In the research note Predicts 2018: Mature Your IT Asset Management Software Discipline to Deliver on the Promise of Digital Business, Gartner identifies four key findings. These align closely with challenges encountered by and recommendations and opinions from Ivanti ITAM experts, as shown below.

IT Asset Management Software Challenge: Poor Visibility Limits Vision

Gartner: “Poor visibility into and management of cloud services and software consumption are driving rapidly growing demand for accurate, timely IT asset management (ITAM) data.”

Ivanti: “Traditional ITAM has two problems, technical debt and lack of visibility. Technical debt is the tools, poor data, turn over in personnel, and manual undocumented processes people do to just get the job done. All that technical debt leads to poor visibility on the state of IT environment, which makes it difficult to be innovative in order to support the business goals.” (from “Q&A with the ITAM Experts.”)

IT Asset Management Software Challenge: New Technologies Demand Better Processes

Gartner: “Explosive growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) is driving a renewed focus on and need for effective hardware asset management (HAM) processes – a key success prerequisite for robust software asset management (SAM).”

Ivanti: “Based on our own experiences and conversations with customers, we believe…that for IT, the very definition of an “asset” is broader and less distinct than it has ever been. Network-connected cameras and large-screen displays can be found at almost any corporate headquarters. Corporate users increasingly monitor their business emails on the same devices they wear to monitor their heart rates. And every tablet or smartphone used to access corporate data may not be secured to IT’s standards. None of these is a traditional IT asset, yet each requires management by IT, at least of its access to corporate networks and resources.” (from “ITAM: It’s Time (For) A Makeover.”)

“ITAM is about managing risk and optimizing spending while still allowing the business to function efficiently. You can’t do that with inflexible processes.” “Every process should be evaluated for relevancy and effectiveness on a semi-annual basis.” (from “Q&A with the ITAM Experts.”)

IT Asset Management Software Challenge: Support the Business

Gartner: “IT leaders are increasingly looking to leverage ITAM data to support other IT, business and regulatory activities, and ITAM must either rise to this challenge or risk becoming irrelevant.”

Ivanti: “IT asset intelligence data is created by normalizing, then mapping IT assets to relevant information. Asset intelligence establishes the relationships that an asset has with other assets, services, contracts, ELP [effective license position], departments, cost centers, vendors, warranties, utilization, environment, location, and related business objectives. Asset intelligence is a critical component for a complete IT asset management solution.” (from “Three Components Required for a Complete IT Asset Management Solution (Part 3 of 4): Asset Intelligence.”)

IT Asset Management Software Challenge: Software Asset Management (SAM)

Gartner: “SAM tool implementations often overbudget and underperform their business cases due to a lack of governance and the processes needed to effectively integrate them into IT and business workflows.”

Ivanti: “Software has multiple characteristics that make its management different from that of other IT and business assets. Perhaps most significant among these are the growing use of cloud-based software and mobile devices. These and other evolutionary trends are forcing enterprises and their software providers to revisit and revise traditional software licensing and pricing practices. Nonetheless, SAM and ITAM more than overlap. They share both common objectives and core requirements for success.

“How you go about meeting these requirements and objectives depends upon specific circumstances at your enterprise. However you do so, though, you would do well to focus on technologies and processes that help you modernize, automate, and consolidate your ITAM and SAM efforts. That focus can help you and your team discover all of your most critical IT assets, provide insights from what you discover, and take action based on those insights that improve your asset management efforts.” (from “SAM I AM: Software Asset Management Is Asset Management.”)

Getting to Transformed ITAM: Get Better Licenses

Transformed ITAM is an essential element of digital business transformation. However, the challenges and changes discussed above are accompanied by roiling changes in software vendor licensing and pricing practices. Gartner addresses these particular challenges in another research note, Predicts 2018: Negotiate Software and Cloud Contracts to Facilitate Digital Business.

Gartner: “Digital business, and particularly artificial intelligence, will alter software pricing models, metrics and terms. Sourcing and vendor management leaders must grasp the impact of these changes to balance costs, risks and speed while maximizing business outcomes.”

“Be sure to choose a solution that employs software license experts, preferably with software auditing experience. Avoid employing a company that is currently providing software audit services to software vendors. This is a conflict of interest.” “When software vendors are aware that an organization employs ITAM best practices, they tend to audit them less” (from “Five Reasons Software License Optimization Is Needed for the Data Center.”)

Ivanti: Your Partner for ITAM, IT, and Business Transformation

Ivanti has the ITAM solutions you need to ease and speed transformation of ITAM and IT at your organization. We can help you help your business to tap The Power of Unified IT™, and achieve its digital transformation goals. Explore our solutions online, then get in touch with us, and add us to your transformation team.

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