You won't find better backup and faster restore times than the native methods. 3rd party backup tools just make it all a bit easier for people that need it to be easier.
As for a "centralized software management tool" that does this, let me ask.... If you're in a DR situation and trying to get back in business quickly and restores are the only hope left to do so, what are you going to do if your "centralized software management tool" was a casualty of whatever went wrong?
That's not quite true. Compressed backups and restores can be faster, depending on your CPU/IO systems.
As for central servers, SQL Backup can be easily setup and instances added back. Or a restore of the system. We also include utilities in extreme cases to convert our compressed backups to native formats.