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F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management vs. Symantec Client Management Suite

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management

    Score8.8 out of 10
    N/AF5's BIG-IQ provides centralized management of app services and security policies.N/A

    Symantec Client Management Suite

    Score2.5 out of 10
    N/ASymantec 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
    F5 BIG-IQ Centralized ManagementSymantec Client Management Suite
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    F5 BIG-IQ Centralized 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
    F5 BIG-IQ Centralized ManagementSymantec Client Management Suite
    Considered Both Products
    F5
    No answer on this topic
    Broadcom
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    33%
    Would buy again
    5 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    40%
    Delivers good value for the price
    4 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    20%
    Happy with the feature set
    3 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    11%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    1 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    55%
    Implementation went as expected
    6 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    User Ratings
    F5 BIG-IQ Centralized ManagementSymantec Client Management Suite
    Likelihood to Recommend
    4.1
    (15 ratings)
    8.9
    (14 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    4.3
    (12 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    5.0
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    F5 BIG-IQ Centralized ManagementSymantec Client Management Suite
    Likelihood to Recommend
    F5
    F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management works perfectly in Software upgrades and simple daily changes. We are successfully using it to create and or delete objects. It doesn`t works well when we need reports. I usually have to create custom scripts to get a list of objects, for example. Performance is also something that could be improved in Big-IQ
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    F5
    • Common system level changes like cipher suite customization, ssh protocol settings etc can be pushed to all F5 gear through one click of a button
    • Enterprise standard templates for profiles/protocols etc., can be efficiently managed across F5 gear through a single interface
    Incentivized
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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
    F5
    • There a lack of the going forward to next
    • The second site product does not do what we need and we are forced to write our own scripts
    • Many of the alerting that was in enterprise management is no longer in F5 BIG-IQ Centralized Management
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    F5
    There is some room for improvement around RBAC. The access to certain features, options and menus is not straightforward and not that granular.
    Incentivized
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    Broadcom
    So far so good - no major issues with that technology.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    F5
    I feel pinning policies are killing you guys when it comes to being able to add multiple LTMs that have different naming conventions.
    Incentivized
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    Broadcom
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    F5
    The support is a bit complex and not straightforward. It seems there aren't many engineers supporting this platform. There are many components in the solution that makes it complex for troubleshooting. Documentation needs to be more in depth, and I have opened a few cases around cluster sync issues and objects stalled. In the end I was able to find and fix the problem.
    Incentivized
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    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.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    F5
    Of all the centralized Management platforms I have ever used, BIG-IQ is the worst. It constantly breaks and requires fixing in some way or another.
    Incentivized
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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
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    F5
    • Cut costs by requiring less manual hours to manage F5 OS installations
    • Great monitoring and alerting tool for general F5 gear health
    • Provides critical information for capacity planning of the F5 resources
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots