Asset management moves beyond tracking inventory

Suites from CA, Peregrine, and others also combine discovery and inventory with software usage metering, which is an essential tool for ensuring software license compliance and preparing for an audit. As Viking's Ramachandran learned with Adobe Illustrator, it's also a great way to discover where a company may be overpaying for software. The resulting savings from reduced software costs is one of the quickest ways to show a return on an asset management investment. "Our customers often find that they're overpurchasing software by 20 to 25 percent, which is valuable information for negotiating with software vendors," says Craig Macdonald, vice president of product marketing and management at Peregrine.

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Model for success

Knowing what you have and being able to access that information from a single, accurate data repository represents the Reactive or second stage of the asset management capability model used by CA, Gartner, Peregrine, and many other asset management vendors. The first stage is Chaos. A 2004 TechRepublic survey of member companies of all sizes found that 61 percent of respondents claimed they either had no knowledge of their asset base or used spreadsheets and rudimentary discovery tools to keep track, which puts most of them in the Chaos stage.

Getting to the Reactive stage is a relatively easy first step that accomplishes a lot. It provides essential information for managing patch deployment, planning hardware upgrades, consolidating servers and applications, reducing help desk costs, cutting spending and excess inventory, redeploying existing assets, ensuring compliance and proper asset disposal, allocating IT resources efficiently, and locating rogue hardware and software that cause security and compliance problems. "If someone comes to you and says they need a Sun server for the development group in India, you can find out pretty quickly that India already has a Sun server that's only running at 15 percent utilization," CA's Andersen says. It's also an important foundation for tighter processes and controls and better service and change management. It's valuable information during mergers and acquisitions.

Today, asset management suites go much further than inventory and software metering, storing financial and ownership information -- or integrating with existing financial, service management, and HR systems -- so asset data is associated with users, warranties, service contracts, leasing agreements, help desk calls, tax and depreciation information, and change management solutions. This gets you to the Proactive stage. "Proactive means you've started to build some applications and processes on top of the asset database to help manage the asset lifecycle," Peregrine's Macdonald says. "You can now do contract management so you can make sure you're in compliance."

This allows IT to get a better handle on support costs for each asset to determine true cost of ownership and to do better, more accurate budgeting (see "The Next Step: IT Portfolio Management," page 35). It also helps IT track leases, warranties, service contracts, and service-level agreements so they are better utilized.

"A few years ago it wasn't uncommon for companies to start a project, purchase software, and then kill the project without canceling the maintenance contract," CA's Andersen says. Andersen also points out that a high percentage of vendor invoices are incorrect.