Four consoles. Three currencies.
One question.
Five disciplines report into one store. Federated visibility, governance, topology and dependency run across all of them at once, and a monthly KPI series carries assets, spend, savings and growth per domain — so the answer is a view rather than a fortnight.
Answered on one platform. One data model across ITAM, SAM, SaaS, Cloud and AI.
Federated rollup
IllustrativeOne store, every discipline
Three feeds in, five disciplines reporting
- Platform feed ITAM and SAM on one source
- 2 disciplines
- SaaS feed subscriptions and seats
- 1 discipline
- Cloud feed cloud and AI spend
- 2 disciplines
- Federated views across every connected source
- 5 views
- KPI history assets, spend, savings, growth
- 4 measures
Federated views
five, across every source
The problem
The question takes a minute to ask and a fortnight to answer.
Nobody upstairs is asking for anything unreasonable. They are asking one question that happens to cross four teams, and crossing four teams is the whole job.
- 01 quarter end
Four teams answer the same question four different ways.
Each is right about its own console and none of them is answering the question that was asked. What follows is not analysis. It is somebody deciding which of four true numbers goes on the slide.
Federated Visibility across cloud, SaaS, SAM and ITAM Command Centre
- 02 three currencies
The rollup is in pounds, the cloud bill is in dollars, the subsidiary reports in euros.
Somebody picks a rate and applies it by hand, so the number moves depending on the day they did it. Next quarter nobody can reproduce the figure, because nobody wrote down which rate they used.
Per-currency KPI history, so a global rollup is not a spreadsheet job Command Centre
- 03 better or worse
You can say what the number is. You cannot say what it was.
The consoles show today. Last quarter lives in a slide deck somebody exported and a spreadsheet somebody has since left the company holding. The trend gets reconstructed from artefacts rather than read from a series.
Monthly KPI history per domain: assets, spend, savings and growth Command Centre
- 04 where did that come from
A figure is challenged and nobody can say where it came from.
It came from a spreadsheet, which came from an export, which came from a console, on a date nobody recorded. The number may well be right. What you cannot do is show your working, and that is the part that costs you the room.
Ingest log recording every run into the federated store Command Centre
- None of it is a reporting problem. It is what happens when four systems each hold a quarter of the answer and the joining is left to a person.
Customer
“Certero’s SAM managed service allowed us to significantly mature our license posture at a fast pace, something that would have taken 3-4 years without their involvement.”
- Microsoft compliance risk mitigated
- £100k
- of SAM maturity accelerated
- 3–4 yrs
Recognition
The only vendor named Customers’ Choice in the 2024 Gartner® Peer Insights™ Voice of the Customer for Software Asset Management Tools.
4× Customers’ Choice in the category: 2019, 2020, 2021, 2024
Read the announcementGARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark, and PEER INSIGHTS is a trademark and service mark, of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner Peer Insights content consists of the opinions of individual end users based on their own experiences and should not be construed as statements of fact, nor do they represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates.
Five of the five disciplines.
Each runs standalone and shares one asset model, so the parts of this that span products need no integration work.
- Primary CerteroX ITAM Devices and hardware, arriving on the platform feed with SAM beside them. Product page
- Also applies CerteroX SAM Licence position and compliance, on the same feed and the same reporting period. Product page
- Also applies CerteroX SaaS Management Subscriptions, seats and vendor spend on their own feed. Product page
- Also applies CerteroX Cloud Management Cloud and AI spend, with the optimisation savings that offset it. Product page
- Also applies CerteroX AI Management AI tools and their adoption risk, counted in the rollup rather than beside it. Product page
How four answers become one.
Each move is a named view in Command Centre with a screen behind it.
-
Three feeds into one store
Cloud, SaaS and Platform each report into the same schema. The platform feed carries ITAM and SAM together, which is why five disciplines arrive over three sources.
- Data Source Governance — each feed named, configured and enabled or disabled Command Centre
- Ingest log recording every run into the federated store Command Centre
- Ten discovery methods landing in one schema before anything is federated Command Centre
- Connector sync pulling authoritative user and licence lists from the vendor SaaS Management
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Ask it once, across everything
Federated Visibility and Federated Observability run across every connected source at the same time, rather than four views a person holds in their head.
- Federated Visibility across cloud, SaaS, SAM and ITAM Command Centre
- Cloud, SaaS, SAM and ITAM Visibility as their own views Command Centre
- Search across the federated store Command Centre
- Executive Dashboard rolling up apps, users, spend and trend SaaS Management
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Keep the series, not the slides
A monthly row per domain carrying assets, spend, savings and growth, each in its own currency. Last quarter becomes a row rather than an archaeology exercise.
