Cherwell Asset Management was a software asset management offering from Cherwell Software in Colorado Springs, based on technology acquired with the company Express Metrix in August, 2014. Cherwell was acquired by Ivanti, and the application is no longer available.
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Snow License Manager
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Snow License Manager is a software asset management solution, with options for cloud or on-premise delivery. Snow License Manager is designed to reduce the risk, cost and complexity associated with software assets and licensing. It provides a consolidated view on all assets across the network, enabling staff to use one interface to manage multiple software vendors, device types and locations. Audit data can be imported from more than one inventory source to cover a range of enterprise computing…
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 …
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.