tasks without submitting service requests. They can be given full authority to manage host groups, and they can launch applications written in different languages without having to access the local machine. The enforced organizational standards can now be defined more easily and quickly by administrators through the new site standard policies.
• Business users can access more BMC Helix Control-M resources, information, and capabilities through an enhanced graphical user experience. They can manage folders, users, roles, and access new reports without the need to submit a ticket.
• Developers can be granted access to BMC Helix Control-M Automation API to deploy jobs, folders, and subfolders so the deployment of changes to production is faster. They can access more BMC Helix Control-M resources, information, and capabilities through the Automation API monthly updates and enhancements.

It’s vital to stay ahead in today’s highly competitive market. BMC Helix Control-M can help you modernize your business by expanding your orchestration framework, increasing operational efficiency, and improving collaboration within your business.

For more information about BMC Helix Control-M, visit our website.

Modern business success requires meeting the demands of a perpetually competitive market. As more organizations embrace technology innovation, businesses must work hard to leverage that innovation and improve their business outcomes. To do that, they must identify the challenges and demands of the market.

For example, technology stacks have become increasingly complex. Rather than shy away from dealing with that complexity, companies must build competitive advantages by embracing and exploiting their complex technology stack. In addition, companies are expected to increase the speed and quality of the results they deliver while still using the same resources. That means companies must accelerate their operations to meet that demand. And finally, within the organization, there is a rising demand to eliminate the barrier between IT and the rest of the business. To accommodate this demand, organizations must turn to self-service technology access to give business users the ability to work more freely within their part of the business.

While these challenges may be daunting, a robust application and data workflow orchestration platform can help an organization turn these perceived obstacles into areas of opportunity. That’s why I’m excited to announce Control-M 21 from BMC! With this latest version, IT Operations (ITOps) can strengthen their orchestration framework for business growth through expansion and efficiency and give business users the freedom to work within their designated, secure framework.

Control-M 21 helps ITOps address the challenges of the market by:

• Expanding the orchestration framework
• Increasing operational efficiency
• Improving self-service and collaboration

Expanding the Orchestration Framework

Control-M 21 enables companies to reduce complexity and better orchestrate modern workflows across hybrid and multicloud environments with new data platform and cloud storage integrations. This helps businesses take a data-driven approach, drive business outcomes, and gain competitive advantage.

Key features include:

• Airflow integration—Developers and data engineers can orchestrate their Airflow-based pipelines from within the Control-M orchestration framework, and take advantage of the broader orchestration and advanced capabilities provided by Control-M.

Figure 1. Planning Airflow within Control-M orchestration framework

Figure 2. Monitoring Airflow Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs)

• Cloud storage integrations and support for cloud authentications—Users can transfer files to and from further cloud storage repositories (Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 PrivateLink, Azure Data Lake Storage, and Google Cloud Storage) in one simple step. They can also simplify and enhance security control when running cloud services, by supporting new authentication methods (AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles).
• Continuous monthly releases—The Control-M team at BMC is delivering new integrations in monthly releases, thus expanding the orchestration framework on an ongoing and continuous basis.

Increasing Operational Efficiency

Control-M 21 increases operational efficiency through features that help ITOps eliminate redundant, time-consuming tasks, mitigate risks, and achieve faster-time-to-value.

Key features include:

• Operational enhancements—Users can log into the product faster and more securely with single sign-on through Identity Provider (IdP) SAML 2.0 support. They can also more quickly define application and data workflows, and better automate their execution, by leveraging features such as the ability to reuse existing folders/jobs in workflow definitions, introduce variables in the post-processing logic, and solve dependencies in different ways.

New file transfer capabilities—The ability to orchestrate internal and external file transfers has been significantly enhanced with Control-M 21.

