CA Asset Portfolio Management Reviews

We are using CA Asset Portfolio Management for lifecycle asset management for the cloud sets and integrating the solution into our CMDB.

The most valuable feature of CA Asset Portfolio Management is the full integration with our Service Desk. It allows us to work both sides of life cycle management.

CA Asset Portfolio Management can improve the uploading of batch information. I have to upload large amounts of information and it can take a long time to finish. There are some other solutions that are better, such as Micro Focus.

We have approximately 10,000 PCs that we are busy processing and we have to upload information to them but when we use this solution it is complex. When we use Micro Focus it is better.

I have been using CA Asset Portfolio Management for approximately two years.

CA Asset Portfolio Management is completely stable.

I rate the stability of CA Asset Portfolio Management a five out of five.

We build the site according to the node that we will have and CA Asset Portfolio Management will be scalable to add more capacity. We use a Microsoft SQL database at the back end, which allows for scalability.

We have approximately 1,000 servers and 20,000 workstations using this solution.

I rate the scalability of the solution a four out of five.

I have not used the support from CA Asset Portfolio Management.

I have previously used Micro Focus and it was better at uploading information quickly.

The initial setup of CA Asset Portfolio Management is mostly simple. There is some complexity with importing, but we have overcome this challenge.

We had to initially migrate some of our information onto the platform and then we enabled integration with ECC to gather the information. The full deployment took approximately three months.

We had some assistance with the implementation from the vendor in South Africa.

I would recommend this solution to others. However, it can depend on many factors, such as if they are using CA Service Desk and what their integration needs are.

I rate CA Asset Portfolio Management a nine out of ten.

Because I'm coming from a university, we're really decentralized, and everybody has their own silo where they put their information. Using CA Asset Management is really helpful because it allows one silo, itself, for all this information, where everybody can log in and take a look at it and add resources or whatever configuration items. And then they can also connect it to other tools as well.

My organization now understands what type of products they have: warranties, how long the warranties last, depreciation. We never really knew what our depreciation values were, so it was really nice to have that on hand as well. It gives us a better view of our hardware, which is really beneficial.

I'd like to see more mobile. I'd like to have it actually manage mobile devices. It really doesn't, and I'd like to have a mobile application just for asset management. If somebody wants to take a look at, say, a contact record, and see all their assets, it would make it a little bit easier.

It's been around for years and we haven't had any problems with it. It's been pretty stable.

The licensing model is "meh," but technology-wise, it will meet our needs.

Any time I've had issues with it, I call technical support, or open a ticket. They've been really responsive. They've gotten a lot better since four or five years ago. So, dramatic difference.

I would say the last version, when we actually set it up, was pretty complex. When we upgraded these last few months, it was pretty straightforward. Single installer, really easy to do. If they errored out, it would tell you what the error was. It was pretty easy this time.

In terms of criteria when selecting a vendor, I would say it's the reputation, but it's also about the technology. I don't want to go to a some company that says, "Yeah, we've been here for a hundred years," but their technology is stale. We'd like to stay on the cutting edge and get really nice technology, and from a good company.

I would rate it a seven out of 10. Does it have its flaws? Yes. The UI, even though they upgraded the UI, it's still kind of dated, it's a little bit convoluted to use. It's not like something that you can sit down and automatically understand how to use it. But the ability in it is really nice. It's a really powerful tool, and once you learn how to use it, it's really something that's worth learning how to use.

We use two solutions. Client Automation for hardware and software discovery. And CA SAM for compliance. Between, we have a CA Interface and the difficulty is this interface is not integrated in the product.

Reduces software cost. Reduces the risk of software audits.

Stronger rebooting components and the ability to develop our own software metrics.

No problem.

No problem. I upgrade this product one or two times per year.

No problem for the first product, Client Automation. For the second product, CA SAM, it's not a CA product. The vendor is Aspera and CA is the distributor, so support is difficult. It's more difficult to get a good response.

When selecting a vendor, what's most important are the specifications, the functionality.

I give it a seven out of 10 because the interface between the two products is not a good solution. But I would recommend the product.

We track software purchases against what's actually installed in our environments to make sure that we're in compliance.

It preforms very well.

It's the ability to make sure that the software that you have installed in your environment is software that you're licensed to have installed. 

Also, the software you have, you can monitor for end of life. If you have software that is end of life, then you can have it uninstalled and buy the new software, so you can make sure that you're not running into vulnerabilities with unsupported software in your environment.

You could also look for software that is no longer being used and you can re-deploy the software, so then you save from a purchasing standpoint because you don't have to buy the software again.

Previously, we had a process that was manual and it was impossible to do manually. We tried and it did not work. With the CA Asset Management tool, we have the ability to very quickly find our software compliance. Of course that is after you get the program set up. So now, as an ongoing process, we know exactly where we stand with software and the opportunities that we have in our environment.

It's the ability to take software that's installed in our entire environment, and normalize the data, and then compare the information to what's in our catalog or software titles that we have built, based on how we purchase the software. In addition, the ability to make sure that we are in compliance. If you're out of compliance, it can cost millions of dollars in a software audit.

Keeping the catalog updated and having more titles in the catalog is helpful, because the more items that are in the catalog, your process goes faster because you don't have to manually build all the entitlements.

CA does a really good job with keeping up with the changes that the vendor makes, and their software entitlements. 

So it is important to make sure that we also keep our software upgraded, because they're continually making changes to the program, and they've actually also made it really easy to upgrade. It's a process that takes anywhere from 40 to 60 hours for the upgrades, and we can make sure that we keep our environment up to date along with all the changes that they're making, so that they stay valid with the current industry.

We have the ability to track all of our software. If it's software that can be discovered, of course if it's in the catalog, it does an automatic reconcilement. If it's not in the catalog then we can build the SKUs. We can also make changes, even if it's in the catalog; maybe it's something that we purchase differently. We can update that entitlement to make sure that it's matching what's in our environment. If it's software that cannot be discovered, then we can manually enter the software with our licenses. So it can encompass our entire environment.

And it seems, like with the other software, they're staying up to date as vendors make changes to how they want to manage the software. CA is usually really quick about getting those updates in the system.

They are helpful. And if there are issues that cannot be resolved with like first-level support, then we always have people at CA that we can engage. They will make sure that the problem gets fixed, or we get our questions answered. They can be questions about anything, or any problem that we have, and they make sure that it gets resolved.

We tried to manage the software with a manual process. It's just too time consuming, and it's very difficult because software is complex. This is especially true if you bundle software, or because of the different ways that the manufacturer will supply the software. If you try to do that manually it takes a lot of time and after you spend all the time, as soon as you're finished, you actually have to start over because your software, your environment, is continually changing. So that makes it difficult if you're trying to manually keep up with the software. 

Having the tool, you build the items one time and then you have your discovery that's coming in and the system will let you know whether or not you're out of compliance. And as you introduce new software into your environment, you can make sure that you get it built in the system correctly and it's a one-time, instead of continually over and over and over, every time you want to look at the title.

The tool itself, just installing the tool is pretty simple. The part that's more complex is the discovery side, how you're discovering the data that you pull in to the system. Also all your entitlements, and the things that you purchased, it's gathering all that data and pulling it into the system. It's more around the processes that are complex, and not the actual software itself.

We looked at the HPE tool, and the CA tool whenever we were selecting a product.

We actually chose CA based on previous experience with using their software, and the team that supported that other software. We like how they come together and support their products.

What's most important when selecting a vendor is making sure that you find someone who will be a partner, and not just a vendor. You want to know that they are there after the sale, and that they want to make sure that you're successful, and not just selling the software. 

Also, their roadmap. What are they looking at? How engaged are they in the product? You don't want to buy something today that's going to be end of life five years from now, because anytime you buy software, it's an investment. You have the software expense, and then you also have the Professional Services hours to have the software installed, so you want software that's going to be around for a long time.

