Micro Focus Asset Manager [EOL] Reviews

It's for full-on asset management. You can do hardware and software recognition.

It is stable and scalable.

There are a lot of things that need improvement. Software recognition, software licensing, software compliance, data inputs, reporting, and support are some of the areas.

It needs a discovery tool of its own. You have to get that from other Micro Focus products, which means you have to pay more to get those products.

I have about 20 years of experience working with Micro Focus Asset Manager. 

It is stable.

It is scalable.

There are issues with their support, and their support could be better.

I have been using FlexNet Manager for the last two years. I would recommend FlexNet every single time. While Micro Focus is a clever tool and can become cleverer, it has no source of data of its own. It has to be fed by other data sources.

I'm also using Snow License Manager at this time. I have used it in my current role for 15 months, and I have also used it for about 15 months in a previous role.

Its setup is complex.

From my experience, Asset Manager is expensive.

I would advise thinking hard about it because it's a very complex tool. It takes a lot of work to keep it, and there are a lot of other elements that have to work with it. It is a very hands-on tool.

I would rate it a six out of 10.

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.

We implemented software asset management on top of the asset manager. It was my goal when we selected the product and actually we're looking forward to developing those features in the future.

Actually we have now automatic and immediate control of assets usage, and we can now better manage our assets pool and get benefits through that.

The first problem with asset manager is that it is very, very, very old software, so it's actually history and right now it's outdated on any account.

The technology used is outdated, the interface is outdated, the database is outdated, everything is outdated.

This has been noted by the product management team and right now they are already working on completing a revamp from scratch of the asset manager and we're really looking forward to that. This new one will solve a lot of problems when it arrives because it will be supported on the server side, it will be a modern user interface, it will be faster, it will be more efficient.

Also, we hope it will do the main tasks of asset manager better because we are actually involved in communications already, and we're really looking forward to providing them with our expertise collected during the project.

If they fulfill their roadmap aspirations then the solution will be much, much better.

Stability's fine, actually - when it works, it works. You could say it's not the problem of stability, it's actually a problem of the amount of time you have to spend to configure the solution, which is not a bright side of the asset manager.

For us it's enough. It scales to our needs.

Regarding technical support, the first tier is terrible as always, but after escalation the experience was perfect. It was a really good experience, it was really nice to see the vendor really involved in the idea of fixing the problems, and doing things right.

I'm not sure that I should pronounce names out loud, but we actually looked at almost all the solutions from the top ten competitors on the market. In our home market of Russia, we have at least two main competitors, but again, I'm not sure that I should talk about that here.

The most important features are the flexibility of the product and the way that we can use it to ensure software compliance within our organization.

We use a lot of software in the organization. In order to track it, we use Universal Discovery, which feeds into Asset Manager, to give us our install base. We load all of our licenses against it so that we understand what we're entitled to use. The compliance counters in Asset Manager enable us to ensure that we’re compliant for software licensing.

Technical support is certainly an area with room for improvement.

I participate in the customer advisory council for the product. We had a meeting at a recent conference. We get to see the roadmap and discuss what we want to see in it. They're really good sessions. I really advocate them carrying on. My prognosis is good. It's balanced, so there's some good and there's some room for improvement as well.

Our initial deployment was years ago when Peregrine ran the software. Then HPE bought Peregrine, so I was involved in that. I've also been involved in multiple upgrades since then. We've just finished some work this week, which went really, really smoothly. It was really good. No problems.

A year ago, we upgraded Universal Discovery and it took a long time to resolve all the issues. And that was using HPE Professional Services to implement it and they couldn't get to a resolution. There was R&D in China, there was HPE locally here, there was a team in the US, and there was support in Eastern Europe; all trying to work with each other across different time zones and it just didn't work very well at all.

Deployment was complex.

Asset Manager is pretty stable. Universal Discovery is a little less so. We have problems with it failing for unknown reasons sometimes. We struggle with support a little bit to get resolution quickly sometimes.

Technical support is very frustrating because we have probably 12 or 15 years’ experience with the products. We find that when we get through to technical support, we're sometimes dealing with people that are brand new to the products and often don't have the level of knowledge that we do. We answer lots of stupid questions. I understand why they have to ask them, but it would be useful, if a customer has more experience with the products, without having to pay a premium for premier support, they could get through to a level of support that means we can start to make progress quickly.

The other thing with support is that it can be quite slow sometimes, backwards and forwards, on email. We'd be quite happy to jump on a WebEx and work through something, as soon as there was a support analyst available. But it doesn't seem to work that way.

We also have issues with support, whereby, maybe you email them something, someone goes on holiday and it doesn't get picked up. We've been asked not to email directly the support people, even though they email us, and to put stuff through the portal, but using the portal is slow and clunky.

We looked at other IT asset management software products in the market a couple of times before and we probably will do again in the next 18 months or so. The other products in the area would be Snow, Flexera and so on.

When we initially chose HPE, the landscape was very different. At the time, I think the Gartner MarketScope showed it to be a leader in the area. It just became the best tool for our needs at the time.