Figure 3. Managed file transfer (MFT) job transferring files from AWS S3 to Azure Data Lake Gen2

Figure 4. Connection profile to connect Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2

Not only can users transfer files to and from cloud storage repositories in one simple step, but they now have better control thanks to new options and post-processing actions. For example, users can create copies of the file they want to transfer when it already exists on the destination host, thus avoiding errors or unwanted overrides. Security has been increased with new and upgraded algorithms, and administrators now have a new level of security control, with the ability to define internal allowed and blocked user lists. Finally, the MFT/E user experience has been enhanced and a new MFT web interface helps internal users speed up one-time file transfers in a self-service fashion, which frees up ITOps from the burden of ad-hoc remediation requests.

• Administration facilities—Administrators can now reduce the time dedicated to installation and configuration actions. For example, they can create multiple MFT/E sites with a single MFT/E installation, and eliminate redundant, time-consuming actions with Centralized Connection Profiles. They can also automate the conversion from old local connection profiles to new centralized connection profiles using out-of-the-box conversion utility and reduce conversion errors.

Improving Self-service and Collaboration

Control-M 21 also enhances freedom within the orchestration framework. Now, ITOps can empower business users, developers, and engineers with personalized, secure, self-service access to the resources and information they need, delivered through the interfaces with which they are most familiar. That means ITOps can then delegate more tasks to other users while more easily defining the organizational standards and best practices they must adhere to for disruption-free collaboration.

Key features include:

• Framework for collaboration and control—Employees within the organization have more freedom to use the technologies of their choice. Developers and engineers can complete their tasks without submitting service requests. They can be given full authority to manage host groups and can launch jobs by embedding scripting in their preferred program language, without having to access the local machine. The organizational standards to which they must adhere can now be defined more easily and quickly by ITOps through the new site standard policies.
• Enhanced graphical user interface (GUI) experience—Business users can access more Control-M resources, information, and capabilities through an enhanced GUI. Examples include the possibility to manage folders, users, roles, and access new reports.

Figure 6. Configuring users and roles from the web interface

• Improved developer and engineer experience—Developers’ and engineers’ experiences are improved with easier collaboration with ITOps, through JSON import/export. They can deploy changes easier, faster, and at the subfolder/job level with a new Automation API, and access more Control-M resources, information, and capabilities through ongoing enhancements.

It’s vital to stay ahead in today’s highly competitive market. Control-M 21 can help you modernize by expanding your orchestration framework, increasing operational efficiency, and improving collaboration within your business.

For more information about Control-M 21, check out the “what’s new” page to see a complete list of features.

Companies are creating unnecessary risk and slowing the delivery of business services by utilizing multiple solutions to manage file transfers and entirely different tools to orchestrate application and data workflows. What’s needed is a platform that allows IT pros to manage file transfers and application and data workflows from a single view. According to PeerSpot reviewers, Control-M can solve this issue. It is the top-ranked Managed File Transfer (MFT) tool according on PeerSpot, whose members share how Control-M simplifies, automates, and orchestrates secure file transfers with related application and data workflows, across hybrid infrastructures.

In a recent PeerPaper™ report titled “The Value of Selecting a Platform that can Orchestrate File Transfers Alongside Related Application and Data Workflows,” PeerSpot members who use Control-M Managed File Transfer discussed the selection factors they considered when looking for a holistic solution, including a consolidated view of application, data and file transfer workflows, support for multiple protocols, policy-based self-service enablement, security, audit and compliance capabilities, and the ability to orchestrate file transfers alongside related application and data workflows.

Use Cases

PeerSpot members have varied use cases for MFT and application and data workflow orchestration. For instance, Mark F., a Senior Systems Analyst at a recruiting/HR firm, uses Control-M “… for secure bank payments, banking applications, …database housekeeping, and various housekeeping tasks.” His company also puts Control-M to work “… in lots of different areas where we need to coordinate the platforms, and also areas where the jobs that are running are critical so that if there’s a problem we can know if they’re not running correctly.”

One-to-many and point-to-point security encryption are the use cases for an RPA-WLA BU Director at a tech services company Anirudh R., a Manager of Application Services at a tech services company, has a variety of use cases. He said, “We work on insurance-based clients, so we have a lot of files that come in every day. The business does some manipulation on that, which, in turn, reflects in the New York Stock Exchange, so we use [Control-M] Managed File Transfer for all SLEs and things like that.”

