ZENworks® 7.5 Asset Management

Overview

It's difficult to overstate the value of an efficient, comprehensive asset management solution. Without one, your business is exposed to undue risk with no reliable way to prove licensing compliance. You run the risk of paying for software licenses and maintenance coverage you don't need. Finally, without an asset management system in place, you can't effectively negotiate with vendors because you lack visibility into key dates, terms and conditions and asset usage patterns.

Novell® ZENworks® Asset Management solves these problems by combining sophisticated network discovery, workstation inventory, software management, software usage and contract management capabilities into one comprehensive asset management solution. With ZENworks Asset Management, you gain a more complete and accurate view of all your IT assets. You can eliminate software overspending because you improve your ability to accurately track and monitor software licenses, installations and compliance. And, you get instant access to all the information you need—including licensing contracts—so you can handle software audits with complete confidence and zero stress. Novell ZENworks Asset Management includes:

• Asset Inventory
• Novell ZENworks Recognition Technology
• Software Management
• License Tracking and Compliance
• Reconciliation
• Usage
• Contract Management

Asset Inventory

Novell ZENworks Asset Management starts with advanced tools that automatically inventory your hardware and software and provide detailed information about all the desktops, servers and network assets across your enterprise. This inventory gives you instant access to the data you need to ensure license compliance, reduce IT spending and support costs and fuel other critical IT projects—including migrations, lease management, the service desk, planning and budgeting, and asset redeployment.

Key Features

Novell ZENworks Asset Management includes an impressive collection of industry-leading reporting, recognition and operation features to generate your software inventory:

Reporting

• Comprehensive Web reporting with multiple graphing and display options
• Hundreds of built-in reports and queries
• Asset history and trend analysis
• Custom reports and alerts

Recognition

• Automatic recognition of tens of thousands of products and devices
• Discovery of software, hardware and network devices
• Monthly Knowledgebase updates
• Software suite recognition
• Fast, convenient mechanism for adding proprietary and legacy products
• Unlimited user-defined fields for data collection
• Windows, Mac, Linux and UNIX inventories

Operation

• Integrated client-push utility
• Out-of-the-box or customized inventory processes
• Networked, dial-in and standalone device inventories
• Flexible kick-off options (client, login script and system policies)
• Multiple scheduling options
• Scan-on-demand for real-time inventory of specific devices
• Automatic product updates

Novell ZENworks Recognition Technology

A sophisticated recognition engine drives the inventory capabilities of Novell ZENworks Asset Management. This technology goes far beyond simply scanning hard drives and displaying a list of raw executable files. Instead, an advanced auto-discovery process carefully analyzes the software on your hard drives and checks against an extensive application Knowledgebase to accurately identify all the software running on your systems.

This approach eliminates missing or misspelled header information common to other inventory approaches and distinguishes between real applications and other types of executable files. Built and maintained by Novell Technology Analysts, the Knowledgebase also contains product-by-product pointers that allow the engine to make fine distinctions between things like trial- and full-version software and between different editions of the same product.

The patented recognition technology embedded in ZENworks Asset Management has a long, proven record of success on more than 10 million desktops.

Managing Your Software Assets

Novell ZENworks Asset Management can be used to efficiently manage all of your software assets, in addition to getting your inventory and software compliance programs in place. This process includes establishing and enforcing software standards; generating reports that integrate licensing, installation and usage data; allocating licenses to specific sites, departments, cost centers or individual workstations; and managing and monitoring your IT contracts, associating them with licenses, assets, users and organization units.

Software Management

Before you can successfully manage your software licensing agreements, you need to know exactly what software is running in your organization, maintain a complete, accurate view of all your software licenses, and understand how software inventories and licensing data relate to each other. ZENworks Asset Management simplifies and automates this complex process.

Software Discovery

Novell ZENworks Asset Management does much more than simply inventory your software applications. It also uses sophisticated techniques to make sure your software inventory is complete, normalized and tuned for license compliance, reconciliation and reporting. For instance, software sold in bundles can be defined and tracked to align application discovery to purchasing and licensing information. This unique License View enables you to accurately track and reconcile all the software on your network.

