SanerNow Reviews

Our company is a system integrator and service provider that integrates SanerNow with our customers' existing tools, according to their requirements from an ITSM perspective.

There are two main use cases where SanerNow matches the requirements of our customers. The first use case involves using SanerNow from a security perspective, where the customer is interested in a complete vulnerability management solution.

The other typical use case is for customers who are looking for a general patch management solution, primarily from a compliance point of view. In this scenario, the customer uses SanerNow mainly to identify any necessary patches for their systems. Once they have identified what needs patching, they can add a new policy in SanerNow and it will go ahead and apply the patches automatically. Used in this way, it's a very good patch management platform.

Although it is, in fact, a complete vulnerability management solution, the most valuable feature is the patch management functionality. Most of our customers give preference to this tool over other tools when it comes to patch management.

Beyond that, I think the user interface is excellent and the solution offers many APIs that are available for out-of-the-box integration with most of the existing ITSM tools out there.

SanerNow has good integration with the more well-known ITSM tools, but at the same time, there are many other ITSM (IT Service Management) tools available in the market, including local tools here in India which provide patch management functionality out of the box along with their other modules which lead the customer to choose overall solution rather than fragmented one.

For example, with respect to patch management, one of the prerequisites that customers usually look for is discovery. Discovery entails understanding the current situation of a company's infrastructure, such as what versions of software they are using and what kind of hardware they are running, etc. The discovery process is important, yet SanerNow's patch management offering does not have any discovery capabilities; instead, they just provide patches on the basis of ongoing updates that are available from the respective OEMs such as Microsoft, Red Hat, and so on.

Customers need a solution that not only caters to the requirements for patch management but also the process of discovery — including the creation of a CMDB — which typically takes place before patch management. That is to say, patch management and discovery go hand-in-hand, and as far as I understand, there is no single tool available from one single OEM that can do all three together.

Most of the OEMs use different tools, usually third-party ones, for patch management and discovery, and if SanerNow were to unify these areas in one tool, then it would be much more effective for our customers who want to work with only a single partner.

I have been working with SanerNow for almost a year now.

I would rate SanerNow an eight out of ten in terms of stability.

For enterprise and mid-market customers, SanerNow is a good option and it is well placed in the market for these kinds of companies. As far as small businesses are concerned, most would rather opt for lower-cost manual tools.

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

Their support is really good and you can tell that they take ownership of their product. There are different licensing models that also include the option for technical support.

I personally haven't worked with them outside of the Indian market, but from a support perspective in India itself, they have the necessary technical resources here and provide great support. They have offices in both India and Bangalore.

Positive

The initial setup is very simple.

We do the implementations in-house and we also support some of our customers with various integrations. That said, SanerNow's interface is very good and you don't really need highly technical resources to manage their UI.

As with several other solutions such as Microsoft MECM and SCCM, the licensing for SanerNow involves per-device pricing for each kind of product or service on offer.

When it comes to per-device pricing, if the customer is using it for enterprise patch management, it can become very expensive. Because of this, it can be tough to justify the price for major enterprise accounts, especially if the high pricing means that not all the assets can be completely covered under one solution like SanerNow.

One of SanerNow's competitors that we have considered is Automox. I think the SanorNow user interface is quite good and, overall, it's a lighter and simpler product than Automox and other solutions. They tend to keep things simple, and the graphical user interface is great because it has removed a lot of complexity. It's more of a plug-and-play product and the configuration is easy.

For instance, just last week we deployed SanerNow as a demo for one of our customers and it took no more than two minutes to be deployed on two servers simultaneously. Of course, this deployment demo didn't go into the configuration and further implementation, which would definitely take a few hours, but as far as deploying and onboarding the tool to a new server is concerned, it's pretty easy.

If customers are only looking for a patch management system, then I would definitely recommend SanerNow. But if you look at today's market, there are already many tools similar to SanerNow that give fragments of the overall functionality of an ITSM tool, and enterprise customers tend not to be interested in tools that only provide fragmented functionality. Instead, they need a tool that can give them complete IT service management, including service orchestration, assurance, and automation; that is, the entire gamut of modules in one solution.

Vendors that can provide this include BMC, Micro Focus, and SolarWinds. These vendors cater to the overall requirements of the customer and not just a specific fragment, especially for those customers wishing to break down silos and unify their solutions. Thus, if you're looking for a more comprehensive solution that unifies ITSM and IT operations management as a whole, SanerNow might not be the ideal solution.