How System Center Essentials 2007 Can Save Your Company Money in 2008
A criticism I often hear about System Center Essentials 2007 is that it costs money while there are other free tools out there that do the same thing.
To me, that is sort of like saying it costs money to get a new computer with 4 gigs of RAM, a 160gig hard drive, a 21" flat panel monitor, wireless access and the latest software but my brother is giving me his five year old system with a dial-up modem for free. It depends on what you are trying to accomplish if free is really such a good deal. I'm sure you can send and receive most emails, but don't get grumpy if someone sends you a large attachment. Those two machines are not an equal comparison.
To start out, the 'free' system management tools don't have the same set of features. Unified interface from a single console? No, that actually is a feature unique to Essentials 2007 and isn't matched by any comparable product. Able to use pre-existing management packs for Exchange, SQL, or SharePoint? You'd have to use a higher end Microsoft product to get that functionality too.
Your time as an administrator isn't free. You have a tool that lets you manage updates of Microsoft products, but what about all the non-Microsoft products you have installed at your business. Before you install that upgrade, how do you go about completing a system inventory of not just the hardware but the software being used to evaluate the impact of an upgrade?
If you are like most mid-sized businesses, the system admin manages the entire network, including troubleshooting. What other product will allow you to monitor not only the client and servers but also the SNTP devices like the router? It is much easier to figure out the reason your user can't access email when you can check their system, related servers and network connectivity without having to physically check every machine and device in the system.
Down time is lost money. If employees can't complete their work and customers can't access websites, then your business is losing money. Still trying to justify to your boss why a product like Essentials 2007 is worth purchasing? Review the incidents you encountered over the past year. If you could have been notified that there was a potential issue as soon as there was a problem, how much time would that have saved everyone affected? How long did it take you to do a system inventory? How many problems would you have avoided if you could have identified hardware not on an applications Hardware Compaitbility List? Come up with a reasonable hourly rate to represent your time and you've got the numbers to show that Essentials 2007 would save your company real dollars plus free up your time for solving bigger problems.
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