Managing IT assets can be tricky, but the payoff is real
By Malcolm Wheatley, senior contributing editor -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 4/1/2005 12:00:00 AM
The American Water Heater Company, Jackson City, Tenn., finds it easy to manage IT assets. "There's nothing for us to maintain," says Senior Systems Administrator Andy Eades. "The software does it all for us."
Eades is referring to the Unicenter asset management solution from Computer Associates. Before adopting this package, American Water Heater used PC-based spreadsheets to track IT assets—a process that was both costly and fraught with error.
With the Computer Associates package in place, key metrics related to IT assets—such as the number of CPUs and memory available at a given time—are captured and recorded automatically. The system also reports any changes to system configurations as soon as they occur. "We can see if people have installed or deleted any software or peripherals that they shouldn't have," says Eades. "This system is very handy."
With cash-strapped manufacturers now relying on IT as a strategic weapon, industry experts say the desire for IT asset management software is growing. The bad news, experts say, is few vendors currently offer much beyond the ability to identify what hardware and software exist on a corporate network.
"Typically, the major challenge of IT asset management is the diversity of data sources involved, and the lack of index or reference data across systems," notes Jim Miller, a manager in the London office of Deloitte Consulting. "[Most applications] were not designed to meet IT asset management requirements, so they don't share common naming conventions or indexes to allow data integration."
Tom Whiteford, senior analyst with Boston-based AMR Research, says system compatibility issues like these partially explain why Microsoft, "the biggest vendor in the space, with more than 30,000 customers, has been content to sell basic IT asset management functionality, ceding the market for more complex products and non-Windows operating systems to other market participants."
Symantec has sold IT asset management software to manufacturers as diverse as Volvo, Gothenburg, Sweden; Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., Akron, Ohio; Pilkington, St. Helens, U.K., and Motorola, Schaumburg, Ill. But these companies can do little more with Symantec's solution than monitor IT systems for possible security breaches—which has long been Symantec's area of expertise.
"The payoff comes from understanding what systems you've got, what operating systems they are running under, and where they might be vulnerable," says Andrew Warriner, an executive in Symantec's enterprise administration product group. "Are the relevant patches in place? Is the back-up strategy appropriate?"
While finding the right asset management package may be difficult, AMR's Whiteford believes it's worth the effort. "Too many companies are trying to get by with Excel spreadsheets and ingenuity," he says. "The lost savings are huge."
"One of the selling points [of IT asset management software] is quick, tangible benefits," agrees Jerry O'Neill, senior product marketing manager with MRO Software, which specialized in software for maintaining production equipment before adding IT asset management capabilities several years ago. "We see customers achieve an ROI in six months or less."
Those savings often come from instituting new policies once a company analyzes how IT assets are being used. For instance, O'Neill says, it's common for companies to discover that they can redeploy existing hardware—instead of making new purchases—to support a new business process. Just this simple insight often yields a 10-percent to 15-percent reduction in IT equipment inventory, O'Neill says.
Allan Andersen, director of Unicenter product management at Computer Associates, says there are many other good reasons for taking stock of IT assets. "Just because you find it on your network doesn't mean you own it," he says. "It's important to distinguish between those things that you have bought and paid for, and those things that just happen to be in the environment."
Many companies institute asset management policies to prevent the purchase or use of unauthorized hardware or software, but Andersen says that shouldn't be the sole focus. "You may well find that there's rogue purchasing going on—but you're more likely to find you're paying for an awful lot of licenses, and maintenance for items you're not using. We very often find double payments being made, where fees have been paid from two locations for the same item."
