By Dick Stark

On Wednesday, RightStar presented a webinar, “Take a Walk Through FootPrints Asset Management.” Not to be confused with the prior week’s topic, BMC’s Application and Dependency Mapping (ADDM).  When should we sell one over the other?  Or more importantly why will a customer buy one over the other? Will both ADDM and Asset Core work together, and whatever happened to BMC Client Automation (BCA), which BMC was pushing just several years ago?

Asset Core is part of the FootPrints family and integrated tightly with Service Core, and recently, Remedyforce. It is a multifunction asset management suite consisting of discovery and inventory, OS and application deployment, policy compliance, software license, financial asset, patch, remote, power, event, device, and migration management. Asset Core differs from ADDM in several key areas:

• Dependency mapping, the relationship between applications and the infrastructure, is not provided, however topology and connectivity mapping are.
• Power management, the ability to shut down workstations at night to conserve power, is a native application. ADDM uses tables to look up and calculate theoretical power usage and savings.
• Asset Core now integrates with the Atrium CMDB, as well as FootPrints Service Core and Remedyforce.
• ScanStar, RightStar’s barcode scanner for physical inventory and receiving applications only works with Service Core. Asset Core will be supported at a later date.
• Discovery and software license management is Asset Core’s primary function.  ADDM’s primary function is discovery and application dependency mapping.

A simple rule of thumb is that ADDM is for Remedy users (larger enterprises) and Asset Core is for FootPrints and Remedyforce users (mid-market organization). However, given BCA’s near end-of-life status, consider Asset Core for Remedy users as well.  A much larger enterprise might use ADDM for server discovery and mapping, and Asset Core for patch management or software distribution.

According to a RightStar Asset Core consultant, Asset Core usage varies considerably among customers.  “Asset Core really pays off among customers facing software license challenges. For example, software like WinZip and Ad-Aware might be free for home usage, but not on company networks.  The cost of a software audit will often far exceed the cost of the installing Asset Core.” Patch management is another huge time saver, especially if a company has poor processes in this area.

Given that several of the Asset Core competitors are fading (Altiris was purchased by Symantec, and BigFix by IBM), Asset Core is well positioned for continued growth. With Asset Core, IT has an accurate and current inventory of hardware and software, the proper software and security policies, and with Service Core, the ability to manage changes and prioritize support problems.