ZENworks provides an integrated set of network discovery and deployment tools which can be used to deploy the ZENworks Adaptive Agent to all devices that the organization wants to track and manage.

Network discovery tools are isolated from core deployment tools, leading to the dependency on additional application deployment solutions in order to bring the target devices under management.

ZENworks leverages the integrated System Update mechanism in order to update the core features of the product. This means, no other third party product is required to update ZENworks or any of its components.

May need configuration tools to update or patch the core components.

ZENworks Control Center is the web-based console used to manage the full infrastructure under management. This means ZENworks Asset Management requires no additional plugins, add-ons, or thick client to be installed on an administrative workstation in order to manage IT assets.

Competitive products require thick clients or need add-ons and/or plugins installed, leading to limited administrative capabilities on certain platforms.

ZENworks manages the assets of all major platforms such as: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Unix (HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris), and NetWare all from the same console.

Limited platform coverage focusing around a few platforms such as Windows and Mac OS X.

Core ZENworks services (ZENworks Primary Server) can be installed on Windows Server, Linux, and Open Enterprise Server.

Most competition runs on the Windows Server platform only.

ZENworks Asset Management ships with the Sybase database platform which can be installed as an embedded database on the first Primary Server, or as a remote instance. In addition to this, ZENworks also supports both Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle giving the customer the freedom to choose based on in-house skill sets.

Most competition supports the Microsoft SQL Server database platform only.

ZENworks utilizes the Satellite Server and the collection role for remote branch office locations in order to scale out to the customers distributed requirements. These components can be installed on the Windows and Linux platforms (both desktop and server platforms).

Not available with many competitors.

ZENworks provides offline inventory/data collection capabilities through a portable collector which can be run manually. Data can then be imported to the server in order to keep information up to date on all assets, regardless of where they are or how often they connect to the corporate infrastructure.

Not available with many competitors.

ZENworks provides the mechanism for users to provide demographic-based information by manually entering it, or automatically extracting the information from text files and the registry. This tool can also be integrated with Active Directory and Micro Focus eDirectory to collect demographic information.

Most competitive products provide limited flexibility in collecting demographic-based data.

ZENworks addresses reporting requirements through either ZENworks Control Center or the ZENworks Reporting Server. Both consoles are web-based, and require no plugins, add-ons, or other thick clients to be installed in order to create, customize, or generate reports.

Competitive products provide report generation and report views by leveraging standalone applications or custom consoles.

ZENworks provides hundreds of predefined reports that provide a detailed understanding of the IT assets (both hardware and software) throughout the organization.

Lack of a large number of predefined reports providing limited information about the organizations assets.

ZENworks Reporting Server is powered by the SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Business Intelligence engine which provides significant custom reporting and charting capabilities, without the need of an advanced understanding for the SQL scripting language.

In order to design detailed custom reports, the administrator (or report creator) must have an indepth knowledge of the complete database schema.

Strong business intelligence capabilities provide easy reporting options, to highlight report differences and generate a distribution of reports on a schedule, leveraging the corporate email infrastructure and document repositories.

Competitors do not provide this level of flexibility as far as reporting is concerned.

Approximately 70,000 unique software titles and versions can be identified by the ZENworks inventory scan and reconciliation processes.

Very few vendors provide the same level of identification when it comes to software titles and versions.

ZENworks Asset Management can identify suites such as Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suite effectively. For software collections which do not follow a standard, identification methodology can be custom generated using a collection framework.

While some of the vendors may be able to identify suites, custom collection capabilities are lacking in competitive products.

ZENworks Asset Management has the ability to identify software products of various patch levels, and collate them to represent a proper view of the software product which can be licensed.

Many software vendors expect the correlation between collected data and licenses be established manually.

ZENworks collects detailed information with respect to hardware information including manufacturer, part name and serial number details. This also includes elaborate details for unique identification, and functional understanding/comparison of the hardware assets.

Competitive products do not provide granular identification of hardware attributes, and reporting capabilities.

ZENworks provides the flexibility to edit/add hardware assets that cannot be identified properly for whatever reason.

Competitive products do not provide such flexibility in terms of hardware data collection.

ZENworks Asset Management provides a single view of all software licenses, product usage, and asset allocation to meet compliance, internal budgeting, and assess effective usage.

Most competitive products do not provide the same level of granularity when it comes to license management options.

ZENworks Asset Management provides a flexible proof of ownership model that can associate purchase order based, and custom purchase summary based systems to create a uniform view.

Most competitive products associate one or more purchase orders to the licensed products, making the representation inflexible.

ZENworks Asset Management allows the administrator to represent full license, upgrade license, and maintenance license types in the same licensed product view.

Most competitors are unable to reconcile full license, upgrade license, and maintenance license types in a unified view.

ZENworks Asset Management provides flexibility in modeling entitlements (automatically and manually) for various complex entitlement models such as installation, machine, user, and enterprise based.

Most competing products do not have the same level of flexibility when it comes to representing complex entitlement models, and thus provide ad-hoc custom models to handle complex entitlements.