Asset management has been a topic of discussion for most organisations in the recent past for valid reasons. Purchase and maintenance of assets has been a concern for most of the growing organisations and involves continuous investment. IT Asset Management (ITAM) is been considered as a separate segment due to the nature of assets and added feature requirements.

What Is IT Asset Management?

IT Asset Management is a key process, which can complement the IT Service Management processes. It is important for any service provider (internal or external) to know the assets they are supporting since it enables them to make informed decisions on user requests/incidents.

Let’s take a scenario where an end user is requesting for a change of laptop because his current laptop is too slow. If an integrated ITSM and ITAM solution is available, IT will be able to analyse the situation by combining inventory (software and hardware), incident history and asset history to make informed decisions. This will enable them to decide whether the issue can be resolved by upgrading the current laptop or needs replacement.

Asset Management Solution

IT Asset Management solutions need to combine automatic inventory, normalisation, optimisation and lifecycle management capabilities to provide complete value to organisations. The solution should be capable of handling both hardware and software assets. The challenge is to identify a single solution, which combines these capabilities.

We, at Intertec Systems, have seen organisations having policies of refreshing their hardware assets every three years or five years. Managing your hardware assets properly can help organisations to increase utilisation of assets and thereby reduce cost on asset purchases. We have customers who are able to achieve average lifetime of assets ranging from six to eight years. The solution also allows you to track warranties and contracts of assets. The solution also provide information regarding EOL of any products used by the organisation. This will also help in planning budgets for refreshing these assets.

Organisations can optimise the budget spend on software assets by tracking the entitlement and utilisation of software assets. Reclaiming software used in end user computers (Microsoft Office, Adobe etc.) could be cheaper compared to server based software, but the volume could be high. Server based software licenses (Oracle, IBM etc.) could be smaller in numbers but could be very expensive. Software Asset Management (SAM) solution should be able to handle both softwares to cover the full landscape to gain full benefits.

Managing license compliance for complex licensing like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft is one of the biggest challenges faced by organisations. This may lead to:

  • Under purchase of licenses, which leaves them non-compliant and vulnerable to audits.
  • Over purchase of licenses, which wastes resources. 

Our solution employs a comprehensive algorithm to identify license utilisation of complex licenses like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. The solution gives you deep insight on the utilisation and optimisation options for these licenses which will help you to optimise cost of licenses.

About the Author:

ITIL Expert Certified Abhilash Augustine works as Practice Lead – Digital and ITSM with Intertec Systems, a leading IT solutions and services provider in GCC and headquartered in Dubai. He is an expert in consulting and implementation of ITSM, ITIL, Process Automation, Security, Asset Management, and other solutions for our customers.