Support for Multiple Protocols

Support for multiple protocols allows companies to transfer files between systems or locations using the protocol that is most appropriate for their needs. The tech services RPA-WLA BU Director values Control-M Managed File Transfer in this context. He said, “Whether it’s the architecture or the use case. It supports all file transfers.” For this reason, he deemed Control-M to be “a flagship product.”

A Lead Consultant at a media company uses Control-M to run multiple applications, including SFTP transfers, Arkin, and Informatica. He shared, “We have also integrated some of our reports with Control-M and I’m running them on my local machines. We are planning on expanding Control-M to other applications in the future. That’s one of our next steps, to go to applications at the organization level.”

Security

An MFT platform should have features that protect data from unauthorized access and theft. Security measures may include encryption and authentication protocols. The tech services Manager of Application Services values Control-M’s ability to encrypt and decrypt files. He elaborated by saying, “Usually, with other tools, we do a file transfer, and then we have to encrypt and decrypt it, but in [Control-M] Managed File Transfer, we can do it in one go.”

Ability to Orchestrate File Transfers Alongside Application and Data Workflows

The ability to orchestrate file transfers alongside application and data workflows allows companies to see all their workflows in one place and makes it easier to troubleshoot and optimize them. It also helps reduce the complexity of IT environments by consolidating multiple tools.

Claudio G., a System Programmer at an educational organization, shared how Control-M manages all files at his company: “Some of our clients… send the data to the bank about their employees’ salaries. The bank takes that data and prepares payments for different people in the company. Control-M is used for the information transfer between the bank and Visa, American Express, or Mastercard.”

“We work with technologies including Hadoop, Informatica, all kinds of databases, and file transfers…,” said Raul G., a Batch Scheduling Administrator at a software company. For him, Control-M Managed File Transfer’s major benefit is that it “can work with almost all of the applications that are on the market right now.” Control-M’s ability to “integrate file transfers more readily, resolve issues quickly and orchestrate a diverse landscape of vendor products” was what stood out to a VP – Systems Engineer at a financial services firm.

360-Degree View of Processes

The final factor—a consolidated platform with a 360-degree view—allows companies to see all aspects of their business in one place and makes it easier to identify and fix issues.

For a System Engineering Manager at a marketing services firm, Control-M is leveraged for file transfers. He finds the “visibility of a successful transfer is very useful (e.g., the ability to report on that or view whether that job succeeded or failed in the dashboard).”

Additionally, a Director at a performing arts institute loves that Control-M’s GUI is so intuitive. He explained, “Most tools have a huge GUI. You need to open five to seven windows to go to the parameters. Sometimes you don’t have all the parameters in the GUI. With Control-M, it is three clicks and we have all the information that we need. ”

To read the full report, “The Value of Selecting a Platform that can Orchestrate File Transfers Alongside Related Application and Data Workflows,” click here.

From evolving supply chains to ever-improving inventory practices, the retail industry continuously faces unique challenges that require cutting-edge business practices. As retail operations grow, retailers often turn to technology and automation to help meet the demands of modern business. For instance, many big retailers harness the power of application and data workflow orchestration to optimize their supply chains, set competitive prices, advertise effectively, and ensure that their financial close processes are managed securely.

BMC’s premier application and data workflow orchestration platforms, Control-M and BMC Helix Control-M, support and enhance these practices in various ways, such as automating and rationalizing inventory management, supporting growing local stores, and  optimizing shipping. As the retail industry continues to evolve with growing digitization, e-commerce, and competition, retailers must revise and expand their business-critical requirements for a workflow orchestration platform beyond individual domains. Retailers need a platform that can improve and optimize the entire lifecycle from order to delivery.

Retail market evolution

After years of optimization and accommodating lower margins, retailers continue to search for best-of-breed solutions, especially in the digital world. That means that they will adopt the best customer relationship management (CRM) solution, the best analytics package, the best in-store customer tracking solution, and various other vertical offers.

These disparate solutions often don’t integrate easily, which makes it difficult for retailers to deliver an integrated customer experience, especially one that bridges digital and brick-and-mortar storefronts.

