By Dick Stark

On Wednesday, BMC held a Control-M training session for the RightStar Federal team. The objective was to educate us about Workload Automation (WLA) and BMC’s Control-M, and to demonstrate the value that WLA offers customers. 

Although RightStar has focused primarily on IT Service Management, BMC offers solutions in other areas such as IT Operations (TrueSight), IT Automation (BBSA), and WLA (Control-M). Control-M has been around since the 90’s, and for most of that time has occupied the uppermost right-hand Gardner Magic Quadrant for WLA.

With recent security breaches at the IRS and now the Office of Personnel Management, computer and network security solutions are getting all of the attention.  WLA, however, is a necessary component of most large IT organizations, especially those with significant batch processing requirements. Batch jobs have been around since the early mainframe computer days.  (My first computer job was in 1978 for a computer billing company that ran batch billing jobs for hospitals.) Today, WLA provides a single point of control for definition and monitoring of background executions in a distributed network of computers across different operating system platforms and business application environments.

Control-M is not as sexy as other BMC solutions such as Remedy with Smart IT, or CLM, but the product sells very well to large accounts.  RightStar has had three Control-M customers, the largest being a DOD account, where we are looking at nearly a $2M expansion. What sets Control-M apart from the rest of competition?

Forecasting – Control-M offers predictive analysis so that job schedulers can forecast schedules and workload to prevent traffic jams.

No more scripting – The Control-M user interface replaces scripting. This eliminates the majority of non-standard code, reducing development time and effort.

Change Management – Control-M enforces site standards and change control to deliver applications faster and improve the quality of service.

Big Data, Hadoop, and Informatica – Over 90% of the workload that supports big data applications such as Hadoop and Informatica runs in batch mode, and Control-M is uniquely positioned to support these applications.

ERP applications – Similarly, ERP programs such as SAP require significant batch processing and Control-M provides an excellent fit for large, heterogeneous, IT environments.

Self-service capabilities, policy-driven workload management, predictive functionality, business impact analysis, and support for mobile devices and automation platforms are some of the key areas that differentiate Control-M from the rest of the competition. By offering a single pane of glass and a rapid ROI, Control-M can make a difference for organizations with large batch processing needs.