Economy is not in your control, your organization’s operation costs are! The economy curve isn’t exactly going north and it is important for you, as an asset manager, to contribute for reducing operations cost. In a recent article by Gartner titled “10 Key Actions to Reduce IT Infrastructure and Operations Costs by as Much as 25 Percent”, one of the key steps mentioned was IT Asset Management (ITAM).
“ITAM by itself doesn’t reduce I&O costs; however, it is a very effective tool to identify and assess cost reduction opportunities.”
IT Asset management is not only a business practice of discovering and monitoring the assets, it encapsulates much more than that – cost monitoring, history, contracts management, notifications, software asset and license management, to name a few.
Few ways through which AssetExplorer lets you identify and asses cost reduction opportunities:
Total Cost of Ownership
One should, at any given instant, be able to know the total cost incurred for that asset, so as to plan for future purchases. AssetExplorer lets you do that and also gives you provision for creating cost centers to monitor the IT asset budget used by specific user-defined departments/projects. This can be used for billing or forecasting budget allocation and to see if the budget has been used in the right way.
Software Asset and License Management
One of the best areas to identify cost-reduction opportunities is to see software license usage in your organization. AssetExplorer shows flash reports on the number of under-licensed, over-licensed and compliant licenses. You can also get reports on rarely used, frequently used software, this helps in license forecasting and existing licensing renewals.
Asset information and Contracts Management
By drilling down into an asset, you can see the history of ownership & scans and the contracts associated to the asset. You can get a lot of information about your assets, for example, a workstation will have details such as Operating system, software running on that workstation, other CI’s related to it, costs incurred, contracts. Auto-notification of contract’s expiry dates (of course, in advance) is a benefit you do not want to miss. The cost of missing out a contract renewal could be expensive. Knowing the asset information and the contracts gives you a heads up of things to come and if you are prepared for it.
Yes, ITAM in itself cannot eliminate costs, but if you can find a solution that has all the features you are looking for, and yet affordable, that’s an added advantage.
Make the right choice and reduce operations costs!
AssetExplorer has all this covered. ITAM, the whole nine yards!
cheers
Joe
http://www.assetexplorer.com
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