Order lifecycle management

For instance, in online retail, customers fill their digital shopping cart, check out, pay, and wait for the delivery, but the retailer, due to lack of integration in the order lifecycle, may not be able to fully deliver the cart because some items are out of stock. The retailer needs to handle the situation up front by contacting the customer and proposing a replacement or a refund, while also managing customer (dis)satisfaction.

In such a scenario, only tight integration between inventory (fed by the inbound logistics), order preparation and delivery to outbound logistics, and the CRM system handling the dialogue with the customer will deliver an exceptional customer experience.

Once again, Control-M and Helix Control-M can help, integrating more systems and applications to deliver observability throughout the entire order lifecycle. One customer said they apply Control-M to optimize and connect every phase of the supply chain. As a result, their customers are provided with the right inventory, at the right quantity, in the right place, at the right time.

Data-driven diversified strategies

Advanced analytics can also enhance the customer experience. Gathering the large quantities of heterogeneous data generated by site visits, store video images, and loyalty card acquisition patterns, etc., into an analytics system is a challenge of scale and complexity. But it allows businesses to study customer behavior, preferences, and local trends, all of which can provide valuable business insights.

By bridging systems and processes that communicate with the customers at every touchpoint of their journey, retailers can create outstanding customer experiences. For example, a fashion retailer in Europe has used Control-M to successfully implement a repeatable process that transfers and processes data, producing strategic reports that align with local customers’ needs, site-specific data, seasonal conditions, and local events.

Data transfers from traditional sources and newer technologies like Internet of Things (IoT) can be continuous (customer traffic videos produced by surveillance cameras), highly dynamic (produced by occasional promotional campaigns), and real-time (on-demand catalog requests).  Control-M and Helix Control-M can enhance the customer shopping experience and maximize the conversion rate of visitors who make a purchase by managing and integrating those various data sources in a complex data pipeline of event-driven data processes.

Targeted advertising and promotions

Retailers often experiment with their systems to automate special price offerings and time-sensitive actions, but doing so requires gathering information about customers. For instance, a couple who looks on the web for a TV, compares the offers and prices, and then comes into the store has specific options in mind. By detecting the link between those events, a system could propose a special offer on TVs to dramatically increase the couple’s chance of buying.

Again, this requires tight integration between systems that are often not connected out-of-the-box. By analyzing and interpreting customer data and anticipating customer demand, Control-M and Helix Control-M accelerate the delivery of actionable insights to help companies make informed decisions across the customer journey, from targeted advertising and promotion to strategic pricing.

Light and fast

As part of their digital transformation, many businesses are moving to the cloud with the goal of reducing the operations needed to deliver advanced solutions. This is how they tune their position between minimum risk and maximum profit.

Managing changes in production requires collecting multiple perspectives in a single framework, especially in the cloud, where short-term assets, serverless computing, and resource scaling create an ever-changing, volatile, and ephemeral environment. Control-M and Helix Control-M provide that framework by offering visibility, traceability, and auditability of workflows in the cloud.

Conclusion

The evolving nature of the retail industry demands that agile and robust technologies work seamlessly together and facilitate the automation and data processing capabilities required by modern businesses. Control-M and BMC Helix Control-M help businesses synchronize supply and demand, support and optimize complex inbound and outbound logistics—including inventory management, store assortment, fulfillment, packing, and distribution—all while improving efficiency and reducing costs. But most importantly, the solutions connect all the parts together and deliver consistency from order to delivery.

Businesses thrive by attracting net-new customers and exist by retaining them. But new customers are increasingly harder to come by, and current customers are constantly being wooed by competitors. Brand loyalty has been replaced by customer experience—an experience that includes receiving personalized, tailored offerings that indicate a retailer is attentive to a shopper’s individual needs. The customer should feel like the retailer doesn’t want just anyone’s business—they want your business.

We’re all familiar with the glut of retailer emails, texts, and junk mail. Think about how often you actually click through or glance at, much less open and read. the email text, or mailer. If the offer isn’t personally interesting to you, you probably don’t spend much time looking at the details. But the devil is in the details—or more specifically, the data.

