Why data centre asset management tools built by acquisition leave you doing the work by hand, and what to demand instead for IBM, SAP and Oracle.
First published in July 2019. Updated on migration so that what it says about CerteroX is true of the product today.
Data centre asset management software is where the expensive licensing lives. IBM, SAP and Oracle are the publishers whose metrics are hardest to model and whose audits are hardest to answer. And yet a great many organisations get very little out of the tools they bought to manage them.
The cause is usually a lack of automation and a lack of interconnectedness, and both trace back to the same thing: architecture built a long time ago and extended by acquisition since.
Rather than developing a product continuously, several vendors in this category grew by buying other products and bolting them on. That does not resolve the legacy underneath — it multiplies it. What you end up with is patchwork architecture, fragmented data sources and incomplete data sets. Fragmentation caps how much the tool can automate, and whatever it cannot automate becomes a manual process performed by a person.
Those manual processes are not a minor overhead. They slow delivery, they let human error into the output, and they raise the cost of running the function — including for organisations who have outsourced it to a consultancy or an ITAM managed service, because the consultancy is doing the same manual work and billing for it. The end result is that the asset management process produces very little of the value it was bought for.
The way out is a platform where discovery, recognition, entitlement and reporting sit on one data model, so the work between them does not need doing by hand.
Discovery that does not need a project first. Network discovery sweeps a class-C subnet in under five seconds across NetBIOS, SNMP and ICMP, then probes to work out where an agent can actually be deployed. Ten discovery methods — agent, command-line, agentless, standalone, Active Directory, network scan, third-party import, cloud connectors, browser monitoring and file metering — all land in one schema. Duplicate system detection and stale device archiving run continuously, so new, missing and moved assets surface on their own rather than during a reconciliation exercise.
Recognition you can validate. Software recognition resolves against a Software Recognition Database of more than 3.5 million titles, with centrally maintained categorisation, release and end-of-support dates, and SWID tags with UNSPSC classification. Usage is metered at file level with first-used and last-used tracking and a rolling 90-day utilisation figure, which is what turns an install count into a decision about whether the licence is needed.
Real depth on the three publishers that matter here. This is where generic tooling stops being useful:
One place to look. All of it runs from a single login and one normalised data source, with dynamic reporting across every variable in it and a read-only API with a documented Power BI data source for anything you want to take elsewhere. Deployment is SaaS, on-premises or any hybrid combination, with the same functionality in each — which matters more in the data centre than elsewhere, because parts of these environments are not going to the cloud and should not have to be managed by a separate tool because of it.
The benefit is not a single feature. It is that the gap between “we have discovery data” and “we have a defensible licence position” stops being filled by people with spreadsheets.
That gives you faster output, better and more complete data, and an effective licence position that is computed continuously rather than assembled the week an audit letter arrives. It also changes what your specialists spend their time on. The scarce skill in this function is knowing what an Oracle contract clause means or how a licence type maps to an SAP role — not normalising two exports so they can be compared.
If you are evaluating in this space, bring your own awkward cases rather than accepting the ones you are shown. Ask for an effective licence position on one Oracle database with options enabled, one IBM sub-capacity workload and one SAP system, and ask to see the evidence behind each number. The answer to that request will tell you what you need to know.
One record for the rack, the licence and the bill behind it. Talk to us or book a demo.
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.