There isn't a single tool, product, suite, platform or framework that can manage all of your enterprise network assets. Workgroup suites are easy-to-use and well-integrated, while enterprise platforms are complex and built to size. We've found these solutions evolving to match the other's strengths, but their tangled and overlapping features, functions and shared technology make them tough to sort.

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Asset Management: Inventory
Asset Management: Software Distribution
Asset Management: Software Metering
We brought nine enterprise asset management products into Network Computing's Syracuse University Real-World Lab®. Solutions from Hewlett-Packard Co., Intel Corp., MainControl, Microsoft Corp., ON Technology Corp., PLATINUM technology, Seagate Software, Tally Systems Corp. and Tivoli Systems were tested based on their ability to provide three key asset disciplines: inventory, software distribution and software metering. We deemed these functions critical to the task of tracking the life cycle of a system--namely the deployment, maintenance and retirement of computing hardware and software resources.

We found that products with solid workgroup backgrounds, such as those from HP, Intel, Microsoft and Seagate Software, try to be masters of all disciplines. These solutions, on the whole, are easy to set up and use. However, they lack the architectural and platform depth found in more complex products, such as those from MainControl, PLATINUM and Tivoli. Products from ON Technology and Tally fall into a third category: They offer strong solutions in the specific areas of software distribution and inventory, respectively.

Absent from this roundup are Computer Associates International and Novell. Computer Associates declined to participate in a review that would be broken out into individual disciplines, saying that it believes TNG Unicenter should be reviewed only in its entirety. Novell, which initially declined to participate, eventually sent product to be included; unfortunately, it was received too late. We hope to include both vendors in future reviews.

Breaking It Down Within each of the three disciplines we tested, we chose comparison categories that were important to management in a large enterprise. Also important to meeting enterprise needs is the product's architecture--its integration and securi ty, how its pieces are distributed and supported OSes.

Categories such as ease of use and setup were not weighed as heavily in our tests. Products that offer heterogeneous platform support are necessarily more complex. Workgroup products often support only a single client platform, which makes them easier to install. Don't discount them, however. The dominance of Windows on the desktop often makes choosing a Windows-only product the right way to go, and if that product is easy to use, so much the better.

The biggest failing of workgroup-based products is their inability to limit access control to portions of their applications. Overall, we didn't find application security granular enough for delegation via a tiered management solution. The larger enterprise products had their failings as well. Our biggest peeve was lack of support for external access control from technologies like NDS or NT Domains.

We did not grade these offerings on price. We did, however, create two enterprise scenarios and asked each vendor to provide us a quote (see "A Word on the Complexity of Cost").