Chapter 6. ITAM Tools – What Should You Look For?

Few areas affect your enterprise to the extent that technology does. It affects your budget, your spending, your results, your capabilities, your people, your processes and—ultimately your success. The whole concept behind applying technologies to business intelligence and processes is to ensure that you work smarter, not harder, which in turn should lead to improved results.

The choice of technology is one of the more difficult aspects of Information Technology Asset Management (ITAM) and Software Asset Management (SAM). There are tools that can do ITAM well but not SAM. There are tools that do SAM well, but don't do overall ITAM well, because they are not robust enough to handle Hardware Asset Management (HAM). There are tools that state they can do it all.

Using today's technology, an intelligent asset (such as a laptop, mobile device, server, or VM) reports the manufacturer, make, model, and serial number. The position on the network is...