Broadcom Clarity Reviews

Clarity PPM's strongest features are project and resource management.

Clarity PPM would be improved by developing better support for the Agile framework.

I've been working with Clarity PPM for around seventeen years.

Clarity PPM is very stable across different purposes.

Clarity PPM scales very well.

Broadcom's technical support is good - you raise a ticket with the support team, and they immediately assign a consultant to you.

The initial setup is very simple, and Broadcom provides you with an installation guide.

I evaluated Planisware, but Clarity PPM is more scalable, its focus is built across resource management, project management, and time sheets, and it can be integrated with Microsoft Project.

Clarity PPM is an open design tool that you can design the way you want. I would give Clarity PPM a rating of nine out of ten.

The primary usage is for coastal location and project management. The performance is really good. 

I think with the solution that we have enough functionality out-of-the-box. We also try to use all of that functionality because it is aligned to our methodology and the way we use it for financial purposes. 

However, now we are turning to my next project with a giant framework, and maybe we need some agile functionality related to that.

For us, in Latin America, we use bookkeeping record because we have enough out-of-the-box functionality. 

Maybe we need to bring some financial executive reports to our directors and executives. Maybe we can improve the use of Jaspersoft.

We did have some trouble a couple months ago, but I do not know why because normally it is very stable. 

We did do an upgrade in the past couple of months to 15.1.

Yes, it scales well. In Latin America, we use just it alone. However, in Canada, we have another instance and they use it integrated with other solutions. 

The Latin American support could be better due to the language barrier. It is also a little bureaucratic. I know we have to put in a ticket, but we need immediate support sometimes; not in two weeks time, immediate support.

Not install, but I was involved in configuration of the limitations. It is a little complicated. A lot of fills. 

We were support by the CA team in Toronto, Canada.

We started evaluated some tools related to PPM. CA PPM accomplished our necessities, especially for Latin America.

We looked at HPE PPM. I can't remember why we did not chose them though.

Try the solution according to your necessities.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• Big name brand
• Proven solutions
• Theories
• Implementations
• Especially the functionality in their solutions. 

I don't specifically have a use case, I'm more on the sales end, of going to the federal government. For the federal government of Canada, this has been selected as the tool of choice for PPM solutions.

We find specifically in the federal government space, absolutely, the visibility is the number one thing. They can see where the bottlenecks are, they can see what their project statuses are, why are things being held up, etc.

I think specifically, with a couple of government departments, visibility - when they bill their clients back, when they do a cost recovery - from the financial specifics they can have something tangible and real to say. "Okay, this is how we spend most of this time, this was a net new requirement, this was maintenance, etc. So they can bill back appropriately and when the client questions them on it, they have that information available to them.

Reporting visibility for projects and on the resource management side as well.

We're just helping them start to roll out 15, so no comment here.

Stability is good. In the federal government of Canada there's a central hosted instance of the solution. It's been very good as far as maintenance and outages, there's nothing really negative to report.

Scalability has been good. The federal government of Canada is not enormous. We'll see use cases here this week, at the CA World conference, of JP Morgan, Chase, or huge organizations. We've worked with organizations with IT shops as low as 200 people, all the way up to probably 10,000 people so it's worked out very well.

I wasn't involved on the technical side of setup, but as far as assisting my clients with getting service base, making sure we had all of their organizational structure ready to go into the system, I was involved.

We're the consulting arm, so if it was complex or straightforward, we're either doing good or we're doing bad on our end. So I'd like to say it's good feedback. Straightforward.

I give it a ten. Like I said, the scalability is great. It has a small amount of competition in the space but for me it's an easy sale because it's been the selected software for that space in the federal government of Canada.

It's performing how it is. And I think the more they come out with new versions, they're closing those gaps on anything that does exist.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the quality of the database; the online database is transactional and we are able to get real-time data.

It has helped our organization in regards to the portfolio feature. We are now able to pull all the information together and have a consistent product across all the portfolios. We have various domains and different groups aiding our infrastructure, marketing and sales. Thus, being able to have all the information in one place helps us with the analytics, reporting and decision-making aspects. 

Our business area doesn't really use the system. It's just the IT department that uses the system that we're using. We collaborate with them by giving them some access so there is visibility for the projects that their business might want and then the IT team supports it.

As far as the performance is concerned, I haven't seen any issues.

Currently, we are using version 14.2. It's hard to say at this point but we have been able to get most of what we need out of the system; there is a list.

Cost and speed are important factors when selecting a vendor.

You should do your homework. Make sure that you understand what you're getting. This would be relevant for any solution. You should then talk to other companies or entities that are using this solution.

We are not using the SaaS version of the product, i.e., our specific company is not using the latest version but we do have a global company that's using it.

PPM provides the ability for staff (employees and contractors) in the entire IT organization to track time against specific investments and other work. And we can extract the data to analyze what our resources are working on. It also allows us to perform high-level resource planning.

By using PPM, we centralize where IT resources are tracking their time and eliminate the use of other tools such as spreadsheets.This enables us to gather data on what our resources are working on.

Reporting could be improved. Both the user interface and administration of Jaspersoft is very confusing and not user-friendly.

In my current organization, we have been using it for about two years.

We are on SaaS and system availability is close to 99%.

We have not had scalability issues with the application itself. However, we ran into issues with interface using XML Open Gateway (XOG) when we are injecting mass data into the application (such as resource assignment).

We use CA support and the support engineers are very knowledgeable about PPM. They have experts with deep knowledge in area where we have issues.

We did not have a previous solution.

We are on SaaS and the initial setup was pretty straightforward.

I do not deal with pricing or licensing.

I was not part of the evaluation process in this organization.

I strongly recommend to using CA Service for their expertise. Also, minimize the configuration as much as possible (stay out-of-the-box). Although PPM is highly configurable, getting to know how various functions work together in the tool is much more important than changing a label on a screen to meet a specific requirement!

It's an integrated product. We can do project management, strategic management, and resource management all in the same place. We don’t have to get sources from everywhere. This helps us make decisions faster.

The main benefits of using the SaaS version are its availability, and that we don't have to think about maintaining the systems.

We are just starting our implementation. We deployed it about a year ago, so we're still waiting to see what the benefit will be. Now that everybody is using a single tool, we'll hopefully get some data that will help us manage our resources better.

We could use expanded reporting capabilities because right now that is fairly limited in what it does. I just heard that in 15.2, they have more reporting capabilities; so that will be great.

It has been good so far in terms of stability.

It is highly scalable.

We use CA tech support all the time. They are very accessible. When I need them, they are available to address any issues that I have.

We had about 5 or 6 different ways to record time for work that we do. That is reason enough to move to a single solution.

The most important criteria when we select a vendor are their reputation and their strategic direction. I think we chose CA primarily because of their reputation.

I wasn't involved in the original set up. I think it's pretty simple because we're on SaaS.

Do your research. Make sure you understand what the business requirements are before deciding on a tool because a tool itself is just a tool.

For us, its most valuable features are about resource management, resource assignment, and time tracking.

It puts the right resource at the right place at the right time. Previously, what we were doing was kind of a manual process where it was based on relationships, and the sales rep would reach out to their specific technical person in order to talk to the customer. Now, since we have such a large pool and we're seen as being much more efficient to actually get the right resource with the right skill, not necessarily the one with the sales rep relationship, but who would actually know the most about it and possibly who was closest to the customer. It's one of our parameters that we have.

Improvement to the project hopper would be great. It's a feature that we could really benefit from.

We haven't had any issues with deployment.

We initially had some performance issues with some system down-time, but nothing recent. When they moved data centers, it gave us a lot more bandwidth and memory.

It's very scalable. We've been growing with it. We now have four different organizations on it.

They're very responsive. The call you back. They actually bother you if you're not as attentive as you should be, so that's actually really helpful. People are always knowledgeable. They'll walk you through the whole thing.

It was a long process. It took an awful lot of requirements, and I think the tendency of our company was to make it exactly what we wanted instead of looking to best practices.

You have to figure out your biggest need and pick the software based on it. A lot of times I think it's that one glamorous feature that people love that they want to go with, but I think you have to look across all the different requirements, weigh them, and take it from there.

Working on the technical side of this CA tool for last 9 years with different different companies and clients.

The health report and all metrics of any project including KPIs are now available in a central location under the clarity project or project dashboard, replacing all those excel spreadsheets.

Time Entry, Resource Allocation, Interactive Dashboards, Risk Management, Integration with Jaspersoft reports.

The application memory management and responsiveness of this JAVA product can be improved, especially in the peak usage times. A better way to track, analyze and tweak the heap memory would be a great addition to this PPM tool

More than five years.

Occasional slowness of the product at peak usage times like Budget season, mostly due to poor heap memory management.

No. Its perfectly scalable and perfectly easy to implement the change.

Customer Service:

It's awesome 10/10

Technical Support:

It's very good 9/10

No

Yes, the installation/upgrade is complex. You will need many mock runs in non-prod environments before we try the new version in PROD. Each version upgrade can come with new issues and challenges. But from the latest v14.x versions, this has been simplified a lot.

In-house

We did some analysis on HP PPM. Found Clarity PPM better.

If anyone is looking for a Project and Portfolio Management tool, then I highly recommend CA Clarity PPM. Of all the PPM tools we had tried, Clarity PPM is the most robust, multi-functional and reliable tool.

Check out my other Clarity PPM detailed review at http://www.itcentralstation.com/product_reviews/ca...