Virima review

01 June 2020
6 minute read
Best practice

Virima review

01 June 2020
6 minute read
Virima

Name: Virima

Description: Virima provides a suite of tools to enable a wide range of IT Management use cases extending well beyond ITAM-specific Discovery & Inventory. Key highlights include integration with ITSM use cases including CMDB, Incident, and Change Management and very strong visualisation capabilities.

Offer price: POA

Operating System: SaaS, Windows, On Premises

Application Category: SAM Tools, Enterprise SAM, Inventory, Discovery

Author: AJ Witt

Product review by AJ Witt

Virima provides a suite of tools to enable a wide range of IT Management use cases extending well beyond ITAM-specific Discovery & Inventory. Key highlights include integration with ITSM use cases including CMDB, Incident, and Change Management and very strong visualisation capabilities.

Overall
8.6/10
8.6/10
  • ITAM Review Analyst Score - 8.6/10
    8.6/10
0/10
Comments Rating 0/10 (0 reviews)

Pros

  • Available as SaaS – rapid deployment
  • Agentless discovery
  • Visual Dependency Mapping
  • Certificate Management
  • Tracking of application patch status
  • ITAM plus ITSM
  • Pricing in comparison to other IT Management platforms

Cons

  • SAM capabilities are limited in comparison to a dedicated SAM tool
  • No automated license harvesting
  • License Compliance reporting requires more manual steps in comparison to a dedicated ITAM tool

Virima Functionality

Virima is primarily offered as a cloud-based SaaS platform for Discovery, ITAM, & ITSM. The product is also available for deployment on-premises if required. Cloud deployment simply requires deployment of the product’s Discovery application in the customer’s environment – everything else is cloud hosted.


Discovery

The Discovery application is foundational to the ITAM & ITSM capabilities offered by Virima. In keeping with other vendors offering suites of IT Management applications the data collected through Discovery is shared between the various use cases. As such, the Discovery capability is critical to the value Virima can deliver for you. From an ITAM perspective it goes significantly further than many ITAM-specific discovery technologies.

Key differentiators are;

  • Over 80 out of box agentless probes
  • Optional Windows endpoint agent
  • Deep discovery of hardware configurations, installed software, processes, listeners, ports, and services
  • Dedicated tracking of Windows Update patch status (also possible to track patch status of other applications such as VMWare)
  • Discovery of security certificate status
  • Discover communications between hosts and network to build dynamic relationship and service mappings


These are capabilities not usually available to an ITAM team and will offer a fresh perspective on your estate, and potentially enable you to engage closely with stakeholders in Security, Compliance, and Config Management.

For organisations with security and compliance concerns the tracking of patch status and certificate expiry adds significant value. For example, expired certificates played a role in the billion-dollar Equifax breach. However, you should note that whilst VIRIMA can complete agentless scans of Windows and non-Windows machines through its 80-plus probes, detailed software usage data is only available for Windows machines running the Discovery agent.  Overall, Discovery functionality is strong across the entire IT estate with the added flexibility of the Windows agent.

CMDB

Virima uses its automated discovery and inventory capabilities to build a Configuration Management Database (CMDB). The CMDB is built around the concept of blueprints. A blueprint in Virima is the means for describing a Configuration Item (CI). Standard blueprints are available out-of-the-box and users can create custom blueprints to meet their needs. This enables creation and tracking of custom fields, for example.

The strongest feature of Virima CMDB is the ability to dynamically build interactive visual maps of your environment, showing the interdependencies and relationships between CIs. For example, it is easy to build service descriptions and instantly see where a fault might lie through visual indicators of events such as a recent change or incident raised. Once built, service descriptions, dependency mappings, and Business Service maps will provide multiple stakeholders with key, timely, and up-to-date information about the environment. These visual depictions of your environment can be saved and shared with stakeholders very easily.

Software Asset Management

Virima provides adequate SAM capabilities, built from the foundations of Discovery & CMDB. Typical use cases such as license entitlements, deployment tracking, and usage and consumption reporting are available. Software recognition is accomplished through interrogating Add/Remove Programs data on Windows machines and via process discovery. The blueprint functionality means that the data stored about your software CIs is customisable, and it is possible to import data from other sources such as spreadsheets.

Within the Datacenter there is full support for discovery and inventory of virtualised environments including VMWare and Hyper-V. As with the CMDB functionality this includes an interactive visual representation of your environment. This extends to public cloud offerings such as AWS & Azure, making VIRIMA a viable tool for gaining visibility of your hybrid cloud infrastructure.

Virima lacks some advanced SAM features offered by dedicated SAM suites including automated license harvesting and generation of Effective License Positions. Compliance reporting is possible with custom reports that can be created with end-user skillsets.

Implementation & Time to Value

A primary strength of Virima is its availability as a turnkey SaaS service. All that is required to start gathering information is deployment of the agentless Discovery App Server and/or Windows Discovery agent to your endpoints. Virima has a strong API for building integrations. Critically, these can be two-way and this enables Virima’s Discovery and mapping capabilities to be used with other toolsets. This will be of interest to organisations looking to migrate away from a toolset, or improve the functionality offered by their existing tools. Virima estimates that a typical customer would have 1-2 administrators assigned to manage the tool which is in keeping with the resource requirements of other toolsets. Virima can optionally provide a full managed service direct to the customer, or via a partner. This direct-to-customer model means they can be responsive to customer needs and the customer benefits from deep first-party knowledge of the product. This aligns Virima with market trends towards Managed Services being used to drive value, typically at less cost than employing FTEs to manage the product in-house.

Conclusion

Virima is a strong mid-market to enterprise offering for organisations looking to go beyond a siloed ITAM solution. The CMDB functionality, and the visual mapping of your environment, is a particular strength. The turnkey nature of deployment and availability of expert Managed Services means that Virima can be closely aligned with customer success and start delivering results quickly. Pricing is competitive both against dedicated SAM suites and larger ITSM players. The product will particularly suit organisations that are starting their ITAM journey and who therefore don’t have the process and skills maturity required to extract value from a dedicated ITAM toolset. The platform approach to ITAM, placing it in the context of ITSM and Configuration Management is an increasing market trend and Virima is well-placed to deliver value to its target customer base.

About Virima

Virima Technologies Inc is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The company was established to provide IT Management solutions. The focus on enterprise datacenter transformation led to the product building out discovery and relationship mapping capabilities. Virima targets companies with 5000 devices and above, therefore offering services suitable for medium-sized enterprises and above. Key markets are North America, Latin America, and EMEA.

  • Supplier: Virima Technologies, Inc.
  • Sales Model: Direct, Reseller, Partner/VAR
  • Target Customer Size: 500 – 5,000+
  • Largest Customer (Seats): 20,000

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