I would say the last version, when we actually set it up, was pretty complex. When we upgraded these last few months, it was pretty straightforward. Single installer, really easy to do. If they errored out, it would tell you what the error was. It was pretty easy this time.

The initial setup of CA Asset Portfolio Management is mostly simple. There is some complexity with importing, but we have overcome this challenge.

We had to initially migrate some of our information onto the platform and then we enabled integration with ECC to gather the information. The full deployment took approximately three months.

It was much more complex than we were anticipating. But they warn you that it is not a plug and play type tool. It's very environment specific. Depending on your environment, there are a lot of configuration changes that have to be made; a lot of tweaking and twisting.

We hit some hiccups there, but a lot of those hiccups were due to some of the technical resources on our side, more so than what the tool's limits were. Definitely a complex and very resource-involved setup.

I think at least 70% of that was on our side. There were a lot of things that we had to prepare for that we weren't thinking about with this installation. I think from a CA standpoint, the software was good. But us preparing for that, we had a lot more work to do.

Over the past 17 years that I've been using it, it has just been upgrades. The only complaints have been around major releases and we had CA assistance with those, and it helped.

I do the upgrades. Initially, each upgrade, the process for it was a little different. Lately, they've been a little more streamlined. You do the same process for each upgrade, which is a great help. Having to go, this upgrade was going to be different from this one, going to be different from that one, that was a bit of a headache. It was hard to make sure you had all the things. Now, it's streamlined to the point where it's all the same process. You just grab this file, do this one thing or do these three things, and it works.

It is difficult – it has a high impact to the organization. We had to touch a lot of teams. This kind of implementation needs to be sponsored in the hierarchy because it’s company-wide. It’s resource intensive and time consuming.

The tool itself, just installing the tool is pretty simple. The part that's more complex is the discovery side, how you're discovering the data that you pull in to the system. Also all your entitlements, and the things that you purchased, it's gathering all that data and pulling it into the system. It's more around the processes that are complex, and not the actual software itself.

Very easy. You just install the server, click discover assets, and put it into monitoring mode. It helps us monitor mobile devices, processors, printers, etc.

The new CA Service Management installation is straightforward. We were able to install all apps with the same installation media. The system does the integration between the apps during the installation.

Easy.