There is a significant resurgence of interest in IT asset management tools. Just talk to your Gartner analyst and you will learn the volume of inquiries is dramatically increasing. With the rise of Shadow IT, the continual need to transform IT platforms, and the heightened exposure to unpredictable software license expenses caused by cloud and virtualization, the demand for more proactive management of hardware and software assets and costs is growing across the enterprise.

To help address the constantly shifting world of IT Operations, a new class of IT Asset Management solutions is emerging. It is one that is both specialized enough to be of real value in discrete use cases such as Software Asset Management, but is also broad enough to satisfy all aspects of today’s needs; from procurement to disposal, to the tracking of mobile and cloud adoption – and most importantly to provide actionable intelligence to enable proactive control of IT expenditure.

These systems have been developed from the onset with an eye towards unifying the supporting process and tools that will allow for a comprehensive picture of this new IT infrastructure. In this context unified means these new solutions are equipped with their own discovery mechanisms, catalog systems, visualization models, normalization services and integrated analytics. Further, the most progressive are cloud based and have been developed from the ground up with a specific Dev/OPs model. This means this new approach will support the most significant benefit of SaaS delivery; i.e. Agile methods. They are not simply a repacking of legacy on-premise tools.

Over the next few posts, we will present how these seemingly disparate processes can work together to usher in a new generation of ITAM tools that will have relevance well beyond traditional Infrastructure and Operations departments. These new solutions ensure data is always current, normalized and enriched in ways that create true value and ensure that data can be confidentially shared.

One Proven Approach to Creating A Unified ITAM Solution

Scalable Software’s SaaS-based Asset Vision® provides customers with tools to manage the complexities of the Cloud era. From forensic discovery and normalization, to license management and governance, to integration with other enterprise IT and ERP systems, Scalable’s Asset Vision product suite provides a foundational ITAM solution.

Look for the next installment of The Changing Nature of ITAM Solutions in an upcoming post, but in the meantime please share your challenges and insight on how you are handling ITAM in your organization.