Joe Sullivan
Asset Intelligence Technical Team Leader
Over the last few years at Softcat we’ve developed our IT Asset Management (ITAM) offerings based on market research, customer requests and customer feedback. It’s been clear to us that ITAM and Software Asset Management (SAM) are evolving; the industry is focused less on compliance and cost savings (which is a natural deliverable of our services and good practices) to a mechanism to drive change, optimisation and transformation.
Our asset intelligence services ensure we deliver against these objectives, and to support our customers and our internal teams, we have established a high performing technical team who cover multiple ITAM technologies, supporting the world of Asset Intelligence.
Where we’ve been
Our team of experts have helped many customers on their SAM journeys to reach a stage where they are comfortable with their compliance position. The SAM engagement process is relatively simple; Phase 1 is discovery and visibility, Phase 2 is understanding requirements and what is owned, Phase 3 is remediating the environment to a compliant state, Phase 4 is focusing on retaining the compliant state by maintaining and upskilling the people, processes and tools used.
The Asset Intelligence technical team were solely used as part of Phase 1, the discovery. Our roles were to discover what was currently installed, ensure complete visibility was captured and then to provide on-going technical support to assist with any queries.
Where we are now
With the ever-growing world of asset management and our trend analysis with various requests, we have noticed a considerable shift in technical offerings within the market. The more traditional SAM engagement style was to assist our customers by conducting an Effective Licence Position, then once they were satisfied, we would move to the next customer. Now, we understand that organisations are much more interested in the ongoing optimisation, seeing real intelligence applied to their environments and reaping the benefits of change. Change is one of the most important things to adopt, with technology changing every day, it’s crucial to stay up to date. We continuously promote change within organisations, this could be either changing the ways we discover information, automating administrative tasks to improve productivity or even to change the way we access information by making it easier and quicker to obtain.
Having identified this shift in customer requirements, and seeing the benefits realised, we are adapting and evolving our service offerings to meet the current demand by making the initial discovery and inventory phase as seamless as possible. Our Asset Intelligence technical team are meeting the ‘new’ SAM engagement styles which are focused on SAM tool optimisation, Cloud readiness assessments, Cloud optimisations and Office 365 consumptions. By simply listening to our customers, we can tailor our tools to meet specific needs and provide them with customised reports detailing asset information that may not be traditionally easily accessed. The tools we manage vary depending on the requirements, they are either agentless, agent based, VB or PowerShell script based, and some are automated, so we are constantly learning and upskilling internally to provide the best service.
Where we're going
As we look to align our SAM function to match our IT priorities within Softcat, we currently fit under the IT Intelligence vertical, with a vision to build intelligence into infrastructure and maximise operational efficiency. In order to stay compliant with our new name, ‘Asset Intelligence’, it’s essential we adapt, evolve and improve on what we currently provide as a service, so our customers are truly receiving the tailored intelligence services we offer. We believe that this new approach, working in partnership with organisations to build bespoke solutions according to their business objectives and individual requirements, will provide effective asset intelligence, with clarity and cost savings for each customer.
Get in Touch
If you are interested in finding out more about our Asset Intelligence services, contact your account manager, or click below.