BigFix Inventory
                      
BigFix Inventory
Maintain software audit readiness and 
mitigate security risks with software 
compliance and usage
BigFix® Inventory can identify an organization’s licensed and unlicensed software with drill-down granu-
larity to track software usage patterns and trends across Windows, UNIX, Linux and macOS endpoints. 
The solution dramatically reduces the time required to conduct a comprehensive software asset inven-
tory for license reconciliation or compliance purposes. BigFix Inventory provides valuable insight into 
what the organization owns—and what it has installed but doesn’t own, to understand potential security 
risk. It also identifies how often software is being used, which supports better planning, budgeting and 
vendor license compliance. The near-instant visibility into enterprise assets provided by BigFix Inventory 
is vital to optimizing asset control and streamlining operations.
Easy to use and centrally managed from a unified console, BigFix Inventory enables continuous asset 
assessment and reporting, delivering a low total cost of ownership (TCO) and a high return on invest-
ment (ROI). BigFix Inventory discovers applications, providing up to 4 digit version/release/update level 
information to precisely report critical versioning details. These insights translate into significant cost 
savings for organizations that are spending more than necessary on software licensing fees.
Highlights
•  Identifies licensed and unlicensed software with drill-down granularity to pass more audits, limit security 
exposures and reduces annual software expenditures
•  Reduces the time, eort and inaccuracy of manual inventory and analysis
•  Manages assets on hundreds—or hundreds of thousands—of Microsoft Windows, UNIX, Linux and 
    macOS endpoints
•  Inventories all endpoints, whether on-premise or in the cloud
•  Integrates with other asset management tools such as ServiceNow and IBM Control Desk
Knowing your assets, managing them This catalog is continually updated via a cloud-based service with 
information on commercial applications and publishers 
better using four dierent sources (IBM for the IBM Software, Windows 
When it comes to understanding and managing software and Enterprise UNIX signatures from a 3rd party vendor, and 
assets, organizations today face common challenges. What do additional signatures created by the HCL Software Discovery 
you have? How can you reconcile what you’ve purchased with Team). This discovery process is also easily extended to include 
what’s installed? Do you have the right applications available to tracking of homegrown and proprietary applications through 
the right users? How can you redistribute software to ensure customized template signatures—with no scripting or coding 
its deployed to the best advantage? Overall, are you managing required. The BigFix Inventory approach is a significant change 
your assets in the most ecient and comprehensive way? Are from—and advantage over—conventional management solutions.
you meeting compliance standards? And are you legally Other solutions utilize endpoint agents that rely on instructions  
licensed for all the software installed on users’ endpoints? from a central command-and-control server and require lengthy 
scans to acquire inventory data. The BigFix Inventory agent itself 
provides the computational power necessary for assessment and 
reporting, which vastly enhances reporting speed. Rather than 
scanning endpoints all at once, the BigFix Inventory agent monitors 
changes and sends updates to the server as needed, enhancing 
eciencies by avoiding bandwidth and endpoint CPU bottlenecks.
Drilling down for insight and cost 
savings
BigFix Inventory enables two key software asset management 
functions—“always on” software inventory and analysis, and 
software asset and license management. The “always on” function 
BigFix Inventory can provide answers, delivering deep asset provides a constantly updated inventory that drills down into 
management capabilities even in the most complex software asset information, providing aggregated statistics and 
environments. It covers software vendors including IBM, usage gathered by searching, filtering, sorting, viewing and 
Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, SAP, HP, BMC, CA, Citrix, Corel, exporting data on potentially thousands of computer properties. 