Today, there’s a lot of customer data up for grabs—from behavioral data, site cookies, and shopping patterns to social media and loyalty programs—and customers are more receptive to sharing it. According to Forbes “Customers want personalization—and are willing to share info to get it.”

Retailers that don’t leverage the power of that data are losing out on opportunities. The trick is to get a handle on all of it and distill it into something useful, like creating targeted advertising that resonates with customers to give them what they want, when they want it, at the right time and the right price.

In fact, the recent Google/SKIM Rethinking Readiness Study found that by tailoring advertising content to stated and inferred user needs, purchase intent rose 15 percent and click-through rates rose 30 percent versus ads with standard personalization. It’s time for a more targeted approach.

Targeted advertising

The ability to identify customer needs and create targeted advertising begins with data. Marrying that data from disparate sources and applications and different parameters and contextual information can be overwhelming—if you don’t have the right tools. In some cases, this has been a game of catch up for retailers that started as brick and mortar versus those that only have an online storefront.

While innovative, tech-driven companies capture new data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, social media platforms, and other systems of engagement, traditional companies often rely on CRM and ERP systems of record that can include historical customer data. Regardless of the source of data for established or new companies, you must be able to aggregate it, and in some cases that may mean bridging the gap between historical systems and the latest technologies.

To do that—and cut out the clutter and noise so you can get straight to promoting the things your customers want to hear about—you need an application workflow orchestrator that digests, distills, and disseminates data from multiple sources to give you valuable insights at just the right time. Without it, you run the risk of getting out-advertised by your competitors.

Enter BMC’s Control-M platform

Control-M is that single point of control that can integrate and orchestrate application workflow development, scheduling, execution, and monitoring. Either on premises or as a service, it automates the process of ingesting, storing, processing, and analyzing customer data from multiple sources at scale. From there, you can harness that data to build timely, personalized, and relevant advertising delivered to customers at the right time. The result—your customers get advertising about products they actually want, and you create incredible customer experiences.

Conclusion

The old adage that the customer is always right has never been more accurate. In the race to attract and retain customers, businesses are seeking new and innovative ways to differentiate themselves. Finding that sweet spot with targeted advertising requires collecting and distilling volumes of data—and making sense of and yielding value from it. With BMC’s Control-M, you have a powerful solution to orchestrate and automate that process so you can get back to growing your business.

Everywhere you look, technology drives business, and every organization that embraces a digital culture is challenged to adapt or disrupt its technology landscape to continuously drive innovation.

Established companies in traditional sectors such as financial services, oil and gas, automotive, and pharmaceuticals face different challenges than new market players that were born with a digital strategy. However, if they can quickly integrate new solutions into their existing platforms and deploy the right technology mix, their traditional assets—repositories of historical data on customer behavior, transactions, and so on—can become an advantage versus a barrier to innovation. When used strategically, this data can help maintain and build loyal customer relationships.

Common business goals

While every industry is unique, they often share the same business goals and face common challenges. In fact, businesses of all sizes look to companies like Amazon as a model for how to build excellent customer experiences.

When embracing the roadmap to customer centricity, agility, and actionable insights, companies—and established companies, in particular—will likely have to make some changes to their existing infrastructure to get on the right path, especially when they discover technology gaps their current tools can’t fill. One common gap is application and data workflow orchestration. However, many companies fear that it’s too risky to replace their existing automation tools (or homegrown solutions) in favor of an enterprise grade platform.

Fortunately, Control-M and BMC Helix Control-M can minimize this risk.

The case for change

Suppose your company wants to create data-driven targeted advertising. The Internet of Behavior (IoB), which extends from the Internet of Things (IoT) and is the interconnection of devices that generate a vast variety of new data, is undoubtedly a perfect source of information. Established businesses can also mine their historical customer data to find powerful insights. However, the challenges are how to deploy the latest technology to collect and process customer data so it’s available throughout the organization in real-time and how to bridge the gap with existing technology.

