I have previously used Micro Focus and it was better at uploading information quickly.

We had a major vendor come to us one day, and they brought an auditing firm with them because they were suspicious that we were out of compliance with our licensing. So, after legal mitigation, etc., etc. - although we came out on top - we saw that it was time for us to take a look. We were managing licensing by spreadsheet. So, it was time to move forward and get serious and get something out there that would help us manage our licensing positions going forward.

It's hard to answer this because it has been so long, but it was basically the need to track and report assets in a more formal way, to get away from Access databases, spreadsheets, and things like that. 

We realized a need for compliance, so we created this activity in our company.

We tried to manage the software with a manual process. It's just too time consuming, and it's very difficult because software is complex. This is especially true if you bundle software, or because of the different ways that the manufacturer will supply the software. If you try to do that manually it takes a lot of time and after you spend all the time, as soon as you're finished, you actually have to start over because your software, your environment, is continually changing. So that makes it difficult if you're trying to manually keep up with the software. 

Having the tool, you build the items one time and then you have your discovery that's coming in and the system will let you know whether or not you're out of compliance. And as you introduce new software into your environment, you can make sure that you get it built in the system correctly and it's a one-time, instead of continually over and over and over, every time you want to look at the title.

We switched from our previous solution because there are two big players and CA was already supporting most of the manufacturers in our industry. As opposed to competitors, CA worked with us to connect to our printers through access points.