Control-M
Accelerate delivery of digital services with application workflow orchestration.
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Partner Spotlight
BMC partner iONE Team was essential in helping Air Europa achieve automated DataOps orchestration. A highly experienced specialist in many BMC products, iONE provided hands-on support to Air Europa, including:
- Leading the installation of Control-M
- Migrating workflows into the new Control-M environment
- Planning, testing, and support to help Air Europa meet its goals of migrating systems to the cloud in waves and expanding business user self-service for analytics
Company Overview
Air Europa is a Spanish airline and a member of the SkyTeam alliance. The company's fleet of 53 aircraft is one of the most modern and sustainable in the industry, consisting of Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Boeing 737 aircraft that guarantee maximum efficiency and comfort for its passengers. Air Europa flies to more than 55 destinations around the world and has a strategic position in the Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas airport hub, connecting Europe and America. The company stands out for its firm commitment to sustainability and decarbonization and for its commitment to innovation through the implementation of the most advanced technologies for the digitalization and optimization of its processes.
The Challenge
Air Europa aims to leverage data as a competitive advantage to enhance customer experience. Airlines have traditionally competed on routes and fares. Achieving DataOps excellence is crucial for this vision. However, the rapid growth of data volume and sources, along with new data solutions, complicates data management. Air Europa is adopting a decentralized data mesh organization for data sharing.
"Our primary challenge is to derive actionable insights from data and regard it as a strategic asset. Achieving this requires several essential components," states José Carlos Bermejo Rubio, Director of Data & Analytics at Air Europa. "While technology is important, an efficient operating model, skilled people, and a focus on culture and training are even more essential."
The main challenge at the operations level was maintaining visibility and control across the expanding environment. Air Europa continually builds and integrates new data pipelines using both batch (Pentaho) and real-time (CDC, Kafka) ingestion tools, an Amazon S3 data lake, Snowflake and Google BigQuery platforms, a Denodo virtualization layer and data catalog, multiple BI solutions (Qlik, Power BI), and various data science solutions (Amazon SageMaker, Python, R). These workflows involve numerous steps and dependent processes that must be executed in a specific sequence. Errors or delays at any stage can impact flight and business operations globally.
"Initially, we lacked confidence in the processes involved in managing the data products, as there were numerous inefficiencies and no ability to monitor or adapt to new situations," says Bermejo. "Pipelines have become so complex that it is not feasible to work with different schedulers. A top-layer solution that can operate end-to-end is necessary."
The Solution
Air Europa’s strategy to become more data-driven included implementing self-service analytics for business teams across the company to develop their own data, analysis, and reporting. To support this strategic data mesh approach, Air Europa pursued a DataOps management solution that would cover the entire environment while allowing new data sources and system components to be added.
"Air Europa has invested in SaaS for most of our core systems and is now migrating remaining on-premises solutions to the cloud," says Bermejo. "Control-M SaaS was ideal as it manages migrations with minimal impact. It allows task modifications in dependency jobs to new locations or technologies, enabling wave-based migrations and making the automation process technology-independent."
Air Europa conducted a proof of concept to test Control-M’s adaptability to its complex DataOps workflows. The airline chose a highly sequenced process with 50 to 60 steps that took 6.5 hours to execute. Control-M’s ability to manage dependency jobs and execute them on multiple platforms enabled Air Europa to run some jobs in parallel instead of sequentially, reducing the processing time to three hours. Potential problems are flagged with alerts before they escalate and delay job execution.
"By optimizing the pipelines, we ensure that analytical solutions are available early in the morning, enabling faster decision-making and ultimately enhancing customer service," says Bermejo.
This success led Air Europa to adopt Control-M as the orchestration layer for data operations. It now manages application and data workflows across all business areas, including revenue management, maintenance, finance, and operations.
The Results
Control-M has been instrumental in helping Air Europa maximize the value of Snowflake, a key input source for its Denodo data virtualization platform. "Control-M SaaS facilitates the integration of Snowflake and other new data sources due to its comprehensive range of native connectors. Additionally, it supports hybrid workloads," says Bermejo. “Moreover, Control-M SaaS lets us decide whether to ingest the data in real-time or in micro-batches, depending on the use case, which is important to streamline the operation and costs associated with each project.”
Control-M helps decouple data growth from data management costs and enables decentralized development without dependencies on central teams. Business teams across Air Europa use self-service to access semantic data layers, build custom reports, and create application and data workflows. Bermejo’s team retains final authority over production and maintains overall control.
"We have achieved numerous successes in BI development," says Bermejo. "While centralized teams are straightforward to implement, scaling them presents challenges. Self-service mitigates this issue, and Control-M SaaS offers an optimal balance between development and governance. It allows us to seamlessly integrate quality management processes within the pipelines, thereby simplifying operations and reducing reliance on experts. We are highly satisfied with this model."
Overall, Control-M has enabled Air Europa to achieve more—enhancing visibility and control, ingesting more data sources, and empowering development.
"The primary benefit of Control-M SaaS is the improvement in service level agreements (SLAs) for analytical applications, as well as enhanced product quality. The data is not only error-free but also available when needed. This outcome is made possible by Control-M SaaS," says Bermejo. "BMC offers a great product that meets our requirements effectively, and its development roadmap aligns with our future vision for DataOps."
Managing all our current processes—including the dependencies between transactional systems, data movement pipelines, data warehouse operations, data lake management, cache management, BI application updates, and data quality rules—would be unfeasible without Control-M SaaS.
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