Organizations invest in IT Asset Management (ITAM) solutions to obtain key business benefits, including cost savings, revenue growth, customer satisfaction and reduced security risk.
To achieve these business goals, it is important to know the difference between lifecycle and insights; how the “10-foot view” – the asset lifecycle – can lead to the optimization of the “10,000-foot view” – the insights.
The Lifecycle
The asset lifecycle, or “10-foot” view”, is crucial to achieving the aforementioned critical business outcomes.
IT assets, both hardware and software, have a lifecycle that begins when they are purchased, continues as they are modified over time, and comes to an eventual end when they reach the end of their lifecycle and are replaced.
Whether an asset is transitioning from one stage of its lifecycle to the next, or moving within a singular stage of the lifecycle, the data elements and attributes that represent that asset must also change. These changes must then be reflected in the systems of all stakeholders, including the user of the product, the reseller of the service and the manufacturer/software publisher. To achieve this at scale, it is important that an organization has an ITAM platform that can process ITAM transactions and manage the IT asset lifecycle.
Our RAY ALLEN Control System (RACS) ITAM platform gives technology partners, such as service providers and value-added resellers, a lifecycle-level view into their customers’ IT assets. In doing so, it enables them to accurately manage their customers’ technology purchases over time and obtain cost savings, revenue growth and other key business benefits.
Throughout the asset lifecycle process, transactional change events – such as moves, adds, changes and deletes – occur that are necessary for keeping install bases accurate and valid over time. These change events are represented by “Action Items” in the RACS platform, which are notifications that let the user know when these change events need to happen. Action Items are a critical component of realizing the value of insights, or the “100,000-foot view”.
Insights:
Insights within ITAM are the macro-level “100,000-foot view” of the transactional lifecycle events that happen over time.
As lifecycle events, or change events, occur over time, the records and trends of what has happened within the lifecycle are summarized as “insights.” There are a variety of insights that can be generated from an ITAM solution. RAY ALLEN, for example, offers over 25 discrete insight micro-applications as part of our Asset Lifecycle Management and Recurring Revenue Management business intelligence platforms.
The insights gained from an accurate lifecycle practice cover a variety of dimensions, from views into what is happening within a single customer’s lifecycle, to views of all customers’ asset lifecycles aggregated together.
With this wide range of insights, technology partners can answer the following questions pertaining to business benefits:
- How have I improved my customers’ coverage and attach rates over time?
- How much money have I saved my customer in the last quarter?
- Which critical network assets does my customer have that do not have coverage?
- Where am I leaking revenue on software subscription renewals?
- How do I prevent my customer from facing hefty Enterprise Agreement True-Forward fees?
It is the holistic combination of lifecycle and insights that enables businesses to achieve the return on investment that they desire from an automated ITAM practice. And by offering systems that intelligently manage asset lifecycle processes and connect customer install base data to their own, technology partners can generate the accurate insights that are critical to increasing top line growth and customer satisfaction while improving internal efficiencies and cost savings.