IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager for Software Use Analysis

Transcription

1 IBM Endpoint Manager for Software Use Analysis Rapid, granular inventory insights and always-on asset management enhance license compliance Highlights Identify licensed and unlicensed software with drill-down granularity Reduce the time, effort and inaccuracy of manual inventory and analysis Manage assets on hundreds or hundreds of thousands of endpoints Automate planning, budgeting and vendor license compliance processes IBM Endpoint Manager for Software Use Analysis delivers the ability to identify an organization s licensed and unlicensed software with drill-down granularity to track software usage patterns and trends. Dramatically reducing the time required to conduct a comprehensive software asset inventory for license reconciliation or compliance purposes, the solution provides valuable insight into what the organization owns and what it has installed but doesn t own along with how often the software is being used in order to support better planning, budgeting and vendor license compliance. Built on BigFix technology, the solution can provide visibility and management for software on hundreds or hundreds of thousands of endpoints. Endpoint Manager for Software Use Analysis can be used to provide a rapid return on investment on a IT Asset Management project, completely eliminate inefficient, inaccurate spreadsheets adapted for manually tracking software, and facilitate IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL ) processes. The near-instant visibility into enterprise assets provided by Endpoint Manager for Software Use Analysis can be vital to optimizing asset control and operations in the interconnected, instrumented and intelligent technology environments of today s smarter planet. Easy to use and centrally managed from a unified console, the solution enables continuous asset assessment and reporting with low total cost of ownership and high return on investment. Not only does

2 IBM Endpoint Manager for Software Use Analysis: How it works Endpoint Manager Endpoint Manager content delivery Endpoint Manager for Software Use Analysis server IT operations Finance Contracts Legal Audit Security Endpoint Manager server Inventory database Company network Real-time, ongoing inventory collection Executable information Program strings Registry data Application usage data Computer properties (customizable) Third party inventory applications Software ID catalog Publishers Software titles Software title versions Applications Executables The solution leverages a comprehensive Software Identification Catalog to simplify asset identification and support reporting that organizational units can use to enhance software-related operations and management. Endpoint Manager for Software Use Analysis discover and manage applications down to the version level the insights it provides can translate into significant cost savings for organizations that are spending more than necessary on software licensing fees. Knowing your assets, managing them better When it comes to understanding and managing software assets, enterprises today face common challenges. What do you have and how can you reconcile what you ve purchased with what s installed? Do you have the right applications available to the 2

3 right users and how can you redistribute software to make sure it s deployed to the best advantage? Overall, are you managing your assets in the most efficient and comprehensive way? Are you meeting standard compliance and are you legally licensed for all the software installed on users endpoints? Endpoint Manager for Software Use Analysis can provide answers, delivering deep asset management capabilities even in the most complex environments. Providing infrastructure views and enabling customized slice and dice reports on aggregate application counts, software usage statistics and compliance with basic license types, the solution can provide an understanding of the connections between software license management and desktop, patch and security management processes. It can give you the focus you need to better manage your endpoints, reconciling the real-time endpoint state against application licenses on the Microsoft Windows platform. Benefiting from an intelligent agent-based approach Endpoint Manager for Software Use Analysis is offered as a standalone product that provides its capabilities either as an independent solution or in concert with the rest of the solutions in the Endpoint Manager portfolio. The solution correlates the inventory data it gathers with its builtin Software Identification Catalog to create an inventory data warehouse. It then allows users to browse the data warehouse and generate reports. The Software Identification Catalog simplifies the identification of specific software installations with information on 5,000 publishers, 5,000 software products and more than 105,000 application signatures out of the box. Continually updated via a cloud-based update service with information on commercial applications and publishers, the catalog is also easily customizable to include tracking of homegrown and proprietary applications with no scripting or coding required. The Endpoint Manager for Software Use Analysis approach is a significant change from and an advantage over conventional management solutions. Other techniques utilize endpoint agents that are entirely dependent on instructions received from a central command-and-control server, and require lengthy scans to acquire inventory data. With Endpoint Manager for Software Use Analysis, the endpoint itself provides the computational power necessary for assessment and reporting, considerably enhancing reporting speed. The ability to schedule inventory and reporting at times that are most appropriate to the workloads of individual endpoints, rather than requiring a batch to execute all at once, further enhances efficiencies by avoiding bandwidth and endpoint CPU bottlenecks. Drilling down for insight and cost savings The solution enables two key software metering functions always on software inventory and analysis, along with software asset and license management. The inventory and analysis function provides a constantly updated inventory that drills down into software asset information, providing aggregated statistics and usage gathered by searching, filtering, sorting, viewing and exporting data on potentially thousands of computer properties. Automation and speed of operations enable IT organizations to radically reduce the number of hours and resources spent on inventory activities. 3

