Ecora's potential for ITSM integration

Have you heard of Ecora? This New Hampshire based company creates software that's analogous to SMS or some of the BMC products, and their Auditor suite is used by a variety of companies, including my current one. They have two main products, Patch Manager and Auditor, which comes in several varieties.

Ecora Patch Manager can patch any Windows application, from Microsoft to Adobe. It can assess whether a system needs a patch. In these times of constant Windows vulnerabilities and subsequent fixes, system administrators really need this sort of tool. But Patch Manager, as I see it, isn't really ripe for Remedy integration, unless you imagine that perhaps you could integrate it with Change Management and push out patches that way.

Their other product is Auditor, which comes in Lite (free), Basic, and Professional flavors. It is simultaneously a CI (configuration item) discovery tool and a Configuration Management tool. You can direct it to detect changes to your identified CIs. It is all stored in the Auditor CMDB, which they indicate is compatible with the BMC Atrium CMDB. It also has a number of handy reports.

Anyone can give their Auditor software a try. They offer Auditor Lite free on their website. I tried it out, creating a report on my own system, and it was amazing the sort of data it could retrieve, including driver versions, Internet Explorer versions, network connections and more. It formatted it all into a choice of Word or HTML reports. The HTML reports used a Java applet and were a little slow on my system, but the Word document was beautiful.

Soon, the company will offer a Remedy integration, but some people have already created integrations using Remedy's EIE product. Auditor is yet another way to pull useful data into the CMDB, where it can then be used by people through all the strata of the IT organization.

I'm really looking forward to learning more about Ecora and how it can work symbiotically with the Remedy ITSM suite.