We use Micro Focus Asset Manager for tracking the whole life cycle of IT assets. To some extent, we also track software asset management, e.g. the usage of our software products, so we reduce or procure products in Asset Manager.
We also combine data from different systems about the usage of the software products and now build reports. We are focused on tracking and inventorying IT hardware assets, material assets, including software assets.
The feature that I found most valuable in this product is that it is customizable. It could be heavily customized according to the needs of any company. This is one of the real strengths of this product.
This product has been improved. Previously it was a bit outdated, for example, the Windows application has to be connected to the database, but now they're doing a lot to allow people to do some synching from the browser. It's still not very convenient, but this is probably because of the fact that we're behind a few versions from the latest releases. Our own experience may not be so relevant compared to the latest reviews if you compare with people using the latest version, but not all things could be done with the help of browsers.
The usability of this product is still out-of-date and could be improved. The interface could be improved.
We've been using this tool for 10 years.
The stability of this product could depend on whether it is stable because we host it inside our organization, or if some stability problems that arise are a result of the issues we face inside our own infrastructure. In general, our infrastructure in Micro Focus Asset Manager is stable.
It is a scalable product.
We contacted their support and they could be quite slow, but we have a good relationship with our account manager on the vendor side, so he was able to speed up the process of issue resolution properly.
I wouldn't say that their technical support is different from others because they support issues the way other big companies are doing it.
We used our in-house solution which was very limited, so 10 years ago we decided to switch to a more advanced solution.
We are a software house company and we have a lot of developers on-site. We provide development services for our own customers so we did it the implementation ourselves.
11 years ago, we were able to evaluate the Hewlett-Packard Service Manager software.
We're customers and can also be considered a Micro Focus partner because sometimes we help Micro Focus implement their products for other customers. There are times we could be considered as an implementation team for Micro Focus products. We have a lot of experience implementing Micro Focus products for our own company, for our own needs, that now we can share our experience with other companies, but in general, we're more customers than partners.
In my point of view, this is a complex product and you need to be ready to adopt vendor approaches and incorporate them into this product from one side. These approaches are also quite complex.
We are constantly using this product and we are constantly improving this product. It's actively being used in our company and we have invested some time to support it, attend to its functionalities, etc. The initial setup took nearly six months, but I could be mistaken.
This product is used by hundreds, but I do not remember the exact number. Our support team is not very big: three or four people, but we are constantly developing this tool which means we have developers, too.
I don't know about increasing usage as I have not heard information about it, but the business context is constantly changing and we definitely would need to adapt our Micro Focus Asset Manager to the change in a business context. We will adopt it and we will improve it, but to what extent, I don't know of any real plans because it belongs to another portfolio, but I'm working closely with the business team, though I have no detailed plans.
When we started moving from our in-house development service manager to a more advanced solution, we tried a number of tools and we decided to choose Service Manager (11 years ago). Micro Focus Service Manager, at the time, it was Hewlett-Packard Service Manager, then in the bundle, the Task Manager was included.
We were able to see a return on investment from this product.
My advice to others looking into implementing this product is for them to not rush to change or customize it. If they face an issue with the product, they should not change it quickly. They should try to understand it first because there were times when we faced the same situation and we decided to make some changes to the product. What happened was after some iterations, we had to return the product to its out-of-the-box functionality. One of the best practices is not to rush adapting to change and not to rush product customization. Try to use the out-of-the-box functionality first.
I'm not a product manager for this product so I'm not sure what to ask for in the next release. As far as I know, they are quite active, meaning they have quarterly release cycles and they do a good job here in general.
My rating for this product is a seven out of ten.