CONTROL-M

CONTROL-M is batch scheduling software produced by BMC Software, originally written for mainframes but also available for distributed computing platforms including Unix, Windows, Linux and OpenVMS environments.

BMC Software claims that CONTROL-M is the most widely used scheduling software in large enterprises. It has many features which help maintain an organized job flow environment. It is mostly used in relation to finance and accounting where it could perform daily, monthly, yearly tasks. Tasks in this sense could be anything, for example, calculating the month revenue and expenditure ok

CONTROL-M can be integrated with applications such as SAP and Oracle's PeopleSoft, to act as a scheduling organizer in these platforms.

With the addition of BMC Batch Discovery in 2007, CONTROL-M is now positioned to integrate directly into the Remedy Configuration Management Database (CMDB). This integration helps identify the relationships between batch processes and other business and IT infrastructure components.

Additional Features

CONTROL-M can be integrated into other systems, languages and utilities to provide a common platform by which the end user can access and use the features of the various systems or tools. In addition it has several optional features that can be added on to the base product to give extended functionality to those users who need it. There is also an API available so that end users can access the scheduling engine directly.

Some of the add-on components include:

* BMC Batch Discovery
* BMC Batch Impact Manager
* CONTROL-M Business Process Integration Suite- Enables execution of EJB's, Messaging (JBOSS, TIBCO, WebLogic, WebSphere and other J2EE compliant message queues and topics) and Web Services within the scheduling suite
* CONTROL-M Control Module for Advanced File Transfer- Enables multiple file transfers using ftp and sftp protocols- Enables the use of SSH key pairs
* CONTROL-M/Control Module for PeopleSoft
* CONTROL-M/Oracle E-Business Suite
* CONTROL-M/Control Module for SAP
* CONTROL-M Forecast- Enables predictive scheduling forecasts
* CONTROL-M e/Trigger

Agentless Job Scheduling

Beginning with CONTROL-M v6.3.01 for Distributed Systems, you can now submit jobs to be executed on remote platforms agentlessly. By utilizing industry standard communication and connection protocols such as SSH and WMI, CONTROL-M will submit the jobs for execution without the need to install an agent on every machine where jobs might run. This greatly reduces the administrative overhead while at the same time allows for zero-day platform availability. No longer do users have to wait for a certified agent to become available for a platform; by using agentless job scheduling virtually all platforms are supported out of the box. It also simplifies the justification for having a platform available under CONTROL-M when only a handful of jobs run on it.

Industry Recognition

The Gartner research group has placed CONTROL-M in the leadership quadrant of its Magic Quadrant for Job Scheduling..(Note from Gartner 2006 Magic Quadrant: Although BMC has addressed the issues of ease-of-use the past two years, the product is still perceived as non-intuitive by many of its customers)

User Groups and Community

CONTROL-M has a large and active user community. This stems in part from the fact that the product itself has been around since the early 1980s. In addition to localized user groups that may meet periodically there are a number of online resources to obtain and share information about the product.

* [http://www.control-musage.com Control-M User community on Control-MUsage]
* [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Control-X Control-X User Group on Yahoo Groups]
* [http://developer.bmc.com/communities/community/resources/operations_management/control-m BMC Developer Connection]

External links

* [http://www.bmc.com/products/products_services_detail/0,,0_0_0_2,00.html BMC webpage]