Our customers use it for onboarding, terminations, password reset, and certifications.
Inexperienced support for old product, but good flexibility for use case customization
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
HelpSystems Powertech's feature that I have found most valuable is its flexibility.
It is able to be extended. A lot of the products these days, especially the ones on the cloud, are limited and can't handle all the use cases. Often there is not even a way to customize the application to meet uncommon use cases and HelpSystems provides an infrastructure that lends itself to the ability to be customized.
What needs improvement?
In terms of what could be improved, I would say the support of the product. It's hard to get support for it. I think this is emblematic of the fact that they don't have a lot of employees who have long-term experience with it.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using HelpSystems Powertech Identity & Access Manager for 10 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is stable. I mean, if Windows is up then they're up.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
HelpSystems Powertech is scalable if you throw more servers at it. Then you can distribute the load, which is a Microsoft SQL Server backend, and as long as you allocate enough resources to those things, then it is scalable. That's good enough.
It would be an entire organization that uses it. So at a hospital for example, a healthcare system, a bank, and it would be the entire workforce on it.
I haven't see a lot of customer's specific use cases, but it is for the whole workforce, everyone. The CEO of the company to the janitor.
In terms of maintaining it, that requires application administrators or system administrators. There is a manual process to update the product, at least with the on-premise version.
How are customer service and support?
I don't think support has the experience in their tech support department. It's not a matter of responsiveness or lack of attention. I just think it's because the product has been turned over so many times and bought and sold from different organizations. They don't have the personnel infrastructure to be able to just support it.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was straightforward enough. If there's an installation file, it's straightforward.
What other advice do I have?
My advice to anyone considering it is that I don't think it's a dinosaur of a product. I don't know if they have any new customers. 10 years ago it was in the Magic Quadrant of products. People just don't use it anymore. I would not necessarily recommend customers use it. I don't know what its cloud capabilities are. It just has support for legacy customers who've been using it over the years.
On a scale of one to ten, I would give HelpSystems Powertech Identity & Access Manager a five.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
