Clarity CA Reviews

Clarity CA is used for project management, and it's similar to Microsoft Project, except that it's web-based. It has robust processes, so it's comparable to Microsoft Project with live data. In Clarity CA, you can manage your project, do some scheduling, and do finance and resources, so you can do everything in one shot for project management.

My organization has benefited from Clarity CA because everyone can do project staffing through it. People in the organization can staff projects by looking at the resources and skills before staffing. Change requests can also be done in Clarity CA, so you have everything in one place, except for financials, because my organization didn't enable financials in the tool. Currently, Clarity CA is integrated with SAP, and you do the financials in SAP. Through Clarity CA, you can have an overall view of each project, how a project is doing, etc., so it helped improve my organization.

To me, the most valuable feature of Clarity CA is the timesheet. It's the only feature I use because I just support the tool, and I just enter time on it. Others use Clarity CA for other purposes, such as resource management, project management, scheduling, and financials.

The tool also has a fairly simple integration with other systems, so at the moment, it's working fine.

I also like that you can write your own code in Clarity CA, and you can make changes to it based on your needs.

What could be improved in Clarity CA is its UI, but I know the Clarity team is working on a new UI, so I'm expecting its UI to get better.

The software also has too many functions, so it would be good if the functions or features could be split up, rather than needing to buy the whole Clarity CA package, when you'll only use a few of its functions. This increases the cost of the software, so that's another area for improvement.

How Clarity CA is marketed could also be improved.

Clarity CA is a very stable tool. It has been around for a long time.

Clarity CA is a scalable tool.

The technical support for Clarity CA is very good. The team knows the product and responds pretty quickly.

On a scale of one to ten, where one is very bad and ten is very good, I'd rate support a nine.

Positive

Sometimes, the in-house team does the deployment of Clarity CA. In some instances, it's the team from Broadcom that takes care of the deployment.

I have a customer who used Clarity CA for years, so the tool benefited him and I believe it gave him ROI.

After the tool is implemented and you can run reports on it, and you have the confidence in managing all the projects in Clarity CA, you can get ROI within a few months, if not earlier.

It's fairly expensive to use Clarity CA. There's a yearly license fee for the solution based on the users, and there's a one-time implementation fee as well.

I support Clarity CA, but I'm on the administrator side rather than the end-user side.

My company has a partnership with Clarity CA.

Clarity CA is deployed on-premises in my company, but I have a customer who deployed the solution on the cloud.

Deploying the solution requires two or three resources. For ongoing support, it depends on how many people use Clarity CA. A minimum of three or four resources would be enough to support the solution, particularly two LIFF developers and one administrator.

My advice to people looking into implementing Clarity CA is to make sure there's a team who'll support it, otherwise, you have to look into a Broadcom partner that can provide you with a service support deal. This way, you don't have to deal with the many administrative and maintenance responsibilities that go with Clarity CA as that could be a hassle. You have to be ready by having a team who will support the solution.

My rating for Clarity CA is nine out of ten. Its interface is getting better. It has everything you need in terms of program or project management. The solution works for any organization. It's stable, flexible, and has been around for a long time. You can do a lot with Clarity CA, and that gives you a little bit of power.

Everything is automated. 

We do software delivery through our package. We create some software packages on CA, and then we create groups in the tool. We can then deploy that package instead of installing the software manually into each computer. We can just push it out to the entire corporation if we want to. But in some cases, not everyone uses the software, so we just select a group of computers, or a department, and we push out the software to that group.

It is also really easy to use. You just schedule a job and create a package of software, and everything just works. The tool was already in place when I started at my workplace and as I learned to use it I was amazed that everything could be done with a few clicks.

It has saved us a lot of time. We can create a job and schedule the job, and then just leave it while we go ahead and do other stuff.

I think it would be good for them to contact the bigger software vendors, like Adobe and Microsoft, to come up with a support team. So if we were rolling out a software to the company but didn't know how to create a package for it we could turn to CA for assistance. They might say, "We work with Adobe, and we have a package created already. If you want to customize it, maybe we can help you with that." That would be a good feature.

Or even if they just made the package creation a little bit easier, because you have to deal with code and it gets tricky.

I was involved in the initial setup for the upgrade that we did a couple of months ago. We were using version 12.1 and we migrated to version 14.1. It was pretty straightforward. We received support from the engineers from CA, so it was an easy and smooth transition.

The scalability is good because CA's IT Client Manager has Enterprise Manager, which is like a big server. Below that there is a domain manager and below the domain manager there are scalability servers. If we want to add something, we can easily do so just by adding another scalability server, because we already have the structure. If the company is growing, we just add another scalability server on the other site, connect it to the Enterprise Manager, and we are done.

Technical support is good, when they get back to you. 

I usually have to use Google, though. Not because they don't help, but because sometimes we have to meet deadlines and don't have the time to wait for them to get back to us. Sometimes they do respond to us quickly, but at other times we need support right away and we don't have that. I think this is an area that they need to improve. They should offer higher priority support to their bigger customers.

One of the biggest things that I look for when selecting a vendor is that their solution is scalable, that you can grow with it. Because sometimes, everything changes really quickly.

Another thing that I look for is integration, because we use other tools, like ticketing systems. Right now we are using CA and it is integrated with ServiceNow, so I think integration is a big piece of it.

If a colleague of mine was considering CA Client Manager I would tell them to contact CA, let them know what they need exactly, and have CA do a demo for them. A demo will reproduce the environment so that they can see how the solution really works.