Your BMC Control-M Alternative is Here

1. Redwood RunMyJobs
2. ActiveBatch Workload Automation
3. Snowflake
4. AutoSys
5. Cleo Integration Cloud
6. Automatic Automation
7. IBM Workload Automation
8. Jams Scheduler
9. Activeeon
10. Stonebranch

BMC’s Control-M solution is based on an architecture that is not well-suited to the needs of a modern enterprise. It requires a large installation footprint that is burdensome and time-consuming to update when security patches are needed. It has high operational and administrative costs as a result. A solution that performs more automation through agentless APIs and offers updates that upgrade every element simultaneously in minutes is significantly easier to run. See how Redwood’s SaaS delivery allows IT organizations to focus on automation not administration.

Yes. For example, Redwood’s SaaS architecture eliminates overhead for infrastructure and ongoing maintenance of the workload automation platform. Redwood also includes all features with unlimited connections to applications, services and servers, without licensing additional plugins. With Redwood’s simple pricing model, you only pay for the jobs you run, gaining enterprise-grade flexibility and scalability to help you grow. Explore why Redwood’s unified cloud platform lowers ownership costs.

Workload Automation solutions are used to manage data and dependencies across disparate tools such as managed file transfers/ETL tools, business process applications, enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools, BI platforms, and more.

Workload Automation solutions often provide universal connectors and/or powerful REST API adapters that make it possible to integrate virtually any tool into an end-to-end process, without the need for custom scripts.

No. ETL stands for “extract, transform and load” and is a database or data manipulation tool set. Many automation tools, including BMC Control-M, can do some of the extraction from big data and databases as well as manipulation of that data. But ETL tools are very specialized in being able to pull from multiple sources, make it canonical and link and cross reference data between diverse sources.

Control-M is a BMC developed product that has been around for 20+ years. The “M” stands for mainframe and represents much of the legacy of the system behind it.

AutoSys workload automation was developed and acquired by CA Technologies, which is a Broadcom company. And while it has similar capabilities to BMC Control-M, it is an entirely different product and is newer in comparison from a legacy POV. While Broadcom has acquired multiple companies that provide automation tooling, AutoSys is the primary automation tool that they are known for.

BMC Control-M is a workload automation tool that simplifies on-premises or SaaS application and data workflow. One reason for looking at BMC Control-M alternatives is that the tool itself is old, which makes it much less flexible end-to-end.

Also, the infrastructure, meaning the software and the hardware needed to run the platform, is extensive. This means, for example, if an upgrade is needed, BMC Control-M often requires teams of people, multiple notifications and dedicated downtime.

It is also expensive and can be error prone. So, there is a chance that optimizations you have made do not actually work. With BMC Control-M being based on a schedule, all IT processes need to be pre-scheduled in a sequence, which means you end up with longer processes allowing for buffer time. And the system must be shut down every day to predict for the next day’s schedule, which means you are not really responding to things in real-time.

Lastly, scalability is challenging for BMC Control-M as you grow, despite cloud-based technology changing over the last 20 years. Change management has not evolved, unlike Redwood, so it feels like you are continuously “bolting on stuff to your car” instead of innovating past legacy capabilities. You can do it, but it will not work the way it optimally should as there are a lot of dependencies.

Yes, it is workload automation software.

IT administrators, IT operations and DevOps from enterprise companies use it.

You do not specifically automate BMC Control-M. You automate with BMC Control-M. In other words, it is the tool that does the automation with other IT systems, applications, servers, software, etc.

Control-M is the product name, where “M” stands for mainframe (the central data repository, or hub, in an organization’s data processing center), which stems from when the product was introduced many years ago. BMC or BMC Software is the company name.

BMC Control-M is the job scheduling tool, so it is the platform used to schedule the various forms of IT automation that you are trying to accomplish.

AWS Control-M currently does not exist, however, Control-M in AWS (Amazon Web Services) means that the tool can simplify complex applications, data and file transfer workflows, whether on-premises, on the AWS Cloud or across a hybrid cloud model. BMC is an AWS Partner Network (APN) Advanced Technology Partner with AWS Competencies in DevOps and Migration.

Yes. REST APIs are used to exchange information and update records across various applications, databases and web services.

The “M” stands for mainframe. So, just as you can automate an application on your desktop, you can automate a database or even things like web services (i.e., Salesforce). You can run an automation platform on most things that run on a mainframe via self-service

SAP (Systems Application and Products in Data Processing) is an ERP, or enterprise resource planning, solution that many large enterprises use. Those platforms work like the master database for the entire organization and typically have modules that help do things like payroll. Or, if you are a retailer, they will manage the planning, resourcing, scheduling and pricing with different capabilities and work as the “heart” of an organization. SAP is one of the two major ERP platforms, and the other one is Oracle.

You can start a job in three ways:

1. Triggered by a scheduled calendar time and date;
2. Ad hoc, which means run it right now or run it an hour from now as an example;
3. Event-based, so, if somebody orders a shoe online, the business process involves a signal being sent to the automation system that says update the database or something similar.

A job is an automated task or process, so the command would be "Update the database," "Give me a directory" or "Upload this file," or any number of things like that. It would be tasks like SLAs that need to be defined and scheduled to run in one of the three ways mentioned earlier. It would be highly dependent on the functionality being asked for.

1. Triggered by a scheduled calendar time and date;
2. Ad hoc, which means run it right now or run it an hour from now as an example;
3. Event-based, so, if somebody orders a shoe online, the business process involves a signal being sent to the automation system that says update the database or something similar.