Gartner Says Companies Don't Cover Their IT Assets

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Analysts at Gartner have released a report that espouses the value of IT asset management tools to help companies organize their computers, software, and peripherals, and, most importantly, to save them money in these tough times. Gartner recently held a conference that focused on IT asset management issues, and has divulged some internal data about how even its prestigious clients do not use this technology effectively, even though asset management tools have been around since the advent of PCs.

A special division of Gartner called Gartner Measurement surveyed its own customer base to find out more about how these companies used IT asset management tools, if at all. Gartner says that fewer than a quarter of companies worldwide have IT asset management tools installed, and that many companies do not understand the need for IT asset management. Perhaps more shocking is the revelation that even those companies that do have these tools do not cover all of their hardware assets with these tools. Specifically, when Gartner averaged the total number of assets covered by such tools, it found that only 60 percent of the hardware included in distributed computing networks was covered by asset management tools. (Gartner did not elaborate on what assets were covered and what ones were not. PCs and printers are probably the orphans.) The analysts at Gartner say that many of the company's clients have elaborate manual asset tracking methods or, worse still, do not understand their IT asset base.

If companies don't know what hardware, software, and peripherals are installed, planning upgrades and maintaining the network becomes a nightmare, and one that adds unnecessarily to IT costs. Gartner says that the majority of sites it audited--about 90 percent--had marginal hardware asset management practices, and that this can result in poor system management, lower-than-average service levels, and troubles when trying to upgrade. These results can, in turn, raise the cost of distributed computing--just about the only kind that gets done these days--by 7 percent to 10 percent per year, which, Gartner says, works out to about $560 to $800 per user. That money could be spent more fruitfully on something else, like a company picnic with lots of beer and big thick steaks. The costs of managing software assets by hand, rather than by using IT asset management tools, is even higher, says Gartner. That's why software change management and asset management tools are something that every Windows and Linux shop should be looking at--particularly if they are supporting heterogeneous platforms and multiple programming teams.

How much money are we talking about? Enough to make it worth the trouble. A Gartner case study performed last year showed that a $1 billion company with a $50 million to $60 million total IT budget (between 5 percent and 6 percent of revenues) had about $33 million to $39 million of IT assets to manage, and could save between $6 million and $7 million by improving asset management in areas where they were doing things with tools or manually, and extending it to areas where they weren't really doing anything. The implication is that companies could shave their IT costs by about 20 percent by shoring up their IT asset management. Presumably, these ratios scale down to smaller enterprises, such as the $10 million to $100 million companies, which make up the vast majority of the midrange server base. Even for these small and midsize companies, IT asset management software could yield hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings.

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