During a roll-out of hardware, I asked for a count of assets in an office that had no more than200 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data sources, spend hours tidying it up and then I could work with something but I also knew it was immediately out of date because it would take so long to get the data tidied up.

I wanted one tool to rule them all. I wanted ITAM, hardware and software asset management combined. Otherwise you’ll always have to do a mash-up between two tools and two data sets and you’ll lose a day every time you want to get any information. So that was an absolute requirement for me. Certero was head and shoulders above everything else we’d seen, based on the knowledge, the information it would give us and the ease of deployment. It was a view that we’d never seen in the business.

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 I don’t like people doing extracts of data as they’re immediately out of date.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 Windows 10 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 organizations 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”.