BMC Control-M vs. ActiveBatch by Redwood

Comparing Control-M with ActiveBatch Workload Automation Software

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Overview

Control-M by BMC Software and ActiveBatch Workload Automation by Redwood are both leading job orchestration and workload automation solutions to manage the various IT and business processes across the organization.

Both automation platforms uniquely offer drag-and-drop job scheduling and intuitive user interfaces to make building automated workflows easy for IT and business users. Accessible through on-premises devices, web interfaces, mobile applications and self-service portals, batch job execution can orchestrate across systems and applications (Windows, Linux, UNIX, IBM iSeries Mainframes and more) from a single platform. Users benefit from this end-to-end visibility and unified monitoring to ensure successful critical processes completion and IT operations, especially when strapped IT staff needs to manage and monitor across multiple business systems and applications with unique automation functionality.

Where ActiveBatch and Control-M differ and heavily impact your business is the out-of-the-box features available from each platform. ActiveBatch offers greater extensibility and intelligent automation capabilities unavailable through Control-M, using historical and predictive analytics to optimize and dynamically scale resources. With the largest library of atomated job steps, the ActiveBatch Job Steps Library provides your team hundreds of production-ready job steps to easily assemble into IT and business workflows — no custom scripting or advanced development skills required, freeing up IT and development resources to focus on innovation.

ActiveBatch offers a more extensive set of pre-built integrations and connectors for seamless integration with any third-party system, application and technology. Simplify the implementation and management of your complex workflows and reduce the need for any custom development or additional tools.

ActiveBatch and Control-M should be evaluated based on your unique needs, considering factors such as feature set, ease of use, scalability and integration capabilities.


 

Functional areas and software categories

ActiveBatch

RunMyJobs

Control-M

Job scheduling

Job Scheduling is the process of scheduling, triggering, and running automated workloads. Modern job schedulers have advanced date/time, fiscal calendar, and interval-based options for ultimate flexibility.

Yes

Yes

Yes, but some configurations charge per job template created.

Workflow mapping and low-code orchestration

Workflow Mapping helps teams route end-to-end IT processes and workflows from one point to another based on conditional logic, business rules, or other constraints. Workflow mapping tools can feature visualization displays that allow users to visualize dependencies between workflow components.

Orchestration tools allow diverse systems and applications to communicate cross-platform and be collectively managed from a single console.

Yes

Yes

Yes*

*Orchestrate IT Processes Using Separately Licensed Product: BMC TrueSight Orchestration

Event-driven automation

Just-in-time job scheduling method triggers workflows based on a particular event such as a database modification, file creation, or email delivery. This method of batch-process scheduling reduces delays and bottlenecks by kicking off jobs as soon as, but not before, they are able to successfully run.

Yes

Yes

No *

*Database Triggers, File Triggers, and Auto-Remediation Triggers may require add-ins or plug-ins.

Runtime monitoring, conditional alerting and auto-remediation

Runtime Monitoring and Service Level Agreement (SLA) Management involves monitoring and tracking KPIs related to IT and business process service level performance. Conditional alerting is a required element of this monitoring, as operations teams need to know relevant, context-aware information as soon as possible in the event of a potential breach. Some tools provide automated remediation capabilities such as freeing disk space or provisioning additional resources to processes at risk of failure.

Yes

Yes

No

Requires Control-M
Batch Impact Manager Add-In

Managed file process automation

Secure and reliable file transfers are essential processes within every enterprise. Managed File Transfer Automation takes simple file transfers to the next level with parallel transfer capabilities, validation checks, templated transfer logic, centralized credential and connection info management, and more.

Yes

Yes

No

Requires Control-M
Managed File Transfer Add-In


IT DevOps

DevOps is an agile framework and strategy focused on collaboration between development and operational teams. IT DevOps tools assist IT developers with low-code development functions and provide operations with up-to-date information, documentation, and remediation functions. Plus, DevOps tools offer channels to collaborate across functional teams, securely promote objects between environments, and more. Our workload automation tools operate in hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, and on-premises IT environments.

Yes

Yes

No *

*e.g. Job logic cannot be easily expanded to add additional steps or actions; additional add-ins required for some features.

Change management

A facility that tracks all object revisions, multi-user audit trails, and approval processes for promoting objects between production and non-production environments. Many Change Management or source control tools also offer the ability to perform transformations to objects when migrating from one environment to another, plus simple and reliable methods for rolling back to prior versions of an object or all-inclusive changeset.

Yes

Yes

No *

Requires Control-M
Workload Change Manager Add-In

All-in-one operations monitoring

 

Operational teams need to know what’s happening at a moment’s notice. Real-time, all-in-one operations monitoring tool provides a single pane of glass to monitor workflows, activities, and machine loads. This end-to-end visibility allows operators to troubleshoot problems faster by making it easy to drill into the individual components that caused a setback.

Yes

Yes

No

Intelligent resource optimization and machine load management

Intelligent resource optimization is the process of using machine learning, predictive analytics, and dynamic scaling to automatically distribute workloads among disparate machine resources. Machine load management not only visualizes which machines have the highest loads, but is also used by the system to dynamically balance machine loads.

Yes

Yes

No

Database automation


Automated management of popular RDBMSs such as Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle Databases. Easily add, modify, or remove data within and between databases. Plus, perform low-code ETL processes between providers, monitor database contents for changes, and automatically trigger workloads based contextually on events.

Yes

Yes

No *

Requires Control-M
for Databases Plug-In

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Other ActiveBatch alternatives: CA Automic,  IBM Tivoli, Tidal Workload Automation (formerly Cisco Tidal), CA Autosys alternatives, JAMS Scheduler alternatives, Stonebranch alternatives

Coordinate and consolidate automation tools

According to Gartner, most organizations have 3-8 scheduling and automation tools in place. ActiveBatch offers a comprehensive feature set and a wide range of both pre-built connectors and an API adapter. This allows you to consolidate other limited tools - bringing all automation into one platform using the same modules and plug-ins. Low-code API accessibility makes consolidation and orchestration simple. As your IT team deprecates or adopts new tools and technologies over time, ActiveBatch is ready.

Learn more about our flexible and scalable model here.
 

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Frequently Asked Questions

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