Choosing a Client Lifecycle Management Solution

Jan 9, 2012 11:16:50 AM

Desktop PCs and laptops are the backbone of business profitability.  Yes, yes … I know … last week I raved about the rising mobile device revolution – but that transition is still a few years off.  Today the PC desktop remains king in enabling enterprise workforce productivity, and, in fact, organizational success and ongoing profitability is tied at the hip to desktop and laptop performance in most modern enterprises.  Unfortunately, management of these endpoints persists in being a nightmare to perform.  Consider your own home PC environment – how much time do you spend on installations, patch updates, and performance improvements, not to mention repairs from system crashes, malware intrusion, and software incompatibilities.  Now extend these challenges to hundreds or thousands or even millions of endpoints, and you get some sense of the daunting task facing IT managers.

Obviously, desktop management practices are far too complex to be performed by manual processes alone in enterprise environments, and automated tools must be employed to ensure consistency and reliability across the support stack.  Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) encompasses the breadth of desktop support requirements from initial deployment through final retirement, and, fortunately, a number of automated CLM solution suites are currently available that can greatly simplify and enhance those processes.  But with all the options
available in the market place, it’s not easy to determine which solutions are best suited to meet an organization’s unique requirements.  All too often, enterprises settle on the solution pitched to them by the first vendor they encounter or simply adopt solutions offered by one of the most popular vendor names.  CLM solutions that are designed to be cost-effective, however, may not provide the breadth of support an enterprise requires, and platforms with expansive feature sets may be wasteful to organization that only require a portion of the functionality provided.

To assist in this decision making process, We have developed a ranking report titled, “The EMA Radar Report on Client Lifecycle Management” (http://bit.ly/ptdYa6), that provides an in-depth side-by-side comparison of the leading vendors in the CLM space and clearly rates them according to both features and cost-effectiveness.  Vendors that achieve
the best value in their solutions have been awarded special recognition in the
report.  It is our opinion that clearly and objectively revealing both areas of excellence and deficiencies encourages platform innovation and improvements with vendor development efforts.

Any organization investigating or considering a client lifecycle management solution needs to review The EMA Radar Report on Client Lifecycle Management.  Although each business will have its own unique requirements for a CLM platform, the Radar Report will provide the foundation from which informed decision making can be performed.  We’ve done all the research and product vetting for you – all you have to do is read it.

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Steve Brasen

Written by Steve Brasen

Steve Brasen is a Research Director leading EMA’s practices covering endpoint management, identity management, and access management. Steve’s career at EMA follows 20 years of “in-the-trenches” enterprise experience in IT management, operational support, and engineering for high-technology, telecommunications, and financial institutions, including: MCI Worldcom, Bell Communications Research, UNIX International, Salomon Smith Barney, and Agilent Technologies.

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