Don't wait. Don't put it off, because software is growing. The amount of software that's used in companies is growing, the complexity of software compliance is growing, the number of software audits is picking up. The longer that you wait, the more software you're going to have in your environment, the more that you're purchasing, the more stuff you're going to have to track down. Just go ahead and start the process and start working on making it better.

ITSM management, tracking and reporting on ITSS. Understanding the ownership of IT assets. 

So far the performance has been great.

It enables us to make better business and financial decisions.

The capability of knowing where an asset is at any point during its lifecycle: How old it is, who it belongs to, and where it's at within that lifecycle.

• I would like to see more control over audit trail features, where you can turn on and off fields. 
• More reporting capabilities.
• And I'd like to see end-of-life information on software products.
• Make it cheaper.

Stability is good. No issues.

A lot of scalability. No problem with that.

I've used tech support. It's okay. As long as I can get local technical support, I'm good, but if I go to sustaining engineers, sometimes it takes a little longer than I would like.

It's hard to answer this because it has been so long, but it was basically the need to track and report assets in a more formal way, to get away from Access databases, spreadsheets, and things like that. 

Over the past 17 years that I've been using it, it has just been upgrades. The only complaints have been around major releases and we had CA assistance with those, and it helped.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• support
• service
• stability.

In terms of advice to colleagues who are looking at similar solutions, I would remind them that a tool is only about 20% of the asset management solution. There is no magic bullet, and it still takes a lot of processes and policies and standards to manage asset management.

Compliance.

It's a good product.

Gives better control over software and licenses and reduces risk from a software audit.

Very easy to use.

It's easy to integrate with our system information.

A stronger reporting component, and the ability to develop metric software. It also needs more integration with CA Client Automation.

It's stable. It's robust.

We've been able to make many changes needed.

Technical support is good. We'd rather not have to contact them, but they get back to us quickly.

Easy.

IBM products. We chose CA because IBM was too difficult to use and install. Also, the software catalog was very poor at IBM. CA was more solid.

I would recommend CA IT Asset Manager.

Our primary use case for it is to mitigate risk in relation to licensing management.

In our initial stages using it, we have already found some out-of-compliance situations that we're mitigating.

Being able to determine the licensing position for existing vendors and future vendors. Also, visibility into our environment, being able to match up our entitlements with deployment data, and then being able to produce compliance reports on those items, providing value to business users.

It introduces automation, which alleviates a lot of our manual processes, and provides a central repository for our data.

We're new enough to it that we haven't really gotten to the stage where we're using it day to day. We're still putting data into it. We're not really managing our licensing, day to day, in the tool right now. We're just getting off the ground.

It's still early in the game, but at this point we haven't had any issues with anything.

Our experience with tech support has been that they're very quick, very responsive. I think we're cheating a little bit because we have a consulting firm that's partnered with CA that has been our "mouthpiece" to the support desk. I think we're getting a lot of responses back quicker than maybe we would in a normal implementation, but we've been very impressed with their response time.

We had a major vendor come to us one day, and they brought an auditing firm with them because they were suspicious that we were out of compliance with our licensing. So, after legal mitigation, etc., etc. - although we came out on top - we saw that it was time for us to take a look. We were managing licensing by spreadsheet. So, it was time to move forward and get serious and get something out there that would help us manage our licensing positions going forward.

It was much more complex than we were anticipating. But they warn you that it is not a plug and play type tool. It's very environment specific. Depending on your environment, there are a lot of configuration changes that have to be made; a lot of tweaking and twisting.

We hit some hiccups there, but a lot of those hiccups were due to some of the technical resources on our side, more so than what the tool's limits were. Definitely a complex and very resource-involved setup.

I think at least 70% of that was on our side. There were a lot of things that we had to prepare for that we weren't thinking about with this installation. I think from a CA standpoint, the software was good. But us preparing for that, we had a lot more work to do.

