A fast and powerful way to economize your IT assetsHP Asset Manager Software

Brochure

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Caught between cost and compliance, service levels and outsourcers, IT organizations struggle to fully explain the value they provide to the business. HP Asset Manager plays a major role in addressing these challenges. HP Asset Manager enables IT organizations to reduce costs and drive business decisions by managing the physical, virtual, financial, and contractual aspects of IT assets.

HP Asset Manager automates best practices across the asset management lifecycle and integrates processes into IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) service support workflows including incident, problem, and change management to improve service quality and business outcomes.

Business challengeIT organizations are under pressure to lower service costs, increase service levels, and improve visibility into financial and operational decisions. Today’s economic environment is more challenging than ever—virtualization, acquisitions, device sprawl, consolidation projects, asset allocation, and an overall lack of standardization across IT, all drive up the cost and drive down the ability to deliver quality business services to the organization. IT must align costs with business priorities and prove their value by providing granular documentation of how IT assets support critical business services. As a result, organizations need an integrated approach to IT asset management (ITAM). By establishing an integrated approach, organizations can confirm that the right processes (such as procurement, request management, and change governance) are properly supporting the entire service lifecycle so that actionable asset information is aligned to enable the delivery of timely, cost-effective, business services.

What is federation? Federation is the ability to integrate and share data across relevant IT processes. Through these integrated processes, data can be easily pulled from multiple sources, integrated and then unified, and shared with the end user at the presentation layer.

Federation offers the following key benefits:

• Uses query capabilities to do simple searches

• Improves transaction performance

• Manages the total cost of ownership and value of business services

• Reduces data duplication

How does it work?

• Common service definitions are defined within the HP Universal CMDB.

• Discovered and reconciled hardware and software inventory items become IT asset records.

• Managed IT Assets are presented to the UCMDB as “Trusted Source” configuration items (CI).

The HP Asset Manager solutionIntegration across the IT value chain

It has long been the challenge of IT organizations to get a clear, fiscal view of the configuration items used to provide business services to the customers they serve. Aligning and integrating IT asset management with an ITIL-aligned service management solution enables IT organizations to share common data with minimal duplication.

HP Asset Manager delivers out-of-the-box, real-time federation with HP Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB). This integration results in one of the few systems to automate the entire IT Service Management process without requiring a monolithic repository. Federation reduces data redundancy and improves transaction performance—so that relevant data resides within its respective business domain, yet is available across the business infrastructure. In addition, discovered services or mapped views of component configuration items can be correlated to their physical assets, enabling IT to rationalize the fiscal cost of delivering these business services to customers. HP Asset Manager offers a huge benefit for organizations looking to reduce costs of maintaining ITIL-aligned integrations, optimize transaction performance, and share critical data across the business infrastructure.

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ITAM success starts with discoveryHP Discovery and Dependency Mapping (DDM) software

Sound ITAM processes are dependent on a good discovery tool to scan the IT environment. HP DDM automatically discovers all devices connected to IT network environment, providing the identification of all connected assets. HP DDM collects the inventory of physical and virtual hardware, and usage of software installed across the infrastructure. The data is used for asset tracking and other purposes, such as software compliance and reconciliation with the CMDB.

Discovery, virtualization, and software license compliance

With the introduction of virtualization, organizations are challenged with virtual device sprawl and an inability to adhere to the proper licensing associated with these devices. DDM supports the collection of data for many popular virtualization technologies.

This allows customers to identify virtual resources in the network, match them with the physical servers, and collect physical and virtual hardware inventory.

Software Asset Management in a virtual environment often requires not just the identification of software inventory, but also matching software inventory with host hardware data, while the hardware information itself can also be used for chargeback purposes.

Figure 1. Asset Manager is integrated with the HP IT Performances suite to mitigate compliance risk, improve delivery of service assets, and boost the utilization of IT.

Best Practices

Asset Manager

Discovery and Inventory

Reports and Dashboards (Executive Scorecard)

Procurement

Financials Software Asset Management

Asset Portfolio

Contracts

Federation Connect It Web Services

Figure 2. DDM Asset Manager, Universal CMDB, and Service Manager operate cooperatively to make sure the IT hardware and software assets supporting business services are effectively managed.

IT Asset Managementmanages the hardware

and software provisioned to services

Configuration ManagementSystem governs the

relationship of assets toconfigured services

IT Service Managementenables these

services to executewithout incident

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A foundation for business-based ITHP Asset Manager serves as the foundation for your IT organization to measