If you want to investigate a new restaurant, check out a car repair service, or find a plumber, there’s a good chance that you might visit a third party consumer review site to see what their customers are saying. If you’re not familiar with a restaurant, you might look at Open Table to read about the food, service, and ambience before making a reservation. If you need a car repair, you might check out Yelp to get a sense for how they treat their customers. Or if you need a plumber, you might check out homeadvisor.com to see recent comments before getting a quote. The same concept applies to business software too. Whether you’re already using Control-M or considering moving to Control-M to get more value than what your current solution provides – it’s helpful to gain insight into what customers are saying.

One of the sites where users rate and comment on their experiences with enterprise software is TrustRadius. That includes, of course, Control-M software from BMC. TrustRadius provides a platform for customers to post their feedback and then conducts customer research to help companies make informed decisions about various enterprise software offerings. In a recent research report on Control-M, TrustRadius describes how Control-M offers high-quality job scheduling and batch services in an increasingly complex and competitive business environment and explores the solution from a variety of perspectives.

The report is based on 62 reviews and ratings from customers who used the solution. They gave Control-M an aggregate overall score of 8.6 out of 10. Customers also gave Control-M an 8.8 out of 10 rating based on the likelihood of recommending the product. Multi-platform scheduling, which provides the ability to communicate and integrate different applications and increase control, scored a 9.4 out of 10. Not too shabby!

The report reviewed the product architecture, its capabilities, the types of customers most likely to use it (typically large organizations running complex processes, with a high number of dependencies, scheduling rules, and execution hosts) and other details.

Six strengths of Control-M

The research identified the following six areas that offer the most compelling benefits to customers. These critical capabilities help customers meet the demands of digital business while reducing costs.

1. Centralized view across the enterprise – See all jobs running, regardless of what platform.“The ability to see everything running on all Control-M is awesome and the ability to trigger jobs on other platforms provides even more flexibility.” Analyst, HR Resources Company
2. User-friendly interface – Reduce training requirements and drill down easily.
   “The scheduler interface is extremely user friendly, even for users that are not familiar with other job scheduling tools.” BI Developer, Food Production Company
3. Handling scheduled job dependencies across platforms
   “The ability to schedule jobs running on different platforms and to create dependencies between those jobs … is something that was not easily done with separate independent scheduling systems.” Senior Software Engineer, Banking Company
4. Flexibility for granular control over job scheduling
   “With a lot of self-service options like scheduling to run an on-demand job, etc., it is a great tool to get the work done without much dependency from other teams.” Systems Analyst, IT and Services Company
5. Platform stability – A mature, stable and reliable product. “Control-M is stable, reliable, able to handle extremely complex scenarios, and the customer support is really fantastic.” Infrastructure Engineer, Insurance Company
6. Add-on solutions for cross-platform scheduling
   “Control-M File Transfer is a very useful add-on, allowing for a wide variety of file transfers to be configured ‘out of the box’ and then used as part of the standard batch window.” Senior Systems Analyst, Banking Company

If you’ve ever watched the classic comedy-drama sports movie Jerry Maguire, you’re familiar with the phrase, “Show me the money.” And that’s exactly what Forrester does in a new study that provides an in-depth look at the business benefits and total economic impact (TEI) of Control-M software from BMC. The commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of BMC describes how large financial organizations can increase reliability and productivity of digital business services while saving an average of more than $6 million over a three-year period with Control-M.

The study is based on interviews Forrester conducted with four financial services organizations about their experiences before and after using Control-M software. The metrics reflect savings for a composite organization based on characteristics of the companies in the report. Control-M enabled the organization to reduce batch service labor and operational costs, improve workload error remediation productivity, develop process efficiencies, meet service levels, and more. These capabilities are critical as companies strive to meet the demands of digital business growth.

In this study, you’ll get details on business benefits along with a TEI framework to help identify the types of savings that could apply to your enterprise. Here are a few highlights:

Before Control-M:

The organizations had multiple disparate job scheduling approaches with limited transparency into the dependencies across their batch environments. They missed SLAs and struggled with scaling batch processing to meet growth requirements.

After Control-M:

Became more efficient, grew batch processing, and improved SLA’s without increasing headcount. In fact, one organization increased its batch services environment from 1.2 million executions per month to 2.2 million without increasing headcount.

The study showed how the composite organization could expect to see the following results over three years:

• Improve workload error remediation, resulting in savings of more than $3.6 million
• Reduce batch service labor and operational costs by nearly $1.15 million
• Gain more than $1.2 million in additional productivity savings related to work process efficiencies, regulatory reporting, and batch service support tickets

Customer Comments:

“We’re not just meeting the demands of what the organization has today — we’re actually going out and making ourselves better and we’re able to do that with the staff that we have.  So I think that if we didn’t have BMC, we wouldn’t have been allowed to create the new group that we’ve created.”

“…We’ve seen probably a good 30% decrease in support requests, if not more. In addition, business users have better visibility into their applications and how they impact downstream processing.”

The proverbial phrase “patience is a virtue” clearly doesn’t apply to today’s digital consumer. When you go online to make a purchase, stream a video, check a balance, look at investments – you can fill in the blank here – there’s no time to wait. There is an ever increasing expectation of immediate service, answers and support. For a company, making sure that you can meet these expectations in a constantly changing and competitive online environment is always top of mind.

There are many aspects that come into play in order to ensure the best customer experience. Using automation to speed delivery and reduce human error isn’t a new concept, but one that has continued to garner the spotlight for some years now.

Take workload automation (WLA) – automating batch processes is essential for digital business to improve agility and make it easier for companies to innovate. Workload automation solutions come in many sizes and shapes, so it pays to take a critical look at the WLA solutions that can play to your advantage across the enterprise. Homegrown solutions or the multi-scheduler approach can make it difficult to create, maintain, and synchronize batch processing tasks. In addition, this approach often requires too much manual effort to manage, introducing unnecessary risk and performance problems which could result in less than satisfactory customer experiences.

In a new report, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) describes the advantages of having a unified, cost-effective, enterprise-class WLA solution to manage digital business demands now and in the future.

ESG evaluated Control-M, a workload automation solution from BMC, highlighting nine key capabilities driving this best-in-class solution. According to ESG, the Control-M solution easily and effectively handles the most complex environments while supporting digital business excellence and growth.

1. A single solution managing all batch activities. Most large enterprises have a heterogeneous mix of servers, operating systems, and applications. To simplify application integration, usage, and management they need a single view into their workload activities. The Control-M user interface adapts to provide a consistent way to automate scheduled workloads and view job flows anywhere, any time, and on any device.
2. Efficient management of the definition, control, and execution of workflows. Application developers can create and deliver workflows that adhere to standards, accelerating development while improving quality and control.
3. Integration across a wide variety of environments. Control-M supports multiple operating systems, databases, and applications with pre-built templates, nearly any database and any application, (including homegrown) leveraging Control-M Application Integrator.
4. Advanced workload automation capabilities. Digital business success requires advanced capabilities, like predictive analytics that can identify and address conditions that could slow down service delivery.
5. Lower TCO and cost of business operations. By automating critical IT processes with Control-M, organizations can manage business services more cost effectively while mitigating risk.
6. Optimized, intelligent use of server capacity across all environments. Run workloads where they’ll be most effective.
7. Integrated managed file transfer. Define, schedule and manage file transfer workflows alongside other workload tasks.
8. Drive DevOps with Jobs-as-Code. The latest in “shift-left,” developers can easily improve application delivery speed and quality while reducing rework by integrating jobs as part of application code development.
9. Ease of migration from existing tools. Eliminate the challenges of maintaining multiple scripts and synchronizing schedulers. Simplify the conversion process with the Control-M conversion tool.

“Enterprises that approach WLA through anything less than an enterprise solution are accepting unnecessary inefficiency and risk,” according to the ESG report. It’s worth keeping in mind that your business is only as valuable as your ability to drive a customer experience that brings in new business and keeps them coming back again and again.  As your digital business continues to expand, your workload automation solution will need to grow along with it. Learn more in this report by ESG.