We're customers and end-users. 

Our company chose to use Micro Focus as it is on-premises, which makes it quite secure and therefore quite good for finance companies or those concerned about security.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

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I would give OpenText Universal Discovery and Universal CMDB a rating of eight overall. It is a strong product, and its strengths can vary compared to ServiceNow CMDB, which might be better in some areas like user interface. They are both good, and the choice depends on what you prioritize and need.

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Start small either horizontally or vertically. For example, horizontally you can implement discovery at the IP address level and complete that before you enable any host discovery . Or vertically, take one organizational unit or datacenter and enable full discovery on that subset of IP addresses . I prefer the latter because you can then demonstrate all of the capabilities of the UCMDB within this subset. The former option allows you to demonstrate what devices are actually out there (sometimes quite an eye opener in itself) View full review »

Before implementing, you must finalize the output requirement, i.e., CI grouping/category, attribute, relationship types, etc. This will help in defining the information collection process.

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For a solution that is this complex, I would suggest getting help from an external vendor.

Because of the complexity, I would rate Universal CMDB a seven out of ten.

It may be because we haven't implemented it correctly.

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Large telcos with a history of mergers and acquisitions will benefit from this technology by discovering exactly which components are located where in their data centers, how they're connected and what their status is, facilitating consolidation/transformation of DC infrastructures as well as reducing mean time to resolution in case of incidents. Evaluation is a speedy process because results are visible quickly (imagine a simple scan of a couple hundred Windows servers and presenting the resulting map to a Windows SDM). Usually leads to "oh nice, can we do x or y as well?". Which is what you're doing it for initially.

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They have an ear for the customer; they listen to you. I'm personally very active with them, they have conference calls where you can give feedback or ask them for advice, in addition to the normal support. They have lots of knowledgeable guys now moving to Micro Focus which I hope continues. I'm looking forward to that as they are more of a software company. The problem with support is they have a process, or an organizational structure, that is not leaning to software support.

There is a very steep learning curve. Once you are at the summit, you have a very good oversight and the tool is leaning toward workflows you should be adopting. It's hard to learn all of this, in the beginning.

It is good to you have an expert at the site, somebody in the company already, or someone to train you on the job. I don't think that the training courses have much value. We had training for the tools but we learn more from experiencing it on our own, than from the courses themselves.

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