- Monthly KPI history per domain: assets, spend, savings and growth Command Centre
- Per-currency KPI history, so a global rollup is not a spreadsheet job Command Centre
- Trends & Analytics over the monthly KPI series Command Centre
- Vendor spend and cloud cost breakdown by provider Command Centre
-
Show the working
Governance, topology, virtualisation and dependency federate across every source, so a challenged figure resolves to a feed, a run and a date rather than to somebody’s memory.
- Federated Governance across every source Command Centre
- Federated Topology, Virtualization and Dependency views Command Centre
- Data Source Governance — each feed named, configured and enabled or disabled Command Centre
- Audit trail across agreements, transactions and exclusions SAM
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Answer without building a report
Ask over the federated store and the answer comes back. Every tool call the assistant makes is recorded, so an answer that went upstairs can be traced afterwards.
- In-product conversational assistant with saved conversations Command Centre
- MCP Tool Explorer, with every tool call recorded Command Centre
- Model Context Protocol servers registered and managed in-product Command Centre
- Optimization Hub spanning every connected source Command Centre
Ask to see any one of these running in the product itself, on the screen where it happens.
Last quarter should be a row.
Every other view in the platform shows today. This one keeps a month per domain — assets, spend, savings and growth, each in its own currency — so the question a board actually asks is answered by reading down a column rather than by finding out who kept the deck.
core.kpi_history · assets, by domain
Illustrative| Domain | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ITAM | 18,420 | 18,610 | 18,980 | 19,240 | 19,310 | 19,480 |
| SAM | 12,100 | 12,260 | 12,440 | 12,390 | 12,580 | 12,710 |
| SaaS | 286 | 291 | 298 | 305 | 311 | 318 |
| Cloud | 4,120 | 4,380 | 4,290 | 4,510 | 4,670 | 4,740 |
| AI | 38 | 44 | 51 | 63 | 71 | 86 |
Assets here; the same row also carries spend, savings and growth, each in its own currency. Last quarter is a row in this table rather than a slide somebody kept.
What the board meeting looks like after.
Four things that stop being a fortnight of work, and one that stays a judgement.
- 01
One question gets one answer.
Federated views run across cloud, SaaS, SAM and ITAM at once. Nobody assembles four consoles into a slide, and nobody defends which of four true numbers was picked.
- 02
Last quarter is a row, not an archaeology exercise.
A monthly series per domain carrying assets, spend, savings and growth. Whether this is better or worse than last quarter stops depending on who kept the deck.
- 03
The currency stops being a manual step.
KPI history is held per currency, so a global rollup does not turn on which day somebody applied a rate, or on whether they wrote down which one they used.
- 04
A challenged figure resolves to a source.
Each feed is named, configured and individually switchable, with an ingest log behind it. You can say which source a number came from and when that source last reported, which is what keeps you in the room.
- 05
What to count is still yours.
Federation removes the reconciliation, not the judgement. Whether a contractor laptop is an asset, whether a committed cloud discount counts as a saving, what belongs in the number at all — those are decisions, and a rollup that made them for you would be a rollup you could not defend.
Questions worth asking us.
Not the one you came with? Ask it directly and we will answer it in writing.
What actually feeds it?
Three, and the shape of them is the point. Platform carries ITAM and SAM together, SaaS Management comes in on its own, and Cloud Management brings cloud and AI spend with it — five disciplines over three feeds. Any one of them can be switched off without touching the others, which is what you want on the day a source is mid-migration and you would rather report without it than report wrong.
Is this another system to run alongside the others?
No, and the reason is worth being exact about. The disciplines already share one asset model, so there is nothing between them to integrate — Command Centre is where they report in together rather than a place their data is copied to and reconciled. If it were a sixth system holding its own version of the truth it would be the very problem this page opens with.
Can it tell us whether we are better or worse than last quarter?
Yes, and it is the one thing the individual consoles cannot do. They answer what is true now. The KPI series keeps a row per month per domain, so April is still there in July — assets, spend, savings and growth, each in its own currency, with Trends and Analytics over the top.
The board challenges a figure. What can we show them?
Which feed it came from, what that feed was set to collect, and when it last reported. Data Source Governance names every source and the ingest log records every run, and on the licence side the audit trail across agreements, transactions and exclusions sits underneath it. What you hand back is a trail rather than a restatement of the number they just questioned.
What does the assistant do here, and can we trust what it says upstairs?
It answers over the federated store, so a question does not become a reporting request. Every tool call it makes is recorded and the conversation is saved, which means an answer that went into a board pack can be traced afterwards. It does not decide what counts, and nothing here depends on it doing so.
Is this for the board, or for the team that serves the board?
Both, and they want different things from it. The team wants the reconciliation gone and the working available when a figure is challenged. The person upstairs wants one set of numbers, on one reporting period, that does not move depending on who was asked. The same store answers both.
Tell us the question.
We will read you the row.
Whatever your board asked last quarter that took four teams a fortnight to answer. We will start on the federated view it comes out of, and on the month-by-month series behind it.
A populated environment at realistic scale, a technical person on the call, and a straight answer where we do not fit.