Features

Streamlined asset inventory

Take advantage of proven, flexible out-of-the-box or customized inventory processes.

Powerful usage and compliance reporting

Perform advanced usage and compliance reporting—and create complex custom reports without database programming knowledge.

Software discovery

Tune and prepare all your inventory data for efficient license compliance, reconciliation, and reporting.

License management and reconciliation

Match discovered products with purchased licenses, show how they relate to each other, and place them in the context of your overall software licensing program.

Software usage

Gain deep visibility into desktop and server-side application usage trends.

Integrated contract management

Leverage information in the ZENworks Asset Management database to manage IT contracts.

Automatic asset identification

Automate the process of recognizing and categorizing hardware and software assets with automatic identification of tens of thousands of products and devices.

License tracking and compliance

Make sure your software licenses are in perfect sync with the software running in your organization.


Feature	ZENworks Asset Management		Competition
INSTALLATION AND ADMINISTRATION
Integrated Discovery Tools		ZENworks provides an integrated set of network discovery and deployment tools which can be used to deploy the ZENworks Adaptive Agent to all devices that the organization wants to track and manage.		Network discovery tools are isolated from core deployment tools, leading to the dependency on additional application deployment solutions in order to bring the target devices under management.
System update and maintenance		ZENworks leverages the integrated System Update mechanism in order to update the core features of the product. This means, no other third party product is required to update ZENworks or any of its components.		May need configuration tools to update or patch the core components.
Web based Admin Console		ZENworks Control Center is the web-based console used to manage the full infrastructure under management. This means ZENworks Asset Management requires no additional plugins, add-ons, or thick client to be installed on an administrative workstation in order to manage IT assets.		Competitive products require thick clients or need add-ons and/or plugins installed, leading to limited administrative capabilities on certain platforms.
ARCHITECTURE AND PLATFORM SUPPORT
Multi-platform management		ZENworks manages the assets of all major platforms such as: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Unix (HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris), and NetWare all from the same console.		Limited platform coverage focusing around a few platforms such as Windows and Mac OS X.
Multi-platform Administration		Core ZENworks services (ZENworks Primary Server) can be installed on Windows Server, Linux, and Open Enterprise Server.		Most competition runs on the Windows Server platform only.
Database Support		ZENworks Asset Management ships with the Sybase database platform which can be installed as an embedded database on the first Primary Server, or as a remote instance. In addition to this, ZENworks also supports both Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle giving the customer the freedom to choose based on in-house skill sets.		Most competition supports the Microsoft SQL Server database platform only.
Scalability for Branch Office		ZENworks utilizes the Satellite Server and the collection role for remote branch office locations in order to scale out to the customers distributed requirements. These components can be installed on the Windows and Linux platforms (both desktop and server platforms).		Not available with many competitors.
Disconnected Devices		ZENworks provides offline inventory/data collection capabilities through a portable collector which can be run manually. Data can then be imported to the server in order to keep information up to date on all assets, regardless of where they are or how often they connect to the corporate infrastructure.	Partial	Not available with many competitors.
Custom Inventory and demographic data collection		ZENworks provides the mechanism for users to provide demographic-based information by manually entering it, or automatically extracting the information from text files and the registry. This tool can also be integrated with Active Directory and Micro Focus eDirectory to collect demographic information.		Most competitive products provide limited flexibility in collecting demographic-based data.
REPORTING
Web-based reporting		ZENworks addresses reporting requirements through either ZENworks Control Center or the ZENworks Reporting Server. Both consoles are web-based, and require no plugins, add-ons, or other thick clients to be installed in order to create, customize, or generate reports.		Competitive products provide report generation and report views by leveraging standalone applications or custom consoles.
Standard (canned) Reports		ZENworks provides hundreds of predefined reports that provide a detailed understanding of the IT assets (both hardware and software) throughout the organization.	Partial	Lack of a large number of predefined reports providing limited information about the organizations assets.
Custom Reporting		ZENworks Reporting Server is powered by the SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Business Intelligence engine which provides significant custom reporting and charting capabilities, without the need of an advanced understanding for the SQL scripting language.		In order to design detailed custom reports, the administrator (or report creator) must have an indepth knowledge of the complete database schema.
Alerts and Notifications		Strong business intelligence capabilities provide easy reporting options, to highlight report differences and generate a distribution of reports on a schedule, leveraging the corporate email infrastructure and document repositories.	Partial	Competitors do not provide this level of flexibility as far as reporting is concerned.
SOFTWARE IDENTIFICATION
Knowledge base approach		Approximately 70,000 unique software titles and versions can be identified by the ZENworks inventory scan and reconciliation processes.	Partial	Very few vendors provide the same level of identification when it comes to software titles and versions.
Suites and Collections		ZENworks Asset Management can identify suites such as Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite effectively. For software collections which do not follow a standard, identification methodology can be custom generated using a collection framework.	Partial	While some of the vendors may be able to identify suites, custom collection capabilities are lacking in competitive products.
Version Identification and consolidation		ZENworks Asset Management has the ability to identify software products of various patch levels, and collate them to represent a proper view of the software product which can be licensed.	Partial	Many software vendors expect the correlation between collected data and licenses be established manually.
HARDWARE IDENTIFICATION
Detailed Hardware Attributes		ZENworks collects detailed information with respect to hardware information including manufacturer, part name and serial number details. This also includes elaborate details for unique identification, and functional understanding/comparison of the hardware assets.		Competitive products do not provide granular identification of hardware attributes, and reporting capabilities.
Custom Editing of Hardware		ZENworks provides the flexibility to edit/add hardware assets that cannot be identified properly for whatever reason.		Competitive products do not provide such flexibility in terms of hardware data collection.
SOFTWARE LICENSE COMPLIANCE
Single View of Software License		ZENworks Asset Management provides a single view of all software licenses, product usage, and asset allocation to meet compliance, internal budgeting, and assess effective usage.		Most competitive products do not provide the same level of granularity when it comes to license management options.
Flexible Proof of Ownership representation		ZENworks Asset Management provides a flexible proof of ownership model that can associate purchase order based, and custom purchase summary based systems to create a uniform view.		Most competitive products associate one or more purchase orders to the licensed products, making the representation inflexible.
Licensing Types		ZENworks Asset Management allows the administrator to represent full license, upgrade license, and maintenance license types in the same licensed product view.		Most competitors are unable to reconcile full license, upgrade license, and maintenance license types in a unified view.
License Entitlement		ZENworks Asset Management provides flexibility in modeling entitlements (automatically and manually) for various complex entitlement models such as installation, machine, user, and enterprise based.		Most competing products do not have the same level of flexibility when it comes to representing complex entitlement models, and thus provide ad-hoc custom models to handle complex entitlements.
CONTRACT MANAGEMENT
Extensive Attributes		ZENworks Asset Management provides numerous attributes related to contracts that can be extended for custom attributes as well.		Competitive products provide very specific attributes, and are not as flexible when it comes to extending them to add additional attributes.
Renewal History and Alerts		ZENworks Asset Management allows the administrator to configure alerts and notifications on the contract, thus tracking various contract renewal events. In addition, history of all renewal events can be tracked for future auditing purposes.		Competitive products provide limited contract management capabilities and flexibility.
Document and asset relationships		ZENworks Asset Management gives the organization the ability to add document artifacts to the contract itself, leaving a full papertrail of the transaction. In addition to this, software and hardware assets can be associated with contracts in the system such that the relationship can be used to create complex drill-down reporting capabilities.		Most competitors do not have this same level of flexibility in their reporting capabilities in order to correlate IT assets with associated maintenance or acquisition contracts.

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"With ZENworks Asset Management, we know exactly what is installed and where. Having a real-time inventory makes it easy for us to comply with software licensing requirements, as well as our leasing schedules."

Noah Broadwater / Vice President of Information Services Sesame Workshop