Legacy ITAM and SAM tools slow change programmes down by demanding manual work at every step. Here is what automating discovery, licensing and cloud cost control actually removes — and what CerteroX automates today.
Technology has moved quickly for a long time, but the past decade changed the shape of the problem rather than just its speed. Cloud, analytics, mobile, AI and connected devices arrived more or less at once, and each one added a category of thing you now have to account for.
As organisations adopt them, the scale and complexity of what IT has to govern accelerates. Managing that change is one of the hardest jobs a CIO has. And the tools most teams use to do it — the IT asset management and software asset management tools bought years ago — increasingly work against them.
The main limitation is speed, and the cause of it is architecture.
Tools built decades ago kept up by bolting things on. Each addition brought its own data structure, its own interface conventions and its own idea of what a “device” or an “application” is. What you end up with is not one tool but a set of tools that share a logo, and a set of data sources that have to be stitched together by hand before they mean anything.
That stitching is manual work, and manual work has three costs. It is slow. It introduces human error, so the data you finally assemble is less trustworthy than the data you started with. And it scales with the size of your environment, which means the problem gets worse precisely as the environment grows.
The result is familiar. Reports take weeks. The numbers get argued with. Governance weakens as the volume of assets rises. Change programmes stall waiting for information that should have been available on demand.
The useful question is not “is this tool automated” but “which specific manual steps does it delete”.
Start with discovery and inventory. CerteroX ITAM runs ten discovery methods — a native agent, command-line inventory, agentless collection, standalone inventory for air-gapped machines, Active Directory import, network scan, third-party ITAM import, cloud and SaaS connectors, browser monitoring and file metering — and lands all of them in one schema. Windows, macOS, Linux, AIX, HP-UX and Solaris get the same agent and the same inventory cycle. There is no reconciliation project afterwards, because there is nothing left to reconcile.
That matters more than it sounds. Reconciliation is where most of the manual effort in a legacy toolchain lives, and it is where most of the errors are introduced.
Then licensing. The old model was to produce an effective licence position as a project: gather the data, normalise it, apply the entitlement maths, publish a document, watch it go stale. CerteroX SAM computes the position continuously — purchased, used, available, required, variance and exposure — against publisher-specific engines for Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, Adobe and Salesforce. Usage is metered against a rolling 90-day window, so “installed” and “actually used” are separate numbers rather than the same guess.
You are not producing a compliance position faster. You are no longer producing one at all, because it is already there.
Then the things that used to sit outside the remit entirely. CerteroX SaaS Management discovers applications through three converging signals — identity provider sync, vendor API connectors and a browser extension — against a catalogue of more than 35,000 applications, with 47 connectors shipping today. It detects unused licences at 30 or more days of zero usage and can reclaim, reassign, downgrade or archive them through a workflow engine with eight triggers, eleven conditions and thirteen actions.
CerteroX Cloud Management applies 26 named optimisation checks across twelve cloud and data platforms — abandoned instances, obsolete snapshot chains, instances stopped but not deallocated, rightsizing, reserved instance opportunities — each individually tunable with its own thresholds and exclusions. Certero’s average customer saving across cloud environments under management is 38%.
The second benefit after automation is that everything above shares one data model.
This is the part that legacy toolchains cannot retrofit. When hardware, software, SaaS and cloud all resolve to the same records, an analytical question that would previously have required an export, a spreadsheet and a week becomes a query. Which departments are paying for applications nobody has opened. Which servers are carrying licensable Oracle options nobody enabled deliberately. Which devices are out of warranty, below specification and generating tickets.
None of those questions is hard. They are only hard when the answer lives in four systems that disagree.
Automated data collection changes what governance can be.
If the position is only accurate the week you assemble it, governance has to be a review — something you schedule, staff and survive. If the position is accurate continuously, governance can be a rule that runs.
CerteroX ITAM ships Governance Policies for exactly this: compliance as code, with a reusable filter builder and named checks such as BitLocker enabled, Defender running and Azure VM tag hygiene. Policy definitions export and import as JSON, so they are versionable like any other configuration. CerteroX Cloud Management adds policy of a different kind — expense anomaly detection against a rolling daily average, resource TTL with automatic lifecycle enforcement, tag compliance rules, and daily and total expense limits per resource or pool.
The point in both cases is that the control fires before the invoice does, rather than being discovered during a review three months later.
Automating ITAM, SAM, SaaS and cloud asset management does four things:
That last point is the one worth dwelling on. Asset management is not usually thought of as a strategic function, and when it is done manually it is not one — it is overhead. Automated, it becomes the thing that tells you what you own, what it costs, who uses it and whether you can safely turn it off. Every significant change programme needs those four answers, and needs them faster than a spreadsheet can supply them.
To see one schema do the work a stitched-together toolchain does by hand, book a demo.
Other posts covering the same ground.
Hybrid IT broke the ITAM tools built for the data centre. What unified discovery, software recognition and governance actually have to cover when your assets span on-premises, virtual, cloud and SaaS — and how to test a vendor against it.
Microsoft removes Enterprise Agreement discounting on Online Services, SPLA use ends on the hyperscalers, SAP withdraws special discounts on-premises, Broadcom faces a lawsuit from Tesco, and Oracle Java keeps pushing customers towards OpenJDK. What changed in August 2025, and what it means for your licence position.
Four things that stall a transformation programme — organisational resistance, data silos, legacy infrastructure and the skills gap — and what each one actually requires of your IT asset data before you can move past it.
Everything argued above is checkable. Name the publisher, the billing account or the platform you would argue with, and the session is built around it — the reasoning attached, not a summary slide.
No gated download at the end of it.