Ask questions, ask to meet other customers. Ask for customer references, for whatever products you're looking at. Talk to others who are using the products. If they're your peers, they know what the pains are. I'm not saying there's no pain with this product. There is pain, sure. But in its space, it's a ten. Some of the data management is painful. Some of the new features haven't been implemented in quite the way I would like to get to levels of detail. For example, Visualizer parser doesn't take everything it should out of the Visualizer files. We've had to put in a work-around, but the work-around is not as accurate as what's in the file. Any time you're managing large environments with thousands and thousands of servers, there's some overhead to that. That's going to be true with, and a challenge for, all tools; it's not specific to BMC. The biggest thing I have learned from using this product is that I have a passion for capacity management. More importantly, I have a passion for performance analysis as well. Over these 20 years, things have changed quite a bit. What servers were 20 years ago versus what they are today; and hyper-converged infrastructures; VMware didn't exist 20 years ago. All these things provide different metrics that you have to look at. This tool has grown with all that. BMC has done a great job at partnering. When VMware first came out, they were quick to partner. There are important metrics that are different than anything else you'd ever know, and you had to know about them. BMC has stayed with new technologies as they come out. Today they were talking about a new partnership with a company that is big into RPA bots.
Ask questions, ask to meet other customers. Ask for customer references, for whatever products you're looking at. Talk to others who are using the products. If they're your peers, they know what the pains are. I'm not saying there's no pain with this product. There is pain, sure. But in its space, it's a ten. Some of the data management is painful. Some of the new features haven't been implemented in quite the way I would like to get to levels of detail. For example, Visualizer parser doesn't take everything it should out of the Visualizer files. We've had to put in a work-around, but the work-around is not as accurate as what's in the file. Any time you're managing large environments with thousands and thousands of servers, there's some overhead to that. That's going to be true with, and a challenge for, all tools; it's not specific to BMC. The biggest thing I have learned from using this product is that I have a passion for capacity management. More importantly, I have a passion for performance analysis as well. Over these 20 years, things have changed quite a bit. What servers were 20 years ago versus what they are today; and hyper-converged infrastructures; VMware didn't exist 20 years ago. All these things provide different metrics that you have to look at. This tool has grown with all that. BMC has done a great job at partnering. When VMware first came out, they were quick to partner. There are important metrics that are different than anything else you'd ever know, and you had to know about them. BMC has stayed with new technologies as they come out. Today they were talking about a new partnership with a company that is big into RPA bots.