Most organisations run several asset management tools because they were bought one problem at a time. The cost is not the licences — it is that no two of them agree.
As IT has grown more complicated, so has the job of managing the hardware and software underneath it.
Meeting each new challenge required new tooling, and that tooling arrived one problem at a time. SAM vendors have traditionally sold products covering one slice of the problem: licensing on Windows desktops, or Oracle in the data centre, or discovery, or SaaS. Organisations bought accordingly, because there was no alternative.
The result is several systems from several vendors, each with its own data source, infrastructure, interface, support requirement and internal owner — and no single view across any of it. That is expensive and confusing on its own terms. The larger loss is that nobody can analyse one interlinked set of data, which is where the intelligence worth having actually lives.
Here are the specific costs, in more detail.
Managing multiple disconnected products from multiple providers is a permanent tax on IT management.
Each one arrives with its own deployment requirements, its own infrastructure and its own support arrangement, so simply getting everything running is a project. Then things go wrong. Are there dependencies between the systems? Now add several data feeds and several groups of users who each need something different.
Then IT changes again and you need to integrate something new to cover it. If any of the existing products are built on older technology, a version upgrade probably means a migration with a cost attached. Resolving even a small problem can involve three vendors and no clear owner.
One platform removes the category of problem, not just the instances of it.
Different products have different interfaces and vary considerably in what they can do.
Users have to switch between them, and each one needs its own training and its own re-familiarisation every time it is updated. The experience is inconsistent, which produces frustration, and frustration produces errors and unreliable output.
One interface, managing everything you own, in real time, is not a cosmetic improvement. It is the difference between a system people use properly and one they use enough to get by.
Several products means several data sources and a continual struggle to reach the information you need to manage effectively, improve control, reduce risk and take cost out.
Even when you find the data, it is scattered, needs cleansing every time, and represents a point in time rather than a current position. Accurate, granular, current data spanning multiple systems is what effective decisions and sustainable lifecycle management actually require, and it is exactly what a set of disconnected products cannot produce.
Access to one data source is the first half of the problem. The second is turning it into something meaningful.
You need a reporting and business intelligence engine flexible enough to cut the data any way you need and present the result clearly. Scenario planning, and comparing one scenario against another, is simply not possible without it. That level of reporting is often missing from individual products, let alone across several of them.
CerteroX carries this natively — dynamic, static and custom groups built through a query builder or SQL, trend charts, KPIs and threshold alerts, personal and role-shared dashboards, and a read-only API with a documented Power BI data source for anyone who wants the data in their own reporting layer instead.
The benefit of one platform does not stop at ITAM and SAM. Take the wider view across ITAM, SAM and ITSM, which sit in the same discipline.
In 2017 this section asked you to imagine a fully integrated system working across all three towers, highly automated, producing data that stays accessible whether SAM is run internally, through consultants or as a managed service.
It is no longer something to imagine. CerteroX ITAM ships 28 named system connectors covering Active Directory, SCCM, Intune, WSUS, VMware, Hyper-V, XenServer, IBM HMC, Oracle VM, oVirt, Nutanix, AWS, Azure and more. The SCCM interface imports and drives SCCM applications, packages and jobs rather than merely reading from them. CerteroX SaaS Management connects to ServiceNow directly, including deprovisioning that locks the account and strips every role and group membership. The data goes out through a read-only API and a documented Power BI source.
The CMDB gets populated with normalised, recognised software data from the same system that discovered the device. That was the original point of asking for normalisation in the first place.
You will have heard SAM vendors describe what they sell as a platform. It is worth asking what they mean.
If what is on offer is a portal providing a point of access to subsets of data drawn from separate products, that is a portal. It is a front — a veneer over the same disconnected products, addressing none of the problems above. The data still lives in several places, the reconciliation still has to happen, and it happens where you cannot see it.
The test is simple. Ask whether the products share a data model, or share a login.
CerteroX was built from the ground up for this problem. It manages and reports across everything you own — on-premises, mobile, data centre and cloud.
Five products run on it: CerteroX ITAM, CerteroX SAM, CerteroX SaaS Management, CerteroX Cloud Management and CerteroX AI Management. Each works on its own. Run together, they work as one, because they were built as one — one data model, not five products joined by an integration layer.
That produces a common data source with reporting and business intelligence over the whole of it, which is what makes planning, management and control possible rather than aspirational. A common interface removes the recurring training and disruption cost of running several. And because the discovery, the licence engine, the SaaS connectors and the cloud cost model all write to the same schema, there is no reconciliation project — there is nothing to reconcile.
One more thing has changed since this was written. Every CerteroX product exposes a Model Context Protocol server with scoped, per-organisation tokens and full tool-call auditing, so your own AI agents can query your assets, your cloud spend and your licence position directly — and you can see exactly what they asked for. A single accessible data source was always the argument. This is what it is worth now.
Other posts covering the same ground.
A practical evaluation guide for IT Asset Management platforms — what to test, what to ask vendors, and how to tell unified asset intelligence from a stitched-together toolset.
Five places Microsoft spend leaks — Microsoft 365 subscriptions, Windows Server Datacenter cores, Azure Hybrid Benefit, SQL Server editions and over-estimated Enterprise Agreements — and what it takes to close each one.
Running ITAM, SAM, SaaS and cloud management as four separate tools creates a reconciliation tax. What a genuine all-in-one platform has to deliver, and how to test a vendor claim before you buy.
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.