Our organization is re-evaluating our Systems Management Strategy, and we were very intrigued by your article. We can certainly understand the desire to stay away from including Unicenter, SMS and Tivoli. However we are considering Novadigm, along with serveral others from your article, at this time. We are very interested in your opinion about Radia 3.0. Based on product literature, I don't see much difference between Marimba or Novadigm.

If you were to offer to recommend a product for us from your article,which would it be? We have approx 12,000+ Windows 2000 Professional Workstations in 9 major U.S. hubs, with several hundred remote sites tied into them. Bandwidth throttling and Multicasting would be extremely vital to our selection. We are utilizing Active Directory, and would most certainly require any solution we select to make use of AD OU's and Users.

Thanks,


Jason Huff 2/12/2002 2:03:36 PM

Application-Deployment Tools


I read Tom Iwanski's "Application-Deployment Tools" (August 2001), which reviews five such tools. The article covers most of the concerns I've dealt with in running a large software-distribution operation for the past few years, but I wonder why the article didn't include some of the heavyweight tools in this
category: Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS), Tivoli Systems' Tivoli Software Distribution, Computer Associate's (CA's) Unicenter Software Delivery, and Novadigm's Radia.


We're a large enterprise (70,000 seats), and these products are the only tools that made our evaluation list. Admittedly, SMS, Tivoli, and Unicenter come with a fair amount of baggage, but many large organizations need this baggage (e.g., remote control, inventory, monitoring, management). Radia and SMS don't really require much beyond the inventory and software distribution and management that they supply.


Tom Cornwell

tom.w.cornwell@kp.org



This product feature looks at a representative sample of purpose-specific products that don't fall in the category of framework solutions. I settled on this approach because I needed to narrow the field of players yet still meet the needs of a large number of IT shops that want functionality without the "baggage" you mention. In the future, we'll look at some of the other products in this key area.


Tom Iwanski


Tom Cornwell 1/18/2002 2:41:34 PM

I'd like to compliment Tom Iwanski on a very thorough review and analysis of these products, and especially for identifying the many strengths of netDeploy Global for large enterprise software management.



I do have one comment on this sentence though: "Unfortunately, netDeploy Global doesn't have the same appeal for organizations that don't intend to migrate to AD." Any product that provides policy-based software management has to store policy information somewhere. In our opinion Active Directory provides a much more powerful and robust repository for policy information than you'll find in any other software management product. Of course, there will be very few of your readers who are not planning to migrate to Active Directory anyway!

Graeme Greenhill, president, Open Software Associates 7/18/2001 3:03:21 PM