How we helped centralise data capture across ITAM and SAM for a more reliable source of truth across a hybrid IT estate.
Company profile
Industry: Legal Services
Region: Global
Devices: 4,000
Products Purchased: CerteroX for Enterprise SAM, CerteroX for Enterprise ITAM
The challenge of accurate CMDB population
This client had invested in multiple solutions to manage IT hardware, licensing, support and software delivery over time. Though significantly investing in multiple ‘leading’ solutions, they still struggled daily with the level of fragmented information available.
Each of the ITAM and SAM solutions were ‘owned’ and operated by their respected teams with organisational silos as well as data silos. Therefore, information wasn’t immediately available across functions and needed to be requested and cleansed before any work could begin.
Additionally, none of the over-lapping toolsets deployed were accurate – each showed slightly different results and none were proven correct when tested.
When a new Technology Process Manager took their role and began to look at IT asset management across the entire business; hardware, software, mobile and cloud, it was clear that no overall version of the truth was currently achievable.
No real-time understating of ‘what’s out there’ was possible and any process of creating a meaningful report for senior leaders would take hours to manually compile and validate data.
During a roll-out of hardware, I asked for a count of assets in an office that had no more than 200 machines, and I got 3 different responses from 3 different people, none of which matched when I walked around the office and physically counted the machines… at that point I realized we had a problem.
Any time I did user profiling I had to take from 4 different data sources, spend hours tidying it up and then I could work with something but I also knew it was immediately out of date because it would take so long to get the data tidied up.
Building an effective solution
It was clear that working around so many different toolsets was always going to impede IT operations and what was required was a combined ITAM and SAM solution that could offer a better view of all IT assets, everywhere. This solution needed to have a source of data that was accurate and could be relied upon to make informed decisions.
Upon embarking on a formal RFP process and shortlisting 3 leading ITAM/SAM vendors, it was quickly apparent that only Certero could offer a solution that would provide accurate and reliable data within the platform and have that information accessible in a user friendly UI that could provide real business value to the business.
• Centralised visibility of the entire IT estate – a complete view never before experienced by the business
• IT Asset Intelligence On-Demand – the availability of quality, reliable and detailed information has revolutionised the way teams work with greater speed and efficiency
• Check & Balance – Senior leadership now have a useable source of information that they can access directly to understand exactly what’s happening and the status of projects in real-time
• Faster, better informed decision making thanks to real-time BI
• Reduced operating overheads thanks to Certero’s secure & fully-featured SaaS-hosted provisioning
• Technology Value Optimisation – the ability to see and understand all devices and software and to make sure that these assets are utilised effectively to provide maximum value to the business
• Software License Optimisation – the ability to understand software licence compliance risks,
overspending and under-spending to avoid unnecessary expenditure
Creating value beyond expectation
Since implementing Certero, the client has discovered countless ways that
the single trusted information source can provide value, as the client explains:
“Certero has become an essential solution for us that’s used right across the business, from senior leadership to technical staff. Certero isn’t point-in-time, it provides us with live information. I don’t like people doing extracts of data as they’re immediately out of date. I like to drive everything via dashboards that can be shared easily, plus they’re common and can be used for multiple purposes, rather than spending hours creating spreadsheets for a single use at a single time.
“That’s just wasteful. Certero sees everything, even the assets we haven’t seen for months.
“The CIO has insisted teams get up to speed with Certero and make use of the custom fields so that we’re using Certero as a single source of the truth, rather than relying on a spreadsheet here or SharePoint note there, it’s all now simply in Certero. The up-to-date information we’re getting now from Certero has become critical to the way we do things; it’s how we’ve managed our deployment; our progress is updating every 24hrs.
“It’s led projects, it’s led delivery, it’s led decisions around project strategy. It’s led the procurement and purchasing decisions for the remainder of the financial year. Certero is fundamentally changing how we are procuring assets. My advice to other organisations contemplating RFP’s for ITAM and SAM is: just take Certero. Save your time, money, and effort, and just take Certero. It will give you more value than you think, I would bet money on that.”
