BMC Control-M

Control-M is a workload automation (traditionally called 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 used to help automate various functions in the enterprise including traditional JCL, batch files, shell scripts as well as routine functions such as invoking database stored procedures, invoking and using web services and handling file transfers inside and outside the organization.

Control-M has the traditional ability to schedule workloads on a daily, weekly, monthly, and so forth interval, but it can also be used to handle dynamic and complex situations where you do not know when, or if, a workload will need to be executed. It does this through trigger mechanisms such as its ability to watch for files, be called by third party applications through an API or be invoked on demand through Java or Web Services.

Control-M can be integrated with applications such as SAP and Oracle's PeopleSoft, to act as a scheduling organizer in these platforms and bring traditionally isolated workloads into the enterprise big picture.

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.

Agentless Job Scheduling

Beginning with BMC 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, BMC 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 BMC Control-M when only a handful of jobs run on it.

Industry Recognition

The Gartner research group placed BMC Control-M in the leadership quadrant of its Magic Quadrant for Job Scheduling in 2006 and moved it further into the leadership quadrant in their 2009 report.

In 2010 EMA Radar Report on Workload Automation Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) name BMC Control-M as the "Value Leader" with the "Best Overall ITSM Integration" and the "Best Automation Resolution."

External links

• BMC Control-M webpage