Cherwell Asset Management (discontinued) vs. Snow License Manager

For small industries, it can prove to be a better solution as Cherwell offers comparatively affordable costs for small organizations. But for larger companies, there are many other solutions available in the market that are less complex and offer a variety of additional features. It can be a little complex to use because of its high configuration.

Incentivized

I have said at a number of events that I have attended, where other suppliers have shown their latest and greatest new thing, it is the fundamentals that need to work, and need to work well, and this is what Snow License Manager does. It does not take a team of 100 staff to get the tool working or to keep the tool functioning, it works and is stable out of the box. We have learnt that putting the right processes in at the start means that Snow License Manager can do what it has been designed to do and what we have paid for it to do. Audits from vendors now days are relatively simple actions, with the Snow License Manager doing it's job we can quickly run a report and know exactly what our position is and then act accordingly, quick, simple and accurate data at your finger tips, as long as you put the work in to enter the license details etc. If Snow License Manager could invent a robot to go around the business and find all these bits of paper for us then that would be perfect.

Incentivized

• Automation
• Integrating with other systems
• Full control over how ITSM platform is set up and used

• SLM finds installations of software reliably.
• SLM determines the usage of applications, web apps, and the users who employ them.
• SLM Reports help management determine current and future application usage.
• SLM notifies when forbidden programs are installed.
• SLM provides complete license management.

Incentivized

• Very costly licenses.
• Requires comparatively high amount of configuration.
• Comparatively complex to use other solutions available in market.

Incentivized

• Recognition of licensed plugins running in another application's executable is missing
• There is inconsistent use of Wildcards like "%" across search fields in the SLM and SMACC
• The search "filter" called "Also include not installed/used" is necessary to see not installed/used applications.

Incentivized

It is a tool that works, a tool that is reliable, and trusted within the industry and our company

Incentivized

While the deployment is fairly easy, updating the agent can be tedious. For one, each new version needs a request to customer support, but too it's not possible to "update" the old version rather than reinstall the new one. The lack of customization/configuration possible for the SnowAgent installer is irritating. Putting that aside, once the system is set up it's fairly easy to maintain and with very few hiccups, update. It overall runs very smoothly with little to no error.

Incentivized

Never had issues in this area. Always up and running

Incentivized

It took some growing pains and SNOW fixed performance issues for their product, but never had any issue with it

Incentivized

Cherwell support has been excellent! Always available to take our emails and calls and get back to us quickly.

Support for the most part is responsive, but there are times when it takes more time than I would like to resolve. But then, most of the time it is related to growing pains and the fact I do not have a Dev/Test environment to test items and upgrades before going to Production

Incentivized

Love it, and I got to go to Sweden

Incentivized

It went well, we took out time and verified each step as we went

Incentivized

Cherwell Asset Management is a quite known and affordable solution for Asset management for organizations where there are more than 800-1000 users as it provides a complete integrated solution. There are many additional features that are available in Cherwell which is not available in other solution, like tracking of cost, management of procurement, etc.

Incentivized

The deciding factor for the decision makers was the combination of license management and utilization statistics. Our desktop people wanted the utilization and reporting to be very granular and close to real time. Snow was purchased because they promoted their real time utilization in addition to the license management, alerting and reporting. To my knowledge, only Snow was given a proof of concept before the decision was made.

Incentivized

Not quite sure I understand the deployment question. We deployed company wide

Incentivized

Worked great and accomplished the goals

Incentivized

• Consolidated other systems into a single platform

• Snow License Manager has paid for itself over and over again, and not just the cost of Snow License Manager, but also the cost of the infrastructure and the upgrade of that infrastructure. Most users target the server environment first, and there are some big cost saving to be made there, but also the big expenditures. The desktop side can normally be deployed faster and give quicker returns, application license re-use is a policy that saves us tens of thousands every month.

Incentivized