We brought in a couple different vendors to do demos. We went to both vendors and provided a list of our requirements as an organization, what some of our struggles were. We gave questions to CA and the other vendors we were looking at. Then, based on those responses, we were able to say which tool fit our needs the best.

Once we narrowed it down to the top two, then Deloitte helped us do a scorecard.

We had a multitude of needs and wants. Needs first, then wants. Our needs were to effectively manage licensing; to be able to re-harvest software that's out there that's just sitting around. Also, the ability to automate the process of software assets.

I think a big thing we were looking for was the software catalog. The catalog within the CA tool seems to be one of the better ones in the industry, so that was a big selling point: how many titles it included, and the ability to get new titles added, and those are things that we've already experienced in our short time using it. There is some software that, maybe, we have some one-offs of, and we've been able to go to CA and say, "We need you to add this to the catalog." That's where a lot of our service desk support stuff has come from, adding new titles to the catalog.

We were all over the place with licensing, from the business user side, and information services. So, to provide us a single source of information was a big deal as well. We made this list, put it together, and then we evaluated the top two that we'd chosen. And, of the top two, CA scored, something like 93 or 94%, being able to provide everything that we wanted; everything we needed and wanted.

It's hard to really give a fair rating. I don't want to say it's a 10, because I don't think we've really had the usage. But, from an implementation standpoint, and what we've seen so far of what it can do, I'd say we're extremely satisfied.

I would give it an "early" eight out of 10. Again, we've only had the product for four or five months. And it's actually been installed for only two months.

In terms of advice to someone who is considering a similar solution, I would tell them to create their scorecard, like we did, and do that same evaluation.

Do you research and evaluate what you need. Depending on the size of your organization and the size of your environment, you can base what your needs and wants, and the highlights of what you're looking to do, off of that. 

Go through and do the upfront research to be able to provide CA the questions that say, "These are our struggles, these are our pain points." Identifying those and then say, "How can you meet those?" Then they can say, "Okay, we have this feature that does this or this feature that does that, that would meet that need, that would close that gap that you've identified." So, I think it's just knowing what you're looking for, identifying the gaps and struggles that you have, and then picking based off that.

Figure out what your goals and objectives are for the program. You have that down pat, then you know what you're looking for.

The most valuable feature is the ability to know where everything in our organization is: "Hey, we're looking for this computer with this serial number." Okay, well, we can pull it up: “It's at this location. This person just logged on with it." It allows us to know where our things are. That's one of the biggest issues in an organization of our size - who's using what, where is it at, and what building, because we have three hospitals, three office parks, and hundreds of small practices; so, to know where things are. Things get moved around; nurses go from point A to point B. We need to know where these devices are. It helps a great deal with that.

It helps whenever we get audited; we know where things are. We deal with HIPAA a lot, so we need to know if we can't find a device, or it hasn't been turned on in a while; location of things; know the life cycle of things; when things need to be reset. Those are our biggest three things that from our standpoint are really, really good, which we need to know about.

I wish I had a great answer. I've made it work perfect for me. It integrates well with all the other CA products, so that's a really good one. So, we don't need that one.

When you're building it, maybe some type of software overlay that gives you best cases for what you're trying to do. Maybe something like, "Hey, this is what we're using it for.” Maybe there's someone who's done this before: “Hey, maybe you should think about this." That would help.

Because, when I use it, I build it to our specifications, but I want to say, "OK, what are the other users using? What are they doing? How are they making it work for them?" That would be something that would be really good.

I have not encountered any stability issues from my side. There are three different programs that actually use the same databases. If they go down or there's an issue there, we go down because we use the same database as well. For the most part, from ITAM, no.

Scaling it has been pretty straightforward, from a small number of things to the 25,000 devices that we have in there now. It hasn’t been an issue at all; no scalability issues at all.

