Asset management got harder one asset class at a time, and most organisations answered each one with a separate tool. The result is a stack of disconnected systems and no single view. Here is why that architecture is the problem, not the symptom.
Before you can talk about why a single platform matters, it helps to remember how we ended up with so many.
When organisations first worried about managing IT assets, the worry was hardware, because hardware was the expensive part. The original hardware-centric ITAM products reflected that. They were fat-client applications, difficult to deploy, and consequently used for point-in-time projects rather than continuous management.
They were not really built for lifecycle management. The lifecycle tools that existed at the time could technically do it, but their purpose was IT service management, and asset management was a side element bolted to the edge of it.
Then hardware costs came down and software became the main event, accelerated by the audit and compliance activity of the major publishers. Software asset management brought licensing optimisation with it, and the first target was the desktop.
Next came enterprise SAM — the same compliance, cost and utilisation work applied to the data centre, where Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM licensing is genuinely difficult. Virtualisation in all its forms, thin client and VDI included, added another layer on top of that.
Each of these arrived as a new problem, and most organisations answered each one by buying something.
That pattern has repeated at pace. Mobile devices. Connected hardware that is not a computer in any conventional sense. Cloud infrastructure. SaaS. And now AI — seats, models, GPUs and agents, arriving faster than any of the previous waves and rarely through procurement.
The scale is not marginal. The average enterprise now runs 305 SaaS applications, 46% of the SaaS licences bought go unused, and 29% of cloud spend is wasted — a figure that rose for the first time in five years.
None of that waste is caused by a lack of tools. In most organisations there is a tool for each of those numbers. The waste survives because no one system holds all of them at once.
Many organisations find themselves having deployed a specific product for each challenge as it arrived. The result is a large number of different systems, often from different vendors, each with its own data source, its own infrastructure, its own interface, its own administrators and its own stakeholders — and no way of assembling one view across them.
That has costs which are easy to underestimate:
An organisation in that position is not short of data. It is short of one place where the data agrees with itself.
“Single platform” is easy to claim and worth testing. A portal that logs you into several disconnected products is not one platform; it is a login page over the same problem, with an extra layer to maintain.
The things that make the difference are unglamorous:
CerteroX is built this way deliberately. Five products — ITAM, SAM, SaaS Management, Cloud Management and AI Management — over one data model, built rather than assembled from acquisitions.
CerteroX ITAM collects through ten discovery methods across six operating system families, including AIX, HP-UX and Solaris on the same native agent as Windows, with agentless, command-line and standalone collection for machines where an agent is not an option. Network Discovery sweeps a class-C subnet in under five seconds, so devices you have no record of are found rather than assumed.
CerteroX SAM resolves what is installed against a Software Recognition Database of more than 3.5 million titles, and carries dedicated licence engines for Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, Adobe and Salesforce.
CerteroX SaaS Management discovers applications through three converging signals — identity provider, vendor APIs and a browser extension — with 47 connectors shipping today and applications classified against a catalogue of more than 35,000.
CerteroX Cloud Management covers twelve cloud and data platforms, applies twenty-six named and individually tunable optimisation checks, and ingests the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification natively. Across cloud environments under management the average saving is 38%.
CerteroX AI Management governs the newest asset class through the same structures: Shadow AI detection from catalogue feature tags rather than a hardcoded list, the same twenty-six cost checks applied to GPU fleets, and AI seat reclamation through the SaaS licence engine.
The point is not the list. It is that these read from one data model, so the question that spans four of them is a query rather than a project.
With one platform, you have centralised access to the information that matters, which improves the management process, supports better-informed strategic decisions, and avoids unnecessary purchases — because you can see what you already own before you buy more of it.
The test to apply to any vendor claiming a single platform is simple. Ask what has to be installed before the first record arrives. Then ask what has to be installed when you want the second discipline. If those two answers sound the same, you are being sold an integration project.
If you want to run that test at us, book a demo and ask the cross-domain question with a technical person on the call.
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.