If your current automation technology doesn’t allow you to rapidly and reliably integrate new technology solutions into your workflows, you’re already falling behind. You’ll be left with snippets of past and present customer behavior data that are stuck in siloed tools. If you try to create and maintain manual integrations, you’ll inevitably have blind spots that could lead to inaccurate or incomplete data. Manual integrations are also inefficient to manage. It’s time to make the right choice.

With Control-M and BMC Helix Control-M, you can integrate disparate technologies; orchestrate the entire process of ingesting, storing, processing, and analyzing customer data from multiple sources (on-premises to the cloud); and deliver fast results at scale.

Minimize conversion risk with Control-M and BMC Helix Control-M

Recognized as a leading application workflow orchestration platform, Control-M provides the most modern toolset for orchestrating complex application and data workflows across multiple cloud and on-premises environments. The same value is delivered by BMC Helix Control-M, which introduces a software as a service (SaaS) user experience for highly decentralized, self-service consumption.

Control-M and BMC Helix Control-M offer comprehensive, supported, built-in conversion tools, which are constantly enhanced based on customer conversion experiences. You can leverage the conversion tools to automatically convert data from out-of-the-box schedulers, workload automation products, and application-embedded schedulers. Furthermore, you can easily create your own conversion rules and automatically convert from any product not supported natively.

Far too often, the conversion of one or more tools requires structural changes and becomes a complex change management project, especially when business-critical services are involved. Control-M and BMC Helix Control-M’s conversion tools were designed to mitigate this risk by guiding you through a staged approach. At each conversion stage, you’ll get a clearer, simpler view of the action required, with reports that help you predict the extent and duration of the conversion. This will help you find the optimal time to complete the migration and minimize downtime.

Finally, if you are concerned about the skills and resources needed to complete a conversion, you’re not alone. Our BMC experts and partners have helped many customers successfully complete their migration projects. They can provide support throughout the entire migration, ensuring your goals are met at every stage.

Conclusion

To get maximum value from your organization’s customer data, and turn that data into powerful insights, you’ll likely need to fill gaps in your technology stack. With Control-M and BMC Helix Control-M, you can eliminate these gaps and mitigate conversion risks—all while supporting your organization’s journey to agility, customer centricity, and actionable insights.

Next steps

Check out this white paper, A Better Way to Consolidate Workload Automation Tools.

New IT roles and responsibilities

If you work in the IT department of an organization (regardless of your position), try to ask yourself how much your responsibilities and tasks have changed in recent years. I’m pretty sure you’ll find you are doing, even in the same role, a lot more than before.

This is the result of “the imperative to generate more business value using innovative technologies and approaches to information”, to use Gartner’s words. “Each IT role faces specific challenges—from planning and supporting digital acceleration to integrating more strategically with the rest of the business”.

Digital acceleration and the proliferation of multi-cloud infrastructures and AI-enabled processes have transformed the scope of IT, bringing it closer to the business. Alongside the technology evolution, new roles have emerged, and existing ones have evolved into consulting engineers and “business-like” roles. IT-professionals are architects, data engineers, data scientists, DevOps engineers, and advisors creating and managing governance rules and an ecosystem of external providers and vendors.

The demand of enablement and empowerment

New and expanded IT roles require new strategies of enablement and empowerment. The more IT can autonomously access and leverage different tools and technologies, the more it will be effective in helping the business. The other side of this equation is also true. Enablement and empowerment strategies lead to expanded roles, where more users can exploit technologies and capabilities beyond their traditional range of expertise.

This is no surprise in the era of democratization of technology when the technology rapidly continues to become more accessible even outside of technical roles within an organization.

Enablement and empowerment principles are also encouraged by self-service culture, where users throughout the organization expect autonomous access and adoption of tools.

How Control-M’s evolution aligns to new technology trends

Control-M, a market leading platform for orchestrating data and application workflows from BMC, has evolved to support organizations embracing the principles of enablement, empowerment, and self-service.