Initially, we would have issues with technical support, but recently, the six months, I found a person who is amazing as far as resolution. If I have an issue, he always takes the ticket. He'll email or call me within 20 or 30 minutes. Generally, by the next day, we have a resolution. If we don't, we're still working on it. He's been amazing.

I do the upgrades. Initially, each upgrade, the process for it was a little different. Lately, they've been a little more streamlined. You do the same process for each upgrade, which is a great help. Having to go, this upgrade was going to be different from this one, going to be different from that one, that was a bit of a headache. It was hard to make sure you had all the things. Now, it's streamlined to the point where it's all the same process. You just grab this file, do this one thing or do these three things, and it works.

Pricing is fairly reasonable. It's not outside what I call the bell curve. It's not too expensive; it's not the least expensive. I think you get what you pay for. It's well within the realm of, "Okay, this is a product that's worth the cost."

I wasn't involved in the decision to go with it. After we bought the product as an organization, they brought me in and I was handed it.

Learn all the things that it can do before you start doing anything. I ran into something where I was trying to get the product how to do a certain thing, and I hadn't fully read all of the documentation with it. There was an easier way to do it. It's the software management part of it; we had been playing with it. What I was doing is making the software an asset inside of the system, where they have SAM, which actually takes care of all of that for you, so you don't have to do it. I wish I had known that before I started playing with it. But that's it.

The most valuable features are asset assignment and reconciliation.

This product has added value to our organization by our increased ability to track assets, status, and lifecycle as well as being able to monitor assets when they are active.

The Gold Brick assignment access is only performed though the catalog. I would like to see this as a standalone feature in “unassign”.

We have used this product for seven years.

Accessing from roles can be effected adversely if searches are created and incorrectly assigned to roles.

CA Support has really improved in the last few years. They have a great knowledge base and response rate .

The new CA Service Management installation is straightforward. We were able to install all apps with the same installation media. The system does the integration between the apps during the installation.

You might find a less expensive cloud version, but you are charged for all of the add-ons and customization. CA provides this for free.

We evaluated HP and ServiceNow before selecting this product.

I would suggest that other companies use an inventory control tool and implement a process to document the correct asset/configuration item (CI) for your company.

We use it to ensure compliance and for licensing. We're able to reconcile between inventory and license contracts.

It allows us to know what we need, what we have, and what to deploy. It helps us with software auditing. All of this helps our bottom line.

The main new feature I'd like to see would be to have a single catalogue rather than one each for ITCM and SAM. CA SAM is only for compliance, but to realize the compliance we need to have an inventory product. So in the future it would be nice to have one product that does inventory and compliance – an integrated solution. With such a new functionality, we can complete many tasks, and one product reduces the complexity.

One additional improvement – the reporting aspect in SAM is poor; we need different reporting for different purposes – compliance reporting for executive management and the product teams. It’s not the same information for both teams.

We need a better connection between ITCM and SAM; the products need to evolve together. It’s high-maintenance.

It’s possible to construct a different kind of infrastructure for different business units. It’s very scalable.

We have a good CA team with us. The main problem we have is the connection between the ITCM and SAM. They’re very helpful with the management of this complex interface. The CA team is very capable.

We realized a need for compliance, so we created this activity in our company.

It is difficult – it has a high impact to the organization. We had to touch a lot of teams. This kind of implementation needs to be sponsored in the hierarchy because it’s company-wide. It’s resource intensive and time consuming.

We looked for a product with good price and functionality. When we chose the CA product, it was the best product for all the tasks we had to do. We had to do a POC between different kinds of products. We challenged them. We looked at IBM TADD. CA SAM was the better product to cover all functionalities and to cover software asset management, and it was cheaper.

For CA SAM, it’s the best in class. At this time we don’t have enough reporting capability in the product.

It’s complex to implement a software asset management solution. It’s not as simple as marketing tells you. They need to know what they have installed, and what licenses they’ve bought. You must know where to find the information necessary to realize the compliance. You must know software installation and licensing in your organization – it’s very important. It’s also important to know what you must report to management and product teams.