When assets are managed well, many business benefits follow
Effective asset management is the key to maximizing return on infrastructural investment.
That's a strong statement, yet a similarly strong case can be built to support it. When assets are managed optimally, for instance, the replacement cycle becomes longer; this means spending can be deferred, and revenues can instead be invested in new strategies designed to drive growth. Furthermore, the services assets support will become more available and more high-performance. And in many cases, asset management can create cross-service value, because the information obtained through asset management solutions can be applied in many different business contexts, creating entirely new service-creation and cost-reduction possibilities.
Many challenges, however, stand between those goals and their successful achievement. Compliance issues created by government regulations, for instance, impose a layer of complexity above and beyond the organization's own internal needs and strategies. Some assets, due to their nature or design, may be unusually difficult to monitor. Some, of course, such as software, can be digitally duplicated, because they do not have a physical aspect at all; this leads to many thorny complications. And, of course, organizations with a traditionally siloed hierarchy will often find that sharing information across those silos, to increase the business value of all assets organization-wide, is a difficult proposition.
IBM offers the industry's most complete IT asset management
For these reasons, IBM offers best-in-class asset management for all the assets an organization may have—whether they fall on or off the IP infrastructure—at every stage in their lifecycles, all conveniently delivered via a shared platform under a single pane of glass. And among IBM's asset management offerings, one likely to appeal to IT in particular is IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT.
This tool helps mitigate many of the challenges most directly relevant within an IT context, such as compliance initiatives, cost reduction strategies and IT service levels—essentially, bringing the management of IT assets into the closest possible alignment with business strategies. End-to-end support for the complete IT infrastructure is delivered through a Web-based interface, spanning operational areas such as inventory tracking, budgetary information, procurement and contract management. In this way, IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT helps organizations obtain a more dynamic infrastructure—one characterized by improved resilience, cost-efficiency, enhanced service levels and agility and diminished business risks.
Naturally, IBM is continually revising and improving its offerings to be sure they help clients resolve emerging issues as effectively as possible. For this reason, the latest version of IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT, 7.2, includes new features and optimizations specifically to help address a particularly critical emerging issue: software asset management.
Compelling new software asset management distinguishes IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT 7.2
Why was this selected as a focus? Software, as a digitally-duplicatable resource, is unusually difficult to track and monitor across a complex and distributed infrastructure of the type that characterizes most enterprise-class organizations. There will typically be a misalignment between the target/expectation of how software should be deployed (authorized assets), and the way software has actually been deployed (deployed assets).
Bringing authorized assets and deployed assets back into alignment, though far from easy, will translate into substantial business benefits if it can be achieved. For example, software license costs may fall if it turns out that the organization needs fewer licenses than it is routinely buying. User productivity climbs when users have the correct software for their roles. And copyright law is certainly easier to observe if the organization actually knows how many copies it has of all the different types of software it uses.
IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT includes many new features designed to support just these goals. Essentially, it serves as a central repository of software asset information, collected from different elements of the infrastructure and then analyzed and leveraged to obtain a better overall asset ROI. Specifically, it allows administrators to create logical rules (policies) designed to create reconciliation between authorized and deployed assets. These rules are then carried out through the solution's integration with IBM Tivoli Integration Composer, which (via other tools) polls the infrastructure using agents (or, in some cases, no agents) to determine which software exists where, as well as related information such as license key, version number and others.
Once IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT has obtained the necessary data, it can then analyze it and generate suitable reports designed to fulfill necessary objectives such as regulation compliance, cost reduction and others. In this way, it centralizes software asset management, making the task simpler and faster for IT overall, but also enhances it by delivering out-of-the-box discovery and reconciliation features that might otherwise have required operationally expensive, fragmented tools or processes.
New applications resolve key software asset management challenges
IBM Tivoli Asset Management for IT is managed by way of several applications that deliver specific functionality likely to be of high priority to IBM Tivoli customers.
One good example is the new Licenses application, which helps administrators create and manage entitled licenses, and manage how those licenses are internally allocated—distributing software only where it is authorized by law, and by internal requirements, to exist. What's more, the Licenses application can also generate purchase order and costs information, helping to show how well IT software budgets correspond to business needs, and to forecast future budgets by suggesting changes.
The new Software Catalog application delivers an improved software inventory—and an improved business outcome that can be obtained as a result. This inventory is created in one of two ways, via integration with the Software Knowledge Base Toolkit or populated by discovery using the agented or agentless tools mentioned above. In this way, Software Catalog provides a clear and actionable list of software deployed throughout the organization. Software Catalog also makes it easier to determine the items used in procurement applications, as well as to set aliases on products (including those discovered by either Tivoli or third-party tools).
Toward visualizing exactly where and how software has been deployed, the Deployed Software application will prove particularly useful to IT administrators. This application lists not just discovered instances of software, but all the associated details of use, including logical/physical location, time of use, business purpose and frequency of utilization. All this information can be leveraged in endless ways to obtain better software ROI over time.
Finally, the Self Service application is designed to empower end users by helping them to help themselves. Users who may be unsure whether they have the software they need to carry out a given business task, or fulfill a given role, can find out via this application, which creates a comprehensive view of all software assets that have been designated to that user or role. Furthermore, in the event a discrepancy exists (i.e., they have more or less software than they need), users can then initiate a reconciliation process by escalating the case to IT.
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