Today, employees throughout the organization–including business users and data, cloud, and AppDev teams–can benefit from having access to application workflow orchestration. For example, data engineers leverage Control-M to integrate, automate, and orchestrate data pipelines, from ingestion to analytics, to produce reliable and accurate actionable insights. Application developers integrate Control-M using Jobs-as-Code in their CI/CD toolchains, to quickly deliver high-quality applications into production that also meet governance, risk, and compliance requirements.

With Control-M’s latest release, BMC has delivered key features to empower teams to do their work in an autonomous way. Role-based administration is one of these features, and it is complemented very well by the centralized connection profiles feature.

“… role-based administration and Automation API will provide more freedom for customers to manage their connection (e.g. bank users can update passwords without sharing it with our team)” – Johann Vermeulen, IT Operations Analyst, BMW South Africa.

Role-based administration

Let’s assume your data engineering team wants to use Control-M to simplify the management of its data pipelines. Who is responsible for setting up the Control-M infrastructure that enables data engineers to define, schedule, and manage data pipelines? Traditionally, Control-M administrators were responsible for setting up and maintaining the Control-M environment and administering roles and users. But, that limited the speed with which data engineers could get their activities done, since it required back-and-forth tickets with the administrator.

Role-based administration now enables product teams to manage their own workflow orchestration environments with full autonomy, eliminating the need to submit ticket requests to the Control-M administrator. With this feature, product teams are empowered by the delegation of administrative privileges. So, in the above example, data engineers can autonomously perform all the administrative tasks that are prerequisites to orchestrating their data pipeline and can complete their business faster. Those tasks include:

• Deploying Control-M agents and application plug-ins–pre-requisites to integrating disparate data pipeline technologies across all servers
• Managing connection profiles and user definitions–pre-requisites to securely accessing and running data technologies and applications

Controlled access to your resources

Data engineers are likely not the only team accessing Control-M to make their jobs easier. Suppose the file transfer team has also been given full control and autonomy over their stack through role-based administration to orchestrate file transfers alongside related application workflows.

Each team needs autonomy to do their work but must have restricted or controlled access to their environment to prevent damage from other teams, and so they don’t damage other teams’ environments.

How can controlled access be implemented? The Control-M administrator can restrict access and control to the teams’ defined resources by using tags and authorization granularity.

For example, the file transfer team can be granted access only to agents starting with the string mft* through tags assigned to agents in their role authorization settings. On these agents, the team can be granted the permission to manage specific application plug-ins and not others.  Also, the team can be granted access to connection profiles only if their name starts, for example, with connmft*.  Finally, teams can be given different levels of authorization on their resources (browse/update/full).

With the appropriate settings, the file transfer team does not have access to the data engineering environment–and vice versa. When logging in to Control-M, any member of the file transfer team is subject to the access control specified via role-based administration and can only see or manage the resources that have been made available to them.

“As technology changes are constant, we continue to see that BMC Software is aligning Control-M to meet these fast-paced demands.  We are excited to roll out more Application Integrator solutions and utilize role-based administration to empower our internal customers with more control over their batch workflows” – A Fortune 500 benefits company.

Centralized connection profiles

Prior to the latest Control-M release, connection profiles were bound to agents. Users had to create connection profiles to connect applications for each agent where the applications run. With the changes introduced with role-base administration, the need to decouple connection profiles from agents became evident.

With the centralized connection profiles, Control-M now allows users to have the same connection profile across all available agents.

Let’s consider the above scenario again. The file transfer team can now add another agent to the list of available agents by simply tagging it with the *mft tag. Thanks to centralized connection profiles, the team can immediately start running tasks on the new agent, using the connection profile already created for the existing plug-ins.

Conclusion

In its Top Strategic Technology trends 2021, Gartner writes: “As organizations accelerate digital business strategy to drive faster digital transformation, they need to be agile and make quick business decisions informed by currently available data… This will also include increasing autonomy and democratization across the organization, enabling parts of the business to quickly react instead of begin bogged down by inefficient processes”.

Democratization of technology inspires a culture of enablement, empowerment, and self- service. BMC is constantly evolving Control-M to support these new principles. It empowers teams (even non-technical ones) throughout the organization to benefit autonomously from application workflow orchestration.

Ready to learn more?

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