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Today, information technology is a necessary aspect of running a business and hence requires significant investments. Whether it is a small company with a few employees working on PCs with specific software or a large corporation where thousands of employees perform various roles, ITAM allows you to manage the entire set of assets successfully.
Indeed, companies' interest in ITAM and software asset management, which help companies get the most out of their IT investments, has grown over the past several years. The COVID-19 pandemic, which has expedited the development of the technology-enabled digital enterprise, has also fostered this growth.
In this article, we will discuss IT asset management and try to answer the central question: how businesses can leverage it to achieve positive results.
What Is ITAM Software?
IT asset management (ITAM) is a set of business practices (activities) for planning, recording, and monitoring the status of IT assets that provide measurable value to the organization's core business.
A logical question arises: what are IT assets? An IT asset is any physical component used in an organization's IT environment. Depending on the type of activity of the organization, an IT asset may include different units, for example, IT infrastructure facilities (computers, software, servers, system blocks, printers, and other controlled components) or other types of physical assets (machinery, equipment, cars, etc.). To cut a long story short, IT assets are everything a company owns and provides to its employees or customers.
To get the most value from IT resources, it is essential to manage their life cycle properly. Companies can achieve this thanks to ITAM software, an asset management tool that covers a wide range of ITAM tasks: audit preparation, decision making from planning to procurement and disposal of IT assets, data optimization needed for better control over IT assets, software license compliance assurance, etc.
Key Benefit of ITAM Software: Why Do You Need It?
Let’s have a closer look at the benefits of leveraging ITAM software.
Hardware assets management
ITAM software provides exact details about hardware characteristics, installed software, scan history, and other ITAM-related information. You can now see which software and hardware tools are being used day by day and which are not. This clear picture of current processes enables you to invest in sufficient assets while eliminating inefficient and non-functional ones, resulting in optimized utilization of physical assets.
Forecasting & planning
When the IT assets of an organization are tracked, it becomes simpler to schedule the future amount to be spent on the inventory of IT infrastructure. Centralized ITAM software allows you to scan your whole network, hardware, and software and provide access to inventory data with storage capacity for analyzing storage utilization and planning budget.
Ecological sustainability
When IT assets reach the end of their operating life, companies can either repair the IT asset or resell them. ITAM software identifies aging IT resources and helps you get the most out of them. This allows businesses not only to return part of their investment but also helps to achieve corporate environmental goals by reducing e-waste.
License and regulation compliance
Failure to comply with rules and regulations can cost companies a lot of money, particularly when regulations constantly change. AITM software can help you comply with laws and standards thanks to ongoing compliance checks, detect malware and prohibited software to mitigate risk, and track licensing to ensure software license compliance.
Cost Savings
The ITAM software’s ultimate goal is a fast IT resources investment payback. In the long run, an intelligent IT resource management solution helps significantly reduce the total cost of ownership and allows quickly and cost-effectively upgrading resources to the latest technologies, hence, outperforming the competition.
The list of benefits is quite long. However, let's look at the statistics provided by Deloitte to find out the primary motive for companies that purchase ITAM software.
How to Choose ITAM Software?
The market offers a great variety of ITAM solutions, each having its own set of functions and designed to meet specific business needs. When developing a custom solution or buying one out-of-the-box, make sure it has the core functions that ITAM software should include:
- Ease of integration with enterprise systems, applications, and third-party software to enhance the productivity of all employees.
- Customized user-friendly dashboards to enjoy the visually appealing interface.
- Automated workflow tools that provide a complete overview of your company’s assets.
- Real-time data import to allow employees to know all the asset-related information.
- Asset lifecycle management.
- Inventory management.
- Alerts and notifications.
- Mobile-friendly interface that allows working flawlessly with desktops, laptops, tablets, etc.
The Future of ITAM Technology: Where Is It Going?
ITAM continues to bring financial benefits, continuity, and stability to organizations. However, the role of ITAM teams has shifted over the last few years from supportive to mainly proactive. Thus, Deloitte has conducted research and got the following results.
With traditionally performing analyzing and reporting functions, ITAM software today is transforming towards decision-making. Although the current positioning and roles of ITAM teams vary by industry, the value of ITAM is constantly enhancing and is expected to surge capacity in the near future. To better understand the ITAM team’s role in the different companies’ workflows, let’s turn to the statistics.
Emerline’s Expertise in ITAM Software Development
ITSM software is at the heart of efficient technology transformation. With the primary goal of helping companies maximize the value and ROI of software assets, ITAM is the right choice for your IT processes. But how to choose the best solution?
Emerline has already developed an intelligent asset management system for optimizing IT asset management. Oomnitza is a flexible, powerful, and secure IT asset management solution, ideal for companies of any size. It enables businesses to monitor and manage all IT assets across corporate facilities, plan equipment replacements, and automate repetitive tasks.
If you’re interested in custom software solutions with a set of unique functions, Emerline tech experts are ready to analyze your current business processes and build a platform that will respond to all your business needs. Contact us to learn more about Oomnitza and other Emerline products and services.
