A companion to our piece on why a single platform matters. This one looks at how CerteroX is actually built — one data model, five products, and the design decision underneath both.
In an earlier article we looked at why a single platform matters so much when managing IT assets — coping with new asset classes as they arrive, and the cost of never getting one view across them.
This article goes a level down. What is it about how CerteroX is built that lets it meet the hardware, software, SaaS, cloud and AI management problem as one job rather than five?
The key is in the original design. Rather than build a product and then a second product beside it, we separated out the elements that every asset class needs — data, interface, management and reporting — and made those the platform.
Everything specific is built on top of that: the licence engines for individual publishers, the collection methods for individual platforms, the cost models for individual clouds. The common parts are common by construction, not by integration.
Two things follow from this that are hard to get any other way.
The first is that a capability written for one asset class is usually available to the others immediately. The twenty-six optimisation checks in CerteroX Cloud Management apply to the GPU instances behind machine learning workloads without anyone writing a second engine, because an ML executor is a cloud instance. The SaaS licence engine reclaims AI seats for the same reason.
The second is that adding a discipline is not a fresh implementation. The foundations are already running.
CerteroX carries no legacy platform underneath it. That matters more than it sounds.
A great deal of ITAM and SAM technology on the market grew by acquisition, and what is sold as one product is a set of separately built systems joined together afterwards. The consequences show up at exactly the wrong moments: version upgrades that cost time, money and coordination across parts that were never designed to move together; interfaces that behave differently depending on which screen you are on; and data that has to be reconciled between modules of the same product.
CerteroX was built from the ground up as one platform. One data model, one interface, one permissions model, one reporting engine. When something is consistent across the product, it is because it was only written once.
You can test this in an evaluation without taking anyone’s word for it. Ask how many databases sit behind the product. Ask whether the discovery data collected for hardware asset management is the same record the licence engine reads. Ask what happens to a report when you upgrade. The answers are quite revealing.
CerteroX is modular by design, so you buy what you need. Each product stands up and performs in its own right — you can run SaaS Management alone, or start with ITAM and nothing else.
What the shared foundation adds is what happens next. Because the platform is already running underneath whatever you deployed first, extending into a second discipline is a matter of turning on capability that is already there rather than standing up another system, integrating it with the first, and training people on a second interface. The same navigation, the same permissions, the same reporting.
This is the difference between a platform and a portal. A portal gives you one place to log in, and behind it the products are still separate, with separate data and separate interfaces that do not quite agree. That does not remove the complexity, it hides it — and it adds a layer that has to be maintained on top of everything it is hiding. It also puts distance between you and the data that matters, which is the opposite of what it was bought to do.
The goal is automated, policy-based asset management with as little manual intervention as possible.
The realistic alternatives are usually a tool that leaves the hard analysis to you, or a consultancy that does the hard analysis by hand. The first leaves you with data and no position. The second gives you a position that is accurate on the day it is delivered and decays from then on, at a cost that recurs every time you need it refreshed.
We aim to put as much of the expert work as possible into the product, so the analysis is continuous, consistent and repeatable, and control stays with you. Concretely, that is:
Holding everything in one data model is what makes the rest possible: a real-time common view, consistent manageability, and immediate access to the data needed to improve control, manage risk and take cost out.
It also means the platform can answer questions that cross asset classes, which is where most of the interesting ones live. Which departed users still hold a paid licence anywhere. Which applications are in use but have no SSO coverage. Which AI tools are being adopted, by how much of the organisation, with what data access. None of those belong to a single module, and none of them are answerable if the data is spread across four products.
CerteroX does not stop at hardware and software asset management.
CerteroX SaaS Management discovers applications through three converging signals — identity provider sync, vendor API connectors and a browser extension — with 47 connectors shipping today and applications classified against a catalogue of more than 35,000. It detects Shadow AI from catalogue feature tags rather than a fixed list, scores OAuth grants for risk, and closes the offboarding gap with a per-licence revocation checklist you can hand to an auditor.
CerteroX Cloud Management covers twelve cloud and data platforms with twenty-six named, individually tunable checks and native support for the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification. Across cloud environments under management the average saving is 38%.
CerteroX ITAM collects through ten discovery methods across six operating system families, and resolves software against a Software Recognition Database of more than 3.5 million titles.
It also connects outwards rather than sitting in isolation. ServiceNow and Jira are supported connectors, and there is a read-only API with a documented Power BI data source — so the data reaches the tools your service desk and your decision-makers already open, rather than being exported by hand into a spreadsheet that is stale by the time anyone reads it.
Alongside that, the built-in reporting gives you trend charts, KPIs, threshold alerts and personal or role-shared dashboards over granular, current data, which is what makes planning and control something you do continuously rather than quarterly.
If you are looking for one platform to manage everything you own — hardware, software, SaaS, cloud and AI — the fastest way to judge it is to name the asset class nobody can account for and watch it walked end to end.
Book a demo, or talk to us.
Other posts covering the same ground.
Locking an application down at user level does not make you compliant with a per-device licence. In a Citrix or RDS environment, one user with access can cost you a licence for every device in the organisation.
A third-party summary of a vendor can be wrong, and it stays wrong for as long as people read it. The case for checking a vendor's facts at source — and the current, sourced record for Certero.
An audit is won or lost on the quality of your inventory long before the letter arrives. Six ways data goes wrong, and what it takes to have the answer already in hand.
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.