Ivanti Endpoint Manager vs. Symantec IT Management Suite

You need to push O365 or some product out to your institution. If you need to build out a reboot before and after and maybe something else, [Ivanti Unified Endpoint Manager (formerly LANDESK Management Suite)] can easily do that for you. It then can also use a query to determine who needs that product in your environment and then continue using that query to watch for the machines you targeted to show up once your push succeeded. If you need to, you can use the task scheduler and schedule your software distribution for a specific not in normal business hours or on a weekend.

I would recommend Symantec ITSM to any company over 250 endpoints seeking to effectively manage their endpoints with a customizable tool. The ability to manage your workstations end to end using imaging tools, software deployment, inventory, workflow engine, reporting tools and end user support is awesome.

Incentivized

• Software distribution - the ability to sit and provide software when a machine calls home works phenomenally well. You may also target based on certain conditions, ranging from LDAP queries down to hardware revisions of individual components.
• Operating system provisioning - the range of choice in sequential execution is second to none. We migrated from MDT to Ivanti's providing with relative ease.
• Patching and compliance - you're able to get extremely granular, and the rollout project templates make rolling it a particular patch from QA to Production an automated breeze

Incentivized

• End to end workstation imaging with a 45 minute average for OS, drivers and base software with only 1 technician touch to name the workstation.
• Application usage reporting on what software is being used and how much - broken down by site, department and user.
• 5% of managed workstations were patched.
• IT lifecycle reports were automated with live inventory feeds to enable purchase reports.

Incentivized

• Mac support - While it's the best I've seen with cross platform support, that doesn't mean they don't have a long way to go to catch up with the functionality of other tools that focus on one specific platform.
• Product coherence - Their core product, the management suite, is great but with every new acquisition the company makes, it seems like there's another product that gets shoehorned into the picture. Making all those disparate pieces work smoothly together is something they're still working on.
• Documentation - They come out with a lot of great features but some are so complicated I couldn't begin to understand the various facets of it all. I realize the days of published manual are long gone but even a PDF covering the major components in detail would be better than having to bump around in the dark until you have to call support for help.
• Software Licensing Management - Every major release seems to completely rewrite this tool but they keep seeming to miss the mark. Lately it's a Microsoft Silverlight program that's very slow and has way too much data to be useful.
• Web Console - The web console is all but unusable. The only way to really work on administration is to use the 32bit console which is great if you're running Windows but a fully featured web console would be much preferred.

Incentivized

• Increased memory consumption
• Older machines can not support the program

Incentivized

As Microsoft evolves Intune, SCCM, MECM and combines their features into the MS EULA, Ivanti seems to be going the opposite where they are stripping out core products in favor of an EULA + A la cart pricing model that simply is more expensive than Microsoft's pricing. A few years ago, the gap was large enough to justify the extra cost of Ivanti, today the gap has closed significantly enough that the value add just isn't there for us.

Incentivized

Items are logically laid out and most are easy to find. The more advanced stuff can be trickier, but it is still not hard to find. There are a lot of options though, so remembering where some settings are, especially if you do not alter them often, can take a minute, but you will get to them fairly qiickly.

I am bit biased after using Symantec ITSM for 10 plus years. However, I found its ability to wrap everything into one console for at a view enterprise health a powerful tool for my department and others. The ability to provide self healing of software packages to workstations was especially powerful. The ability to customize data connections to other tools and automate those inputs and outputs let us provide the business data to support enterprise decisions on Hardware and software usage.

Incentivized

TRM\TAM support has been generally very good. Getting reported bug fixes, design changes, UX problems resolved has been a pain. It is often difficult to get problems escalated beyond the TRM\TAM level. Support is fantastic when you can get it, getting it can often require more work than it should, and that is probably our biggest issue.

With the Blue Coat acquisition the question remains on how much support Symantec is going to give the ITSM suite. Its just not that sexy anymore to have to support a product that touches all the hardware anymore. A few of the really good support reps have gone the way of private which is very concerning.

Incentivized

Better in most all categories. On-prem was not an issue for my organization. MS SCCM was lacking features. Airwatch required increasing tiers of service in order to match [Ivanti Unified Endpoint Manager (formerly LANDESK Management Suite)] features, and lacked the robust inventory data we needed. Meraki was very simple to use, but did not meet our needs. I would say that most Airwatch customers aren't using all the features they are paying for, and could save lots of money by using Meraki instead.

We evaluated Norton and Kaspersky, we chose Symantec to provide more options and more guarantees. In addition, we have used the tool for more than 10 years in the company (the time I am working). It has an interface with all monitoring data and statistics. A specific display of each piece of connected equipment in the network, making monitoring easy and, in case of a threat, it notifies us.

Incentivized

• Centralized IT - all in one solution that is better in some areas than traditional niche software applications. You'll probably still spend the same amount of time with users on the HD line, but you'll be able to reduce the amount of time it takes for auxiliary Help Desk tasks (ticketing, reporting, background deployment, etc.)
• Cost - This is a negative of course ;) But at some point you can save some money if you ditch SCCM or your other CRM

Incentivized

• Reduction of virus infections
• Greater clarity in the reports
• Monitoring the network and infra

Incentivized