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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Compliance.

It's a good product.

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

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.

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.