Four tools, four different answers
Over the years the firm had bought tool after tool to manage hardware, licensing, support and software delivery. Each one was owned and operated by the team that had bought it, so the data sat behind an organisational boundary as well as a technical one. Nothing crossed between functions without first being requested, exported and cleaned.
None of the overlapping tools agreed with each other. Each returned a slightly different result, and when the results were tested, none of them proved correct.
When a new Technology Process Manager took on IT asset management across the whole business — hardware, software, mobile and cloud — there was no overall version of the truth to work from. Nobody could say in real time what was out there, and a report for senior leaders meant hours of manual compilation and validation.
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.
— Technology Process Manager
One platform, one set of numbers
Working around that many toolsets was always going to slow IT down. What the firm needed was ITAM and SAM together, covering every asset everywhere, on data accurate enough to decide from.
The firm ran a formal RFP and shortlisted three leading ITAM/SAM vendors. Only Certero could put reliable data behind an interface the wider business would actually use. CerteroX ITAM and CerteroX SAM now cover 4,000 devices — hardware, software, mobile and cloud in one place.
What changed
- Centralised visibility of every IT asset, a complete view the business had never had before.
- Asset intelligence on demand, so detailed, dependable information is there the moment work starts rather than days later.
- A check and balance for senior leadership, who go into the data directly and see project status as it stands.
- Faster, better-informed decisions, taken on live business intelligence instead of a week-old export.
- Lower operating overheads, from Certero’s secure, fully featured SaaS-hosted provisioning.
- Technology value optimisation: seeing every device and application, and making sure each one earns its place.
- Software licence optimisation: compliance risk, overspend and underspend all visible before they cost anything.
Value beyond what was expected
Nothing about the way the firm works now runs through a spreadsheet. Dashboards are shared, reused and updated in place, and the data behind them is live.
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 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.
— Technology Process Manager