Symantec, TIBCO, and VMware. For IBM products with sub Software asset management is accomplished by utilizing 
capacity licensing, BigFix Inventory also measures the discovered software through the constantly updated inventory, 
processor value units (PVUs), resource value units (RVUs), and while software license management compares discovered software 
processor cores available to and consumed by each software against the number of available licenses. Automating and 
product. streamlining operations enable IT organizations to radically reduce 
BigFix Inventory provides infrastructure views and enables the number of hours and resources spent on inventory activities.
customized views of aggregate application counts, software 
usage statistics and compliance with basic license types. The Container Software Discovery
solution can provide an understanding of the connections 
between software license management and desktop, patch, BigFix Inventory Container Software Discovery is a feature that 
and security management processes. It can give you the focus discovers and tracks usage of software in containers. Container 
you need to better manage your endpoints, reconciling the support provides the ability for organizations to discover all 
real-time endpoint state against application licenses on Kubernetes container instances running in the cloud, similar to VM 
Windows, macOS, UNIX and Linux platforms in physical, instances; retrieve basic properties of the containers, including their 
private, and public cloud environments including AWS, Azure, current status (running, idle, stopped, etc.); scan software in 
and VMware. BigFix Inventory also provides IBM software container images and assess whether the container instances are 
discovery on Docker and Red Hat Openshift containers. running software that is unused, blacklisted or whitelisted; track the 
usage of software running in containers; scan software in container 
An intelligent,agent-based approach images; and tag discovered software and later report on the 
purpose the software was deployed (e.g. test or production) and 
BigFix Inventory is a standalone product that provides capabili- who deployed the software. BigFix Inventory Container Software 
ties either as an independent solution or in concert with other Discovery helps organizations report on all software deployed in an 
solutions in the BigFix family. It utilizes six dierent forms of environment including vulnerable software, avoiding over 
discovery including a Software Identification Catalog (ISO deployment penalties, and understanding usage and status of 
19770 enabled), customized template signatures, an installation software running in containers.
registry, vendor-specific discovery solutions, ISO SWID tags, 
and hardware discovery. This data is gathered to create an 
inventory data warehouse where users can browse data and BigFix Inventory provides a number 
generate reports. of key capabilities:
The built-in Software Identification Catalog simplifies the 
identification of specific software installations by providing •   Rapid installation and implementation - BigFix Inventory is a 
information on over 9,100 publishers, 38,000 software products robust platform designed for speed, installation across an entire 
and more than 105,000 application signatures. enterprise takes only hours. Other solutions, by contrast, often 
require months or longer to deploy. Once installation is complete, 
“always on” inventory captures software status and changes in 
near real time, boosting time to value to lower the total cost of 
ownership (TCO). Existing BigFix users can quickly add Inventory 
capabilities without requiring additional endpoint software or 
hardware.
•   Flexible, ecient design - With the ability to handle hundreds of 
thousands of endpoints, BigFix Inventory provides simplified 
management and reduced hardware and stang costs 
compared to traditional asset management methods that require 
dozens of dedicated back-end servers.
•   Visibility into any asset - BigFix Inventory can gain visibility Prerequisites
into any endpoint across various network topologies in a 
heterogeneous environment and regardless of connection 
state, whether on the corporate network or via the Internet. The prerequisites for BigFix Inventory are available online at 
Software discovery and usage monitoring is enabled on all help.hcltechsw.com/bigfix/landing/index.html.
platforms supported by BigFix, including all UNIX operating 
systems, and provides discovery of processes, file systems, 
hardware and usage. One component of BigFix Inventory is Why BigFix?
the Common Inventory Technology scanner that can also be 
used to gather data from endpoints and discover all signature The HCL BigFix endpoint management platform helps IT 
types, including those that cannot be identified by searching Operations with Continuous Compliance and Intelligent 
only file names. Additionally, enhanced usage data monitor- Automation to manage over 100 operating system versions, 
ing can help prevent duplication of signatures and verify enabling streamlined management processes, tool consolida-
software entitlements. Persistent inventory and visibility tion and operational cost reduction.
ensure that software records are always up to date, accurate 
and complete. Unlike complex tools that cover a limited portion of endpoints, 
the unified architecture of BigFix can eectively manage and 
•   Rapid Streamlined catalog management - The built-in ensure compliance of all servers, desktops, and mobile devices 
catalog feature enables users to configure software asset whether they are in the oce, at home or in the cloud. BigFix 
content based on publishers, products and releases, and drill can find and fix endpoints faster than any other solution – 
down to the package or file-data level. This built-in view, as delivering greater than 98% first-pass patch success rates.
well as the launch-in-context feature, gives users the power to 
leverage scan and registry reports for quick signature BigFix integrates with leading vulnerability management 
creation. The configurable catalog can then be exported into solutions like Tenable and Qualys to dramatically reduce the 
native format and uploaded into a new software use analysis time required to remediate vulnerabilities. It also extends its 
installation before the initial import. well-established endpoint management capabilities to AWS, 
Azure, and Google clouds, enabling organizations to use a 
•   License Reconciliation and Penalty Avoidance - Using BigFix single solution to manage multiple clouds and on-prem in a 
Inventory, organizations can gain increased visibility into their consistent manner.
software license consumption and usage while reducing the The unique approach of BigFix, coupled with thousands of 
time and eort required to manually generate reports that out-of-the-box security checks, will enhance your security 
show software license compliance and usage.  BigFix Invento- posture and automate the fight against ransomware and other 
ry can help organizations reduce the exposure of vendor-im- cyberattacks.
posed software compliance fines and penalties due to over 
deployment and speed preparation of software inventory 
reports. The BigFix Family 
•   IT Budget Planning - Financial analysts can generate the BigFix is the only endpoint management platform that enables IT 
reports they need in minutes, when they need them, regardless operations and security teams to fully automate the discovery, 
of the size of the environment. Reporting access, based on management and remediation of vulnerabilities and assets – for 
computer groups, is available to various roles and individuals in every endpoint, whether its on-prem, virtual, cloud or mobile– 
the enterprise, not just to IT operations managers. The All regardless of operating system, location or connectivity.
Metrics report shows current quantities in use and quantity 
history, which helps financial analysts see license usage over BigFix empowers businesses and organizations to find more, fix 
time. more and do more, faster.
The BigFix family includes:
 
•   BigFix Lifecycle to automate endpoint lifecycle management 
by enabling software and operating system deployment, 
continuous compliance, self-service software catalog, power 
management, server automation, and vulnerability remedia-
tion
•   BigFix Compliance to continuously monitor and enforce 
endpoint security configurations and ensure compliance with 
regulatory or organizational security policies using thousands 
of out-of-the-box compliance checklists. 
•   Migration Planning - Migration planning can be simplified by •   BigFix Inventory to discover and manage over 100,000 
using BigFix Inventory. Organizations who are migrating from an software titles, reduce software license costs and mitigate 
old version of Microsoft Oce to the latest version, for example, security risks of unauthorized software.
can quickly BigFix administrators quickly determine which 
endpoints meet the prerequisites, and which need hardware •   BigFix Insights unifies and analyzes data from BigFix and 
upgrades. As a result, BigFix Inventory can help migration third-party solution providers with deep analytics, new 
planners include accurate costs of migrations and develop business processes, and powerful reporting.
precise execution plans.
•   BigFix Mobile extends modern endpoint management 
•   Security Risk Mitigation - Many organizations do not know capabilities to iOS and Android devices.
about the unauthorized software installations on their network 
and what risks this exposes them to. BigFix Inventory helps IT Visit www.hcltechsw.com/bigfix/oerings/products for more 
and Security organizations collaborate to secure the enterprise information.
by monitoring for unauthorized software and removing 
software which pose a security threat.
For more information
To learn more about BigFix, contact your HCL Software representative, HCL Business Partner, or visit www.BigFix.com.
About HCL Software
HCL Software, a division of HCL Technologies (HCL) develops, markets, sells, and supports over 30 product families in the areas of 
Customer Experience, Digital Solutions, DevSecOps, and Security and Automation. HCL Software is the cloud native solution factory 
for enterprise software and powers millions of apps at more than 20,000 organizations, including over half of the Fortune 1000 and 
Global 2000 companies. HCL Software's mission is to drive ultimate customer success with its IT investments through relentless 
product innovation.
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All product names, trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.                                                                                 032022