Asset Life Cycle Management (ALM) is all about taking control of
tracking, ownership and assignment of IT Assets, from the initial request through retirement and disposal. Understanding what
you own, where it is located, how much it is being used and how much it costs -provides the context for continuous improvement,
cost reduction, security and regulatory compliance.
The same tools that automate and centralize Service Desk, IMAC and
Break/Fix processes also provide best practice asset accounting and license reconciliation. ECS provides deep IT Asset Management
process and tools expertise across most IT towers including Desktop, Network, Open Systems, Mainframe and Applications. IT
Asset management in many IT shops is not only archaic, it's a serious fiduciary risk that many shops purposely back burner
- until there is an audit. There may be an enterprise level Asset Management solution in place, but processes around procurement,
vendor management, contract management, license proof of purchase management and lease management may be so bad that the data
is unreliable, shrinkage goes undetected and serious license gaps pose massive true up and/or penalties during audits. Asset
Management is more than inventory control. Modern asset systems manage the life cycle of company owned or leased hardware
and software assets to ensure fiscal accountability, audit compliance and cost efficient operations. ECS can evaluate your
existing processes and tools, streamline current asset management practices, develop new designs and controls and assist solution
implementation. Major focus areas are:
•
Procurement, goods receipt and accounting
• Hardware and software Asset tagging and discovery
• Vendor
and contract management
• Software License Tracking
• Usage Monitoring
Asset
Life Cycle Management - What It Should Look Like:
Discovery and Asset Management provide the building blocks for a
Configuration Management Data Base Implementation. A CMDB provides significant value to an IT organization by providing a
complete view into the relationships and dependencies of all IT elements that work together to deliver business services.
ECS can provide a road map for an ITIL compliant, enterprise ITSM and ALM solution supporting a common federated CMDB, discovery
tools, connectors, dependency mapping UI and off the shelf integration with Incident, Problem and Change Management.
Software Compliance
Challenges
In today’s high end data centers, operating massive multiple CPU Windows and UNIX servers with
virtualization, software compliance management has become an art form. The first challenge is finding and loading accurate,
up to date vendor, contract and license entitlement data necessary to perform software reconciliation. Second, automating
discovery of not only where the software is executing but the CPU horsepower environment in which it is executing in, on a
dynamic basis, is a challenge. The final hurdle is developing a solution that matches complex license model
entitlements (eg PVU pricing based on allocated CPU cores) with a matching server software discovery configuration item
attributes snapshot. Today’s large shop license models include:
Quantity
installed
Concurrent usage
Named Users
Capacity based, number of CPUs, and number of cores
Capacity based,
CPU pooling on virtual machines
Citrix end point virtualization models
Web (browser) based services – in house web application server hosting
SaaS models eg subscription, pay per use
Unlimited
License Agreements
Enterprise
or Select Agreements with true-up
Client Access License (CAL) with true-up
Product bundles, shared components
