BigFix Reviews

Near world PCI compliance and patch. We share the modules that we own for BigFix. So, those are the most important.

Our compliance levels - i.e. our compliance percentage has improved.

Simulators could be introduced.

None that I can think of. It does what we purchased it for. So, there isn't really anything that I can think of to add to it.

It is very stable. Streaming, of course, will do it.

I manage and control the relays and everything, so it's easy to put new relays up and configure them.

The technical support is usually pretty good. However, I had a ticket that stayed open for a couple of weeks which I didn't get a response to. Then when we got the response it wasn't really good. So they could have told me sooner than two weeks.

We did an audit. A PCI audit. We were looking for reliability. Also cost and support were considerations.

I did the initial setup, it's fairly straightforward.

I wasn't part of the evaluation of other products.

Definitely look at BigFix to consider it as a solution.

The most valuable feature for me is patching, because it's helped me to make sure I am always compliant. It's completely transparent. I can take care of what I need to do because BigFix is doing the patching by itself.

It is always taking me to the right level of security compliance.

Maybe they could introduce a preview of what is going to happen next, because generally what the project is doing is just asking you to execute some actions. I'd like to see a pop-up which says you are expected to do this or that and then I can decide if I have to do that today.

I never had problems, so I think it's highly stable.

I don't know about scalability because I'm not using it for a larger scale.

I haven't used the technical support.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

For me, the perception that I can see in the market about stability, quality and all those kinds of things is important when selecting a vendor. Cost is definitely also a criteria.

I would advise them to just do it.

The most valuable feature of this solution is its ease of use.

It improves the productivity of our organization, by helping the technical guys in our team.

We would like to see more of the extended reporting feature. It would help the technical teams, so as to drill down into the reports further.

The stability is good.

Scalability is also good.

This solution is giving us the results that it's meant for.

You should definitely take a look at it.

The most important criteria while selecting a vendor are the reliability, cost and technical support.

The most valuable features are the endpoint management capabilities of what you can actually control on your endpoints, as far as vulnerability assessment, compliance, and making sure that they are up to date on multiple platforms. One single-user-stop-shop is really awesome.

A benefit is being able to do it from a single place; whether it's Windows, Linux or Solaris, the user interaction doesn't change for the operators. We can teach one on Windows and one on Solaris to do the same thing. For them it's very simple, because it all looks the same. That why I dig it.

Scalability is big for us. To be able to scale faster and quicker, with more people coming in. Probably, more of a cloud initiative presence would be good, possibly as a SaaS, that would be amazing. Yeah, I think that's what we are looking for.

Stability is solid. Very, very solid. We rarely have issues and if there are, it was usually due to old architecture issues, but we've taken care of that and since then, we really haven't had any.

Scalability could be better. I know they're improving it. They are talking about it. They preached about it a lot at a recent IBM conference, specifically. We are kind of looking forward to that.

Technical support is getting better. About five years ago, it was horrible. Over the last couple of years, it's gotten better; more engagement and more knowledge transfer, it seems like, to the first-tier level support for IBM.

I came into the company and it was already there. So, I'm not sure about previous solutions.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

It is a highly effective tool if you're cross-platform. It really gets the job done simply.

I really do dig it. I had worked with it previously, got a different job, not using it. After a little bit I came back and just looked for a job that was still using the BigFix tool. I sought out jobs specifically looking for it.

Knowledge of the tool is important when selecting a vendor. Anyone can come and take you out to lunch, or wine and dine you. That's fine, they all do it. But to be able to have someone walk up to you and know how the tool actually functions is most important to me. I don't know which vendors were evaluated.

It's easy to manage. It gives me great power over the devices that I manage with very little effort, compared to other products. With other products, it takes a lot more effort just to do the same kind of work.

It has one central location to manage all the different platforms that we have such as desktop, Windows Servers, Linux Server, Solaris, AIX and zLinux. It's great to be able to manage them all from one central location.

The feature that I would like them to implement is for the command line and I know this is probably against the design. We come from the command line and sometimes, you want to talk to the agent in real time. Seems like now with the new BigFix CLI, it's heading in that direction. It's something that we've been craving for, because sometimes you want to just talk to this agent and not have to wait. You just want to discuss things with them and get the result back. That will be great. Still, you have to dance around and probably do some voodoo in order to get that data back. We come from the old framework, in which you send a command and get your return back. This kind of power is gone in BigFix, but we love all the other stuff.

Usually after upgrades, you have some hiccups but they're manageable. It's kind of common between products, after upgrades; either it is a learning curve or it could be a bug and then it's fixed in subsequent patches. So, nothing out of the ordinary, but it scales well.

This solution scales well.

I use the technical support for stubborn kind of issues, that won't go away. However, not as much as for the other products. They're very knowledgeable and it sounds like a different breed with the IBM support.

Actually, we had all the tools and we pulled them out, after which we went to BigFix. The reason why we chose this solution is because the government paid for it.

The setup is very easy. I usually have to tell them how hard it is, but then I can do it within a day. So, this is also a very big feature.

This product is extremely easy. If you've never implemented this type of three-tier architecture tool, then you don't know it. But, for anybody who has carried out such an implementation before, it is very straightforward.

