BMC Track-It! vs. KACE Systems Management Appliance (SMA)

Track-It! is great for a small-to-medium sized enterprise that has a fairly small IT department but needs far more control of tickets than just email and spreadsheets. It scales well enough as IT departments grow, adding techs is simple enough, as is changing the workflow. A large company would probably be better off with a different solution. The lack of easy customization, and the shortcomings it has in workflow templates (which would be a nightmare for project management) means it won't scale up that far.

Incentivized

I think it has added value for any organization. It reduced our Tech Support cost by: -Supporting users anywhere -Reducing users downtime as well keep them informed with the status of their tickets -Managing software and hardware actively -Processing automation -deploy mass software installs, patching or updates - Provide approved software's to users to install without IT help

Incentivized

• The software is simple to use. There doesn't seem to be a lot of bells and whistles which could be attractive to some users.
• It includes email notifications where users are able to respond to an email and it updates the ticket.
• The system gives you the ability to customize your view so that you only need to see that tickets that are relevant to you or your group.

Incentivized

• Inventory: KACE provides a ton of hardware and software inventory information that is easy to search, filter, and export. This is critical when we need to find the answers to questions about how many of such and such we have in our fleet.
• Patch Management: We were using WSUS before and it was altogether too cumbersome. KACE has given us the power, flexibility, and verification we need to feel comfortable our patches are up-to-date.
• Service Queue: We made KACE our help desk system and it does everything we need it to do. Great improvement over our old system.

Incentivized

• Configuration is convoluted in my opinion. Getting the email to flow how you'd like is difficult.
• A lot of the configuration option names aren't very clear. It seems they use their own terminology for things I would have never guessed.
• Support is lacking - asking them for help always results in them directing you to a KB article. Sometimes you just want hand holding.

Incentivized

• The KACE SMA needs a better way to handle different roles in the software so certain users can access or administrate certain parts of the software, but not the entire software installation.
• The KACE SMA could improve the ticketing process of projects. The aspects of the title and some information do not always flow down from the parent ticket to its child tickets.
• The KACE SMA could improve the UI of the software with the addition of different CSS color schemes.

Incentivized

Overall, the software is simple to understand and use. That said, most vendors have been slowly updating their user interfaces to HTML5 so that they have a clean updated look and feel. This is where KACE falls short in that the UI is great for a packaged software 10 years ago. This isn't a major limitation as the software is really meant primarily for technology users.

Incentivized

We have rarely needed to use Support for BMC Track-It!, but in the times that we did need to use it, they were excellent. The biggest issue is that after not paying for support for about three years, now that we NEED support, it is too expensive for us to receive. This is due to the way their support is billed. So long as you never drop support, then you should be fine.

Incentivized

KACE does exactly what you need it to do, it maintains your computer environment. You can set patch schedules, inventory computers, setup software catalogs; basically everything you need to ensure the computers on your network are being actively managed. This is all with little need for constant configuration or updating the setup.

Incentivized

BMC Track-It! is much more bare bones compared to ServiceNow products, and if your department has the money, ServiceNow is a much better option. Not only is the Knowledge Base much easier to create and publish articles, but the asset management in BMC Track-It! is practically useless. BMC Track-It! is more cost effective, and with a small amount of technicians there's likely no reason to need a bigger solution, but it leaves a lot wanting.

Incentivized

We have selected this software because it rolls several different systems into one. We have a helpdesk system with this and an asset and inventory management system as well. We pay one price for the whole system instead of paying multiple companies different amounts that would have totaled more than we pay for the single system.

Incentivized

• The biggest positive impact it had on ROI was that the software itself didn't require any expensive ongoing maintenance contracts since it was installed and managed by our organization.
• The negative aspect of this is if there was a major problem with the software, then it would require contacting the vendor, at which point it could become expensive for a service call.

Incentivized

• KACE has saved us from having to spend several days of employee hours in crafting DVDs and duplicating them (100+ DVDs)
• KACE has saved us on the postage required to send out those DVDs for every update (monthly) to all of our customers electronically

Incentivized