CA IT Asset Management (CA ITAM)

One of the biggest problems faced in large enterprise environments is meeting IT service expectations while still maintaining cost and meeting compliance mandates.

It's not just a big problem but a growing one as CEOs and CFOs look to IT departments to cut/curtail/reduce IT-related expenditures. The IT asset base, network devices, servers, desktops, laptops, Blackberries and other PDA's, becomes larger and more complicated to meet 24x7 business demands and provide IT services to an ever-widening group of users.

To further add to the complexity, compliance with software vendor contracts and regulatory statutes is now a serious issue that requires a watchful eye to mitigate risks. This leads to the critical question, "How can IT managers reduce IT asset costs and risks without reducing IT service levels?"

CA IT Asset Manager (CA ITAM) helps you to proactively manage your IT assets through asset tracking capabilities that feature: automated discovery, hardware and software inventory, configuration management, usage monitoring, license management and cross-platform reporting.

CA ITAM Benefits:

Implementing system-wide hardware and software asset management means that you have decided to end the time-consuming and cost-intensive process of manually inventorying all the hardware and software IT assets and associating them with their financial and contractual information.

• COST CONTROL CA ITAM helps recoup as much as 10 to 35 percent of the total IT asset budget. It helps maximise return on investment of existing IT assets through more effective asset utilisation. It automates processes, such as measuring resource usage, project costing, budget forecasting, invoice reconciliation and automated hardware lease return. This allows customers to eliminate unnecessary expenditures and avoid over-payments.
• RISK MANAGEMENT CA ITAM meets compliance objectives through better awareness of the location and organisational ownership of IT assets. It mitigates the risk of over- or underutilised software by comparing owned licenses to discovered instances. It also addresses regulatory concerns by maintaining the appropriate proof-of-use documentation and disposal certifications. This allows IT departments to reduce liability in partner/vendor relationships by accurately managing contractual obligations.
• IMPROVED SERVICE CA ITAM streamlines and consolidates access to comprehensive asset information to support improved IT services. It lets IT departments leverage a single repository of vital IT asset information (single source of truth) in support of broader business operations.
• ALIGN IT INVESTMENTS WITH BUSINESS OBJECTIVES CA ITAM lets IT departments manage IT as a service in support of the organisation's broader business objectives and ensure conformity with established business processes and workflow. IT managers will know what IT assets they own or lease, who is using them, for what projects and where they are located and what they are costing the organisation.

When deployed as an element of CA's overall EITM initiative, CA's IT Asset Management contributes an unprecedented level of command and control over all IT hardware and software assets, project costs and resource usage.

What makes this product unique?

• Comprehensive, modular, enterprise-level
• Industry-leading asset analytics and optimisation
• Rules-based reconciliation engine
• Integrated Service Catalog
• Extensible with other CA IT Management products, including CA CMDB, Unicenter® Service Desk, Unicenter® Asset Management and CA Clarity™
• Provides flexible and easy to configure license management
• Provides good tools to migrate from previous versions
• CA provides excellent professional services for planning and implementation

How does this product standout against the competition?

• Excellent scalability -truly an enterprise level product
• Broadest, most capable solution -rated #1 in breadth of functionality by EC_web.com In "Tools Manager 2008 Review - a complete Guide to the best of ITAM and SAM Tools".
• Software license management
• Continuous and Active Discovery - highly developed reconciliation capabilities.
• Forrester Research - August 4, 2006
• CA Is The Natural ITAM Choice For More Than Just CA-Centric Environments
• The Forrester Wave™ Vendor Summary, Q3 2006
• by Peter O'Neill, Reedwan Iqbal
• "CA Asset Management offers a top-tier, comprehensive, and robust IT asset management solution for industrial-size multinationals. Part of the Unicenter portfolio, it is not only a natural fit for many organisations that already have a commitment to CA's enterprise management tools, but also a leading solution with exceptional reach and functionality in its own right. Companies considering a standalone solution capable of supporting the needs of a large and complex organisation should also consider the offering. The r11 solution suite is one of the most modern of all those that we evaluated. "

Whitepapers

Download: IT Asset Management — A Cornerstone for Accelerating ITIL Success (PDF)

Download: Why Software License Management is so Difficult — and How To Simplify It (PDF)