Company Profile

Product:       Certero for Enterprise SAM

Product:       Certero for Enterprise ITAM

Product:       Vitado – Azure

Product:       Certero for SaaS – M365

Industry:       Automotive

Estate size:   7,000+ devices

Locations:     UK 

The technology team is both day-to-day Operations and overall Business Change, including all strategic projects in areas of the business – Sales (online & in-store), After-Sales, Operations, Finance, HR and Marketing, e-commerce & Digital. Controlled centrally, the company’s IT costs have increased year-on-year as they enjoyed continuous growth, and managing this mounting complexity and expenditure has become ever more challenging. To deal with these challenges and meet all ITAM and SAM objectives, a brand-new ITAM team was created.  Working in partnership with Certero, the team developed an ITAM and SAM program that very quickly added value by achieving cost savings across the enterprise, which was enabled by highly effective and speedy tool deployment and adoption and development of best practices.

Objectives

• Discover and identify assets across 150 dealerships, and rising
• Reduce Microsoft costs
• Enable introduction of IT cross charging
• Identify and resolve security vulnerabilities
• Improve support desk operations for central and franchise users

Strategy in Action

The dealership created a very methodical approach to their ITAM and SAM program, focusing first on stakeholder engagement and requirements gathering, rather than jumping straight into tool selection.

Led by the ITAM Manager, the ITAM team won support for their program from stakeholders across the organization and built a more comprehensive set of requirements, which were used to shape the ITAM and SAM program’s goals and tool selection criteria.

After an exhaustive tool selection process, great planning by the ITAM team and their supporters across the organization meant that, with help from Certero and its automated Provisioning technology, the implementation and roll-out across more than 8,000 devices was achieved in just four days.

Immediately after the implementation of the Certero platform, inventory data began flowing to give the ITAM team instant value. For example, through Certero for Enterprise ITAM, locations could be identified for all devices, platforms and servers across their network. Combined with Certero for Enterprise SAM and Certero’s Cloud Asset Management solution Vitado (covering Azure) and Certero for SaaS (covering Microsoft365),

This gave the dealership complete, real-time visibility of their environments, hardware, operating systems and software applications. However, despite having all the data and insight available for software asset management, they did not have Microsoft licensing expertise in-house. This is not uncommon and unlike many other ITAM and SAM tool providers, Certero was able to add value through consultancy support to deliver all of their SAM objectives.

Results

It only took six weeks for Certero to complete the Microsoft ELP ahead of their Enterprise Agreement renewal, enabling them to optimize their Microsoft licensing bill to the tune of £800,000. This was as a result of Certero providing the capability to identify license rationalization opportunities and enabling us to provide improved license controls.

Quick wins like these were supplemented as the ITAM team and other stakeholders realized the full power of the tools now at their disposal. Cross-charging for IT consumption had long been on the Finance team’s wish list, and now it was possible, thanks to the insight from the Certero platform.

The ITAM Manager explains: “With the Certero platform we identified all IT assets (inc. cloud) and their ownership and costs across the enterprise. This helped us forge new relationships with Finance, HR and IT by helping them re-charge IT costs to other departments and partners. This also alleviated the burden on the IT budget. This was fully operational by August and in October we used the insight to plan 2020 budgets. Now the cost of IT ownership is distributed throughout the organization, our partners have become more efficient at re-allocating and re-harvesting IT assets.”

The ITAM team also have a closer relationship with Security, by helping them proactively identify and fix vulnerable assets, including those not controlled by the group. For example, the Security team can check that devices such as car diagnostics machines, which are supplied and managed by manufacturers, are kept in DMZs and cannot present security risks to the rest of the network.

Similarly, Service Desk teams now have full access to inventory and configuration information in the Certero platform, which makes it easier and faster to resolve IT support calls from across the franchise network. The overall impact is a fully integrated ITAM program that delivers tangible value to a wide stakeholder audience, and significantly reduces IT expenditure through asset optimization and re-distribution of costs.