Getting the Most Out of Your Workload Automation Solution

Why Migrating from Control-M to JAMS Should Be Top of Mind for Your Business

 

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As enterprise automation continues to increase in complexity, IT teams need to adopt a seamless, streamlined approach to job scheduling and workload automation that modernizes their overall infrastructure and scales effectively across their business. Using a flexible, straightforward workload automation solution can empower the business and take IT automation to the next level.

Many companies have realized the limitations of their current job scheduler—and are looking for a way to break free from the complexity of their solution. If you use Control-M from BMC, you may be feeling this strain, but are uncertain how and why you should consider making a switch. You may even wonder why Control-M is highly ranked among analysts, but you have struggled setting up the product or have experienced difficulty interacting with support.

Because Control-M and JAMS are two major players within the workload automation space, it’s important to examine how the solutions measure up to be confident in your decision moving forward. Below, we will examine Control-M and JAMS in regard to three key areas—ease of use, quality of support, and scalability. Learn where these products rank to customers and get practical insights you can use as you consider migrating solutions.

Solution Overviews: Examining Control-M and JAMS

Let’s start by taking a quick look at JAMS by Fortra and Control-M from BMC, and examine some of the high-level characteristics that define each solution

Control-M Overview

As a company, BMC has been around since 1980, and delivers software and services to more than 10,000 global customers. Control-M is the workload automation solution from BMC, and is recognized as a market leader and favorite by analysts for its intelligent enterprise workload automation functionality.

Control-M delivers self-service automation access via web and mobile interfaces, enables DevOps collaboration with Jobs-as-Code, and can deploy from mainframe to cloud and in hybrid environments. Control-M integrates, automates, and orchestrates workflows on-premise and in public and private clouds. With a single unified view, users can orchestrate workflows, including file transfers, applications, data sources and infrastructure with a library of plug-ins.

Based on user feedback and reviews, which will be examined in more depth below, Control-M is considered more difficult to set up and use than other job scheduling tools. The Control-M solution also has a longer implementation period, and BMC is not well-known for its customer support. In addition, Control-M requires users to submit their full job to run for the day at a specific time each day, and once the schedule is locked, they can’t submit any additional jobs during the day, meaning nothing can be done ad hoc.

While it provides a unified view to orchestrate and monitor application workloads and data pipelines, users report that Control-M lacks in its web interface and needs significant work to shore up testing and quality assurance as a number of bugs regularly make it into the product.

JAMS Overview

JAMS was originally developed by MVP Systems Software in 1985 and is now part of the Fortra family of solutions. JAMS is a highly recognized enterprise workload automation tool, offering centralized workload automation and job scheduling to run, monitor, and manage jobs and workflows that support critical business processes.

JAMS is the only workload automation solution engineered on the .NET framework, and empowers scheduling and monitoring to make business-critical centralized solution systems work together with minimal human intervention for greater scalability. The JAMS solution also enables multiple schedule instances (entries) of the same job definition for scheduling scalability. JAMS is purpose-built for highly-skilled DevOps teams with an intentional focus on code-driven automation.

The JAMS solution offers a centralized console to automate across all platforms, APIs, and scripting languages. It provides a future-proofed solution, showing a more detailed evolution of how jobs are built with the full detail of its history down to the code level. JAMS is well-known in the industry for aggressively updated solutions backed by a top-rated, responsive support and services team.

Comparing JAMS to Control-M: Three Critical Differences Between Solutions

As you compare JAMS to Control-M, you will notice there are three obvious differentiators between the products that may influence your decision to migrate—ease of use, quality of support, and scalability.

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Figure 1: Comparison Between Control-M and JAMS on G2

#1: Ease of Use

Ease of use and set up is an essential component of any workload automation solution. While Control-M is widely adopted in enterprise organizations today, many customers view it as more difficult to set up and use. For example, the solution cannot have multiple scheduling instances of the same job definition. This means that a job is either running or it is not. There is no separation of schedule and definitions. In addition, Control-M only performs a midnight batch schedule of all jobs for the day to offer its big picture view.

Oppositely, JAMS is considered by users easier to get started with and use overall. The JAMS solution makes it simple to define a stream of jobs that can be managed as a single entity and takes care of sequencing and scheduling individual jobs. In addition, the JAMS schedule is rolling, so it is easier to make changes to the job source or schedule without affecting the definition itself.