Support is the most crucial criteria while selecting a vendor, because when things hit the wall and everybody's heated and trying to finger-point, you want someone that have the backbone to say, "We'll take care of it." IBM can do that. They never try to say, "No." They take the heat really well and they control it. Big corporations are looking for that kind of security that the company can provide and they're going to put as much resources as needed, so as to get the problem solved.

For me, BigFix is my virtual operator, and the capabilities BigFix actually brings to our servers to do everything. I don't need a personal operator. I can reach out to our partners for the solution.

BigFix enables us to handle data from many vendors with the scale for our servers, improving our performance.

We are looking for better images for third-party operations like article databases, for example, other article application servers, and the SAP applications. We appreciate that BigFix can produce a better image for everything on a single product.

Also, the web console could be improved as we need to use it more than the desktop console.

I believe the solution is very stable and we have never had an outage of the solution. Communication with our agents is always well-synchronized. Stability is very nice.

It is scalable. We have, for example, 7000 servers communicating with only three or four structured servers on the BigFix environment and it responds very quickly for everything we do.

We usually use the technical support for some troubleshooting when we have a specific problem with agents because in an environment with 7000 servers, we have a certain rate of problems which are specific problems, not general problems. Every time, the support attends to us quickly and the success factor is high.

See if the solution has good capabilities for them and if the solution can communicate well. Integration with many vendors is necessary.

The most valuable feature for me is BigFix's multi platform. It's customizable and we're able to do API integration throughout our entire network.

We're able to to implement automation and reduce touch labor for level one technicalities so we're able to free up more manpower to take on more difficult tasks.

• I would like to see it go to the cloud. I want to see it as a management service.
• For us, we basically generate our own API documentation. So I think more API integration would also help.

We've had no problems, it's a very stable solution. It's very well supported and has a big forum of users. So you always have a resource to reach out to.

We've actually fixed the patching by improving our patch application by almost 60%. We went from applying 6,000 patches manually to 34,000 on average a month.

It's very scalable. Extremely scalable. Customization is always a big issue for us so we're always able to grow with it.

We've used technical support many times. They have great support. We've had international support. We've been on calls with Poland, Ireland, Germany and all our technical experts in the USA.

I wasn't involved in the installation process.

When choosing a vendor we think that knowledge of our market place is key. The Walt Disney Company is unique in the environment so we need someone who understands that we work in different ways than a lot of other companies. This also applies with regard to product scalability. We need growth, I don't need to be working with one product in a silo.

I would really encourage them to look into it and take a look at its abilities and think of it as a platform and not just a patching mechanism. Some people think BigFix is just patching. It's a lot more than that so I would ask them to look at the bigger modules.

The most valuable features for us are scalability and reliability. Hands down.

My organization came from a product that was not nearly as reliable. It was causing failures across our infrastructure and across our enterprise. Switching to BixFix has alleviated that to a great degree.

The other part is it's now allowing our company to think ahead how we can incorporate other pieces of BigFix that other solutions don't have integrated natively. So we can get five or six product sets out of BigFix as opposed to just a single product set on a solution that didn't even work to begin with.

IBM dropped what's called BigFix Detect on us here at Interconnect this year. That blew our socks off because we had just completed signing a contract with a software that does almost the exact same thing called Carbon Black. So we came here and noticed that they're putting a Carbon Black type solution into BigFix. I will be curious about how that particular application develops over time and into the future. I'd like to see them continue to scale that out.

A major feature that I think they need to add to Detect is application whitelisting. That will be incredibly important. If they can get that I might be able to convince my company to start using that.

Stability is excellent. It doesn't crash, it can handle whatever we throw at it. It does a good job with that. Other solutions that we've had haven't panned out that way.

Scalability is excellent. There are people here who are using BigFix in much larger deployments than what we have. We're not small by any means but we're also not the largest out there. We know we can trust with confidence that we'll scale up well over time.

We haven't had to use the technical support at all.

We were using a different solution before this and we outgrew it. My company has gone through a period of hypergrowth and we went from handling just a few years ago 60 stores with maybe 500 endpoints in them, to 1600 stores now with tens of thousands of endpoints. So we knew we needed a new solution because the one we had just kept breaking, over and over.

I was not involved in the initial installation.

For myself as a manager who makes business decisions like selecting a vendor, there needs to be a level of trust and a level of partnership where I can go back to this vendor and actually get support and help if we need it, when we need it. Interconnect has been a great resource for that. So there's got to be that trust level there, absolutely.

I will never push a product I don't believe in. So I have to see that it works. I would argue the same is the case for anyone above me in our business or enterprise. We don't want to work with vendors whose products are half-baked. They have got to work.

So we ended up with IBM because we are partnered with GameStop and they were already using the product and saw that it worked. So we didn't formulate a shortlist off the bat. We said let's try GameStop's product and see how well that works for us, and then if it's not working we will go out and make a shortlist. So we didn't have to do that, fortunately.

The advice I would give is not to be turned off from the learning curve. There is a little bit of a learning curve to it. But that learning curve is there for a reason and the talent that goes into actually using BigFix properly takes a little while to tune, but that is what makes BigFix so powerful. That being said, as a result of that you're going to get reliability and scalability and a much faster response time than probably most products out there.