Key Features

• Rolls up point releases and service packs
• Automatically excludes titles with no license implications, such as Adobe Reader
• Ignores individual software components if they were installed as a suite
• Categorizes all software by functional type
• Identifies standalone suite components that were installed outside the suite
• Distinguishes between full, runtime and evaluation editions

License Tracking and Compliance

Software license data can come from an array of different sources, including software reseller reports, spreadsheets and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Too often, this data is inconsistent and not normalized, making it difficult and expensive to use and manage. Novell ZENworks Asset Management addresses this challenge by providing Reseller Connectors for top software resellers and allowing you to import licensing data from any source in a text file format.

Key Features

• Imports licensing data from leading resellers (CompuCom, SHI, Software Spectrum and Softchoice) using reseller connectors
• Reduces software reconciliation efforts by automatically building a product catalog, allowing one-time reconciliation between purchased and discovered products
• Imports purchase records directly
• Organizes products into a group for discovery and reporting as a suite

Reconciliation

Licensing and software discovery data only provide limited value until you can show how they relate to each other and place them in the context of your licensing program. Novell ZENworks Asset Management includes an auto-reconciliation feature that matches the products discovered on your network with the licenses you've purchased. The same process can be used to create a set of licenses based on the clean, normalized manufacturer and product names in your Knowledgebase.

Key Features

• Automatically reconciles purchased and discovered products
• Links software inventory to proof of purchase and installations
• Allows you to drill down from compliance reports to underlying purchases and installations
• Provides an immediate picture of over- and under-licensing and allows e-mail alerts based on this status
• Keeps discovery and licensing data accurate and up to date

Software Usage

Novell ZENworks Asset Management makes it easy to inventory your network and manage license compliance. It also offers deep visibility into both desktop application and server-side application usage trends. With ZENworks Asset Management, you can quickly generate reports that show which products and types of software are being used most—and even more important, which are not being used at all. This gives you the information you need to maintain license compliance without purchasing and supporting products you don't need.

Software usage reports also make it possible to set and maintain corporate standards and quickly identify the use of non-standard or even rogue applications, such as hacker tools and peer-to-peer software. Server-side usage monitoring and reporting provides visibility into the use of applications run from Citrix Presentation Server or Windows Terminal Server.

Key Features

• Reports on applications that run locally in a browser and from a server
• Provides tracking for both foreground and background application runtime
• Identifies key applications and targets unused software for elimination
• Provides user and device information associated with application usage—even for multiuser devices
• Delivers an aggregate view of usage levels across departments and sites
• Reports on application use and non-use over several time periods
• Provides extensive, detailed report capabilities
• Tracks usage—even when devices are disconnected from the network
• Minimizes user impact with a small footprint and silent operation

Contract Management

Simply keeping track of what you have installed and how it is used is only half the battle—the other half is tracking your license entitlements and details of contracts. With Novell ZENworks Asset Management, not only can you manage IT contracts and automatically notify administrators of key dates associated with them, but you can also actually attach copies of those contracts directly in the ZENworks Asset Management database for easy reference.

Key Features

• Manage details of IT contracts such as maintenance, lease, warranty and SLA
• Monitor and notify administrator of key dates such as start, end and renewal
• Associate contracts to licenses, assets, users and organizational units
• Upload and attach documents to contracts
• Define master lease and related lease schedules

Novell ZENworks Asset Management Architecture

Novell ZENworks Asset Management includes the following core components:

• A Web console and a ZENworks Asset Management Manager console for reporting and administration
• A task service for managing network discovery, Knowledgebase updates and software updates
• A collection service for managing inventory schedules and client updates
• A central database (Microsoft MSDE/SQL or Oracle) for storing all of the collected inventory and usage data from various devices

A Proven Solution

Novell ZENworks Asset Management features mature, proven technology that can scale to meet the needs of any environment—from 100 desktops in one location to hundreds of thousands all over the world.

The award-winning asset tracking and discovery tools in Novell ZENworks Asset Management deliver unparalleled accuracy. They provide you with a true accounting of your hardware and software assets. And they are capable of reporting on the full range of IT devices—including servers, routers, desktops and laptops—together with all the software that runs on them.

With this advanced inventory and asset management solution, you can cut your hardware and software expenditures, lower maintenance and support costs, reduce your legal exposure and face software audits with confidence.