When assessing the two solutions, reviewers on G2 found JAMS easier to use, set up, and do business with overall. Reviewers also felt that JAMS meets the needs of their business better than Control-M.

“[JAMS is] the best job scheduler I have used—even better than Control-M—because it caters for the use of PowerShell, SSIS, JDE, SAP, etc.”
– Joey Baring, SAP Application Specialist, Viva Energy, Former Control-M User​

#2: Quality of Support 

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Figure 2: Workload Automation Grid on G2

Control-M offers a robust workload automation solution, but based on user feedback, it lacks in overall support. According to reviewers on G2, Control-M received only an 8.3 out of 10 for quality of support. Conversely, JAMS received higher marks with 9.7 out of 10 for its quality of customer support.

One example in outstanding support offered by JAMS is successful implementations. Experienced consultants work closely with customers to ensure each implementation balances flexibility with performance and security. With expert, highly-ranked implementation services, users count on JAMS for extra guidance and confidence. JAMS also invests in a continuous connection with customers, including ongoing product feedback and an active automation community, resulting in high rates of retention and incredible responsiveness to users.

In addition, JAMS offers 24/7 support. Whether it’s verifying connection prerequisites, supporting the initial set up of a development environment, or helping explain the client, JAMS ensures customers are truly supported with the expertise to back it up. While both solutions are listed in the Leaders Quadrant on G2, JAMS outperforms and outranks Control-M based on customer reviews and experiences.

“[The] key to our success was the JAMS support team, which provided us the best level of customer service I have ever experienced.”
– William S., Senior Systems Database Administrator, Enterprise Retail Organization

#3: Scalability  

Organizations that grow in complexity typically find that they need a solution that can expand with their automation approach without expanding the cost of their solution. The complexity of Control-M makes scaling it across the enterprise more difficult than other workload automation solutions and typically requires additional licenses to make the solution function as intended.

JAMS makes enterprise automation scalable and more cost-effective than Control-M by combining jobs into powerful sequences, and providing fair and flexible licensing to organizations seeking to maximize a return on their investment. JAMS fits the automation needs of a comprehensive array of business initiatives—providing a robust scheduling interface that is not a key component of Control-M.

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Figure 3: Comparison of Scalability Between Control-M and JAMS

The JAMS job scheduler also bridges the gap between scheduled tasks and the business users that depend on them. It empowers non-IT users to schedule and monitor their own jobs, easily captures change history of every job definition, and provides aggregate insights into the entire schedule of jobs to identify issues before they impact individual jobs. When it comes to overall scalability rankings, reviewers on G2 rank JAMS higher than Control-M, scoring 9.2 versus 8.7 for scalability overall.

Practical Takeaways As You Consider Migrating from Control-M to JAMS

With so many essential business operations at stake, it may seem overwhelming to move from one solution to another. Your experiences with Control-M likely make you think there is significant time, cost, and services required to move to a new solution. But migrating from Control-M to JAMS is easier, more common, and more predictable than you might think.

One of our primary goals is to minimize the impact on your business and effectively migrate your solution quickly and effortlessly. Using our conversion technologies, we can easily and accurately convert anywhere from a handful of jobs to thousands of jobs in JAMS. The JAMS conversion utility makes it easy for organizations to migrate batch processes and workflows out of their existing system. Our conversion utility can pull the core properties—schedule, exceptions, credentials, and job source—directly into the JAMS scheduler. This process is completed in days—even when countless batch jobs are involved.

If you are considering converting, you can be sure that our automation experts have the know-how and experience to streamline your Control-M migration. We offer comprehensive solutions and services to assist you—making your migration seamless. Best of all, your organization will have significantly reduced its job scheduling maintenance costs once you have converted to JAMS. We use a proven, repeatable methodology to convert scheduling processes into JAMS and help you itemize and prioritize the scheduling features you actually use.

Converting from Control-M does not require long consulting engagements—just a streamlined, straightforward plan to get you where you need to go. It’s time you gain confidence to move toward an easier to use, better supported, and more scalable solution in IT automation. Look to the highest rated workload automation solution offered by JAMS to take your enterprise automation to the next level.

 


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