Is your organization successfully managing its IT assets? Are you maximizing the value of your assets across their life span?
If your answer is “no,” you are not alone.
We have found that about 60% of companies doing business today would receive a “D” if graded on how effectively they manage their IT assets.
The solution?
IT asset management, also known as ITAM for short.
ITAM is a proven way to ensure your organization optimizes its IT assets while maintaining compliance and controlling costs.
ITAM proactively tracks all your IT assets (hardware, software, networks, and cloud devices within your IT environment) across each asset’s lifecycle—planning, acquisition, installation, maintenance, and retirement.
The process provides clarity to your organization with valuable information about your assets, such as inventory, owner and access rights, and user and location data.
Organizations out of compliance with software licenses and subscriptions risk incurring severe penalties. They face heavy fines if they are not managing compliance, and an audit reveals they’re using more licensing than they purchased. We’ve seen audits that are eight digits long, cause significant staffing burdens, make chief financial officers (CFOs) prematurely gray and leave organizations exposed to unbudgeted expenses.
ITAM mitigates risk by making sure your organization complies with licensing regulations. This leads to more efficient utilization of both the hardware and software within your company.
Many companies pay for and waste as much as 40% of their assets because they’re underutilized or sitting on a shelf. Whether the assets are on-premises, in the cloud, or SaaS, that is a significant expense for any organization, regardless of size.
ITAM allows your company to eliminate waste and decrease costs by redistributing or discarding underutilized assets, thus optimizing your IT asset investments.
When your company performs ITAM consistently, you chronicle a history that empowers your organization to increase your assets’ cost-effectiveness. You create a transparent, rules-based, data-rich, and intelligent environment by using this information to make decisions.
Information about hardware or software history, dependability, and durability will inform future purchasing decisions, allowing for improved budget forecasting.
ITAM establishes standardization of assets enterprise-wide. This enables IT, developers, and innovators to maintain consistency across the organization, saving time and improving productivity.
Successfully managing IT assets requires an extraordinary amount of skill, knowledge, and experience in the realm of software licensing. Licensing is highly complex, with myriad rules and regulations not commonly known.
While your company might be able to source a few people who know specifically about Microsoft licensing, Oracle licensing, and SAP licensing, finding employees with the breadth of knowledge and expertise required to manage thousands of assets and hundreds of publishers at a scale that encompasses all your licensing agreements will be challenging.
It would be akin to asking someone on your IT team to explain how the U.S. tax code works. Perhaps they could detail the basics, but if you’re seeking authoritative advice, you’d likely prefer to tap into a tax expert's knowledge.
SoftwareOne recommends companies undertaking ITAM seek consultation from an expert resource for guidance on their IT asset management journey.
SoftwareOne’s Diagnostic Platform is a set of assessment-based services designed to help your organization understand your current capabilities across people, processes, and technology in relation to ITAM.
We examine where you are in your asset management journey, what technologies would improve your organization’s operations, and how your company can derive an optimal return on investment. Our analyses compare your position with others in your industry, benchmark against ISO standards, establish detailed business requirements for new technology, and lays the groundwork for determining a path forward and next steps.
Our comprehensive assessment examines the most common challenges enterprises face in the ITAM process and recommends solutions:
The SoftwareOne Diagnostic platform takes between six to eight weeks to complete. This thorough assessment progresses over the course of three steps:
SoftwareOne examines the entire lifecycle of your software. This begins with catalog management and follows every step of an asset’s life cycle until it is retired or taken out of service.
We determine how your processes currently function, how well they perform, and how much conformity they are to today’s ISO standards.
In this step, we analyze your technology to determine if it will aid in software or hardware asset management (asset discovery, active directory, normalization, configuration management, deployment, change, etc.). When the analysis is complete, we make recommendations on the best tools available based on your business requirements.
As a provider and critical user of many of these technologies, we often know what tools work best.
Gathering all the information we’ve compiled, we review your options for the next steps. We explain the impact of recommended investments on your business, how much of an investment your company will need to approve, and, once approved, the associated ROI you can expect to realize over the next five years.
Because SoftwareOne is technology agnostic, we present your enterprise with the best possible solutions. Using PyraCloud, we can deliver our assessment to you in an automated form, clearly defining our recommendations for your next best steps.
Historically, companies who take advantage of SoftwareOne’s Diagnostic Platform Service realize an ROI of five times their investment. That means your organization can expect this service to more than pay for itself over time.
Is your organization ready to start on a successful ITAM journey? Discover the ITAM Best practices to optimize your cloud spend and drive business value.
Download our full list of on-demand sessions to gain valuable insights on optimizing your software asset management (SAM), enhancing your FinOps practice, and modernizing for long-term value.
Download our full list of on-demand sessions to gain valuable insights on optimizing your software asset management (SAM), enhancing your FinOps practice, and modernizing for long-term value.
