Incumbent ITAM and SAM tools cannot adequately support business transformation, cloud migration or IT security improvements – but next generation solutions can.
After more than a decade of over-promising and under-delivering, the common perception is incumbent ITAM and SAM vendors have lost credibility to the point where customers no longer trust them. But despite their limitations, they continue to over-promise.
Why do they do this? In a word, legacy. Innovation in hardware and software has exposed incumbent SAM and ITAM tool vendor’s inability to keep pace with these changes. Instead of developing their solutions to properly accommodate new functionality, they cut corners with unsatisfactory modifications or business acquisitions. This is driven by architectural restriction. The result is fragmented functionality that sits outside their core offering and fails to deliver the value it promises. Customers are left with gaps across the solution range, which can only be plugged by people performing manual tasks. You can think of it like a house that was built decades ago, which has gradually had extensions and outbuildings added to it to meet the needs of a growing number of residents. By using different architects, builders and materials, the result is a disorientating, poorly constructed complex that fails to meet the needs of its occupants. If you were to build the house again today, knowing what you know now, the design would be very different. The same principles are true when developing software solutions using different teams, languages, methods, architecture and so on.
What are the gaps?
Incumbent tools have a range of limitations that have consequential impacts on organizations that use them. These gaps are caused by legacy technology that has become more deeply ingrained into the tools over time. As a result, strategic objectives such as business transformations, cloud migrations and IT security are significantly undermined, which reduces organization’s ability to accelerate growth.
While there are many limitations that we can explore, the primary issues are:
- No end-to-end SaaS solutions for ITAM and SAM
- Lengthy implementation processes
- Complex configurations
- Manual processes and data entry tasks
- Fragmented data sources
- No overall visibility of the IT estate
How does this impact businesses?
Without a true end-to-end SaaS solution for ITAM and SAM, businesses are not able to fully automate their practices and processes. What this means is organizations have to hire large teams to plug these gaps, which increases the cost of performing ITAM and SAM projects and in turn reduces the amount of value that can be delivered.
However, there are even more consequences of not having an end-to-end SaaS solution for ITAM and SAM. While some SAM tools are provisioned as SaaS, these tools discard significant volumes of valuable ITAM data that is crucial for effective software asset management. Naturally businesses want both datasets, but in order to acquire this data they have to procure an on-premises ITAM tool. This has a big impact on time to value, as on-premises servers require lengthy sign off processes that make implementations take months. All of this is before the system is configured, which is typically complex and left to the customer to figure out. By pushing the configuration and deployment on to the customer, the tool vendor is absolved of the responsibility of the subsequent data. What this means is if the tools returns poor or inaccurate data, the responsibility is that of the customer.
Once implemented, these tools require a lot of manual processes and data entry tasks just to perform basic operations. Again, this requires a larger team to be focused on low value tasks. Much of this is caused by fragmented data sources that cannot be easily normalized and merged into a single source. Organizations therefore have to manually stitch datasets together to perform detailed analysis of IT hardware and software assets. However, with so much human intervention comes the increased risk of human error, which can invalidate any analysis performed.
Ultimately, with so many different datasets and tools to log in and out of, customers cannot get overall visibility of their IT estates. Without proper visibility and governance, strategic objectives such as business transformations, cloud migrations and IT security improvements are difficult to achieve. What this means is the time, energy and investment required by businesses to successfully implement change programs that accelerate business growth is dramatically increased. Only next generation ITAM and SAM solutions, which are free from legacy technology and the restrictions of incumbent tools, can provide the visibility and governance required by organizations to drive business growth.
Why are Certero different?
At Certero, we understand the limitations of legacy and failing to innovate outside our core offerings. In 2013, we bravely decided to scrap our version 3 products to focus on innovating the next generation of ITAM and SAM solutions. Like an architect demolishing a building to replace it with a newer design, our team built the world’s most advanced and modern IT hardware and software asset management solutions from the ground up.
Using automation as the key to hyper-scalability, we vastly reduced the need for people to perform manual processes and data entry tasks. All products work holistically and optimally with one UI, one UX and single data source, covering mobile to mainframe to cloud, (including SaaS, PaaS and IaaS), across vendors such as SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and many more. And the best bit is, our unique Architectural Advantage allows us to run all this in public or private cloud, with full functionality and no compromise. Without the need for on-premises servers, we can deploy our solutions in minutes – not months – which means you can deliver value faster than you can implement other ITAM and SAM tools. However, if you want an on-premises or hybrid solution, don’t worry we can do that too.