4 The software asset and license management function enables users to create and manage information about software contracts and product licenses to ensure licensing compliance. Users can browse data about software licenses and compare this information with inventory information in order to audit license compliance and determine related financial implications. The result: the organization is better positioned to actively manage just enough software, just in time, eliminating the expense of over-purchasing and the risk of noncompliance. These two central functions are supported by a number of key capabilities: Rapid installation and implementation A robust platform designed for speed as well as intelligence means that installation throughout the entire enterprise takes only hours. Traditional solutions, by contrast, often can require months or even longer. Once installation is complete, always on inventory captures software status and changes in near real time, boosting time to value for low total cost of ownership. Existing Endpoint Manager customers can quickly add Software Use Analysis capabilities without requiring additional endpoint software and relay infrastructure. Flexible, efficient design With the ability to handle hundreds of thousands of endpoints, the solution provides significant advantages for simplified management and reduced hardware and staff costs over traditional asset management methods requiring dozens of dedicated back-end servers. Visibility into any asset The solution can gain visibility into any computing device across topologies in a heterogeneous environment and regardless of connection state whether on the corporate network or connected via the Internet. Persistent inventory and visibility ensure that software records are up-to-date, accurate and complete. Ongoing analysis and reporting Because the solution s asset monitoring takes place continuously, administrators and financial analysts can generate the reports they need when they need them. Real-time reporting can deliver information on the health and compliance of software assets in minutes regardless of the size of the environment. Reporting access is available to various roles and individuals in the enterprise, not just to operations managers, helping support line-of-business requirements. Integration with other solutions To extend management capabilities, Endpoint Manager for Software Use Analysis integrates with other asset management products, including Asset Management for IT with its capabilities for functions such as procurement and contract management, as well as Asset Discovery for Distributed with its capabilities for inventory of non-windows based assets. Generating reports for IT and business operations Using Endpoint Manager for Software Use Analysis, organizations can gain increased visibility into their software license consumption and usage while reducing the amount of time and effort required to generate reports that show compliance and overall software usage. Leveraging the power and flexibility of Endpoint Manager technology, the solution enables significant benefits including the ability to more accurately plan software budgets based on inventory and usage trends. The solution can also help facilitate planning. For example, when organizations are migrating from Microsoft Office 2003 to Office 2010, Endpoint Manager can help administrators quickly determine which endpoints meet the prerequisites, and which endpoints need hardware upgrades such as added RAM. 4

5 The Endpoint Manager family You can further consolidate tools, reduce the number of endpoint agents and lower your management costs by extending your investment in Endpoint Manager for Software Use Analysis to include other components in the Endpoint Manager family. Because all functions operate from the same console, management server and endpoint agent, adding more services is a simple matter of a license key change. Endpoint Manager for Lifecycle Management This solution addresses today s convergence of IT functions by providing real-time visibility into the state of endpoints and giving administrators advanced functionality for managing those endpoints. Endpoint Manager for Security and Compliance This easy-to-manage, quick-to-deploy solution provides unified, real-time visibility and enforcement to help organizations both protect endpoint assets and assure regulators that systems are meeting security compliance standards. Endpoint Manager for Patch Management This option provides organizations with a powerful way to assess, deploy and manage patches for the myriad operating systems and applications across heterogeneous environments. Endpoint Manager for Power Management This option enables enforcement of energy conservation policies across the organization, with the granularity necessary to enable application of policies to a single computer. Endpoint Manager for Core Protection This solution helps reduce business risk by delivering real-time protection to physical and virtual endpoints from malware and other malicious threats from a single console. Endpoint Manager for Software Use Analysis Server requirements: Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 Microsoft Windows Server 2003/2008/2008 R2 Console requirements: Microsoft Windows XP/2003/Vista/2008/2008 R2/7 Supported Platforms for the Agent: Microsoft Windows, including XP, 2000, 2003, Vista, 2008, 2008 R2, 7, CE, Mobile, XP Embedded and Embedded Point-of-Sale Mac OS X For more information To learn more about IBM Endpoint Manager for Software Use Analysis, contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit: ibm.com/tivoli/endpoint About software from IBM software from IBM helps organizations efficiently and effectively manage IT resources, tasks and processes to meet ever-shifting business requirements and deliver flexible and responsive IT service management, while helping to reduce costs. The portfolio spans software for security, compliance, storage, performance, availability, configuration, operations and IT life cycle management, and is backed by world-class IBM services, support and research. Additionally, IBM Global Financing can help you acquire the IT solutions that your business needs in the most cost-effective and strategic way possible. We ll partner with credit qualified clients to customize an IT financing solution to suit your business goals, enable effective cash management, and improve your total cost of ownership. IBM Global Financing is your smartest choice to fund critical IT investments and propel your business forward. For more information, visit: ibm.com/financing 5

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