Blog Entry

I am in Orlando, Florida at the Gartner IT Asset Management conference.  Novell is a Platinum Sponsor at this conference and I wanted to provide a quick update on a session that we did yesterday. 

The cool thing about the vendor sessions this year is that they are split/ half the time for the vendor and half for a customer to present a use case.  The title of my presentation was: Separating ZENworks Asset Management from the Pack.  In the presentation, I talked about 3 key areas that differentiates ZENworks Asset Management from the competition. They are:

> Knowledgebase approach (BTY- Gartner has picked up on this terminology in relation to discovery)
> license tracking and reconciliation
> usage tracking and reporting

The customer session was presented by Keith Cartlidge from Lockheed Martin.  Lockheed Martin are a long-standing ZENworks Asset Management customer with 40,000 seats under management.  In his presentation, Keith walked through how they use the product and the various ways they are getting value from it.  He told a great story about how when they first were evaluating ZENworks Asset Management.  They were dealing with an Oracle maintenance renewal at the time and used their old inventory product to produce a report of all Oracle installations.  The problem was that the report did not identify and breakout the products in a way that would allow them to tie back to licensed products.  They sent the report to Oracle and asked them to identify which file(s) went with which products and after several months, Oracle finally said, they couldn't figure it out. 

So, Lockheed Martin scanned their systems with ZENworks Asset Management and through a sample check, determined that it accurately identified and reported Oracle applications at a level needed to determine the right maintenance renewal. 

This is all possible because of our Knowledgebase approach to discovery and inventory and the Tech Analysts that work on ZENworks Asset Management and update the Knowledgebase on a monthly basis.