CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager vs. Symantec Client Management Suite

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
CA Service Management
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
CA Service Management, including CA Desk Manager, is a fully-featured ITSM platform, now from Broadcom. It competes with BMC Remedy, ServiceNow, FrontRange ITSM, Cherwell Service Management etc. It is based on technology acquired by CA in 2010 with Nimsoft, and is now supported by Broadcom since the 2018 acquisition.N/A
Symantec Client Management Suite
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
Symantec Client Management Suite is designed to automate time-consuming and redundant tasks for deploying, managing, patching, and securing desktops and laptops so organizations can reduce the cost and effort of managing Windows, Mac, Linux, and virtual desktop environments.N/A
Pricing
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk ManagerSymantec Client Management Suite
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
CA Service ManagementSymantec Client Management Suite
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk ManagerSymantec Client Management Suite
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk ManagerSymantec Client Management Suite
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager
8.6
6 Ratings
5% above category average
Symantec Client Management Suite
-
Ratings
Organize and prioritize service tickets9.76 Ratings00 Ratings
Expert directory8.75 Ratings00 Ratings
Service restoration8.46 Ratings00 Ratings
Self-service tools8.66 Ratings00 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications7.96 Ratings00 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation9.76 Ratings00 Ratings
ITSM reports and dashboards7.55 Ratings00 Ratings
ITSM asset management
Comparison of ITSM asset management features of Product A and Product B
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager
9.2
6 Ratings
11% above category average
Symantec Client Management Suite
-
Ratings
Configuration mangement9.76 Ratings00 Ratings
Asset management dashboard10.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Policy and contract enforcement8.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Change management
Comparison of Change management features of Product A and Product B
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk Manager
9.1
6 Ratings
8% above category average
Symantec Client Management Suite
-
Ratings
Change requests repository9.06 Ratings00 Ratings
Change calendar8.64 Ratings00 Ratings
Service-level management9.55 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk ManagerSymantec Client Management Suite
Small Businesses
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
ManageEngine Endpoint Central
ManageEngine Endpoint Central
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
Ivanti Neurons for ITSM
Ivanti Neurons for ITSM
Score 9.1 out of 10
ManageEngine Endpoint Central
ManageEngine Endpoint Central
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk ManagerSymantec Client Management Suite
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(12 ratings)
8.9
(14 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
4.1
(6 ratings)
9.1
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
CA Service Management, with CA Service Desk ManagerSymantec Client Management Suite
Likelihood to Recommend
Broadcom
It is a suitable tool for a large organization with extensive user needs. It is not for a small shop as it may be over-engineered for smaller organizations that don't have teams that can manage a solution of this size. It does have some significant hardware and configuration needs, but that should not deter customers from deploying it in-house. I've seen it deployed in the cloud as well as in-house; the downside to deploying it as a hosted solution is you're forever at the mercy of the vendor for customizations, and they cost an arm and a leg. The simplest things take a long time and cost much more money than necessary, so you can't truly get a custom solution and end up with mostly vanilla services (unless you have very deep pockets.)
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Broadcom
Whenever you have computers that aren't easily accessible or you have a big site to cover (or multi location), Symantec Client Management Suite (CMS) is really great to manage all your computers, if it's for installation, software, licenses or even status. Setting up all you need from CMS can take some time, especially when you're in a multi-location site. We had to ask the Symantec engineers to help us a couple of times and set things up because even if we followed the documentation, it wasn't an easy task. But at least, the Symantec engineers are people that know what they do and they're really efficient at it.
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Pros
Broadcom
  • A large community where, if help is needed, is usually very helpful and quick to respond.
  • Various sites with good information on various issues. If you have a problem, there's a good chance some else already had it and documented it.
  • Fairly easy installation of the product if recommendations are followed and prep-work is done.
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Broadcom
  • Patch Management: We are able to easily deploy patches to all our workstations and accurately report on compliance.
  • Software Delivery: We do a lot of software deployments to our end users and with CMS we can quickly create policies or tasks to perform these deliveries and get quick results on our success or failures.
  • Inventory: Ease of use to get reports of what workstations have what software installed, patch levels, or hardware specifications.
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Cons
Broadcom
  • The right-click feature is disabled in this application and users are unable to copy and paste with mouse or touchpad.
  • The application also freezes quite a bit and a user will have to quite often close and reopen browser to get it functioning properly.
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Broadcom
  • More transparency with the roadmap would be a welcome change. New and upcoming features are usually a surprise until a major Symantec Event takes place but little is heard about those features before and even after, in some cases, leading up to a release.
  • Documentation for some items is poor. Especially around the Workflow product. It was intended that the documentation for the elements in a workflow would be crowd-sourced, which is a good idea, but in order for that to happen, more people need to be using it and taking the time to draw up the documents.
  • Cost. Its always a big topic, especially in higher-ed, but Symantec could do more to lower its costs for some product lines in order to gain more acceptance and support. If that was done and more institutions could get their student workers to use the product, once they leave college and go into the "real-world" there is a possibility that they would start recommending Symantec products because of their use in College.
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Likelihood to Renew
Broadcom
While the concepts of Service Desk and EITM were solid. The user interface, tool capabilities, and integrations fell behind the rest of the industry. Too often it seemed like CA bought and rebranded products without fully integrated them with their other products. It was a coat of paint, without the parts under the hood being updated. The overhead for administration was too high and the reporting capabilities were absolutely amongst the worst I've seen.
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Broadcom
So far so good - no major issues with that technology.
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Support Rating
Broadcom
No answers on this topic
Broadcom
Support at Symantec isn't that great. Client Management Suite isn't even listed on the Support Portal when trying to open a ticket. Your best bet for support is actually the user groups that Symantec hosts. The members of the groups are usually very responsive. With Broadcom buying Symantec, I've seen a huge jump in personnel leaving Symantec, so I'm assuming the support is just going to get worse. Recently for a simple question, I reached out to 5 people just to find out 4 of the 5 had left the company.
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Alternatives Considered
Broadcom
We are too integrated with CA Service Desk Manager to disassociate anytime soon. We found the more we used the product the more we needed to customize it in order to better integrate with our business processes. There are other alternatives that have many built-in features that had we have foreseen our future requirements... would have chosen ServiceNow or Remedy as our "go-to" ticketing product.
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Broadcom
Although there are other tools that can be utilized I don't believe those tools are as robust as Symantec Management Platform. The Symantec Management Platform was chosen because of the value it returns internally and for our customers. You can pull just about any data element from an endpoint and provide detailed reports or great graphs for the C-Level
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Return on Investment
Broadcom
  • Having CA Service Desk Manager within the company has increased the satisfaction of customer service from 68% to 95%. Teams are getting better customer survey scores and making better efforts to meet their SLAs.
  • CA Mobile app has provided agility and collaboration among IT Users and Customers.
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Broadcom
  • SMP allows us to centrally manage all of our endpoints with little to no end user interaction.
  • With the new P2P downloading our bandwidth constraints have been almost completely removed.
  • Cloud Enabled Management (CEM) allows our remote users to receive the same updates as in-network devices without the need for a VPN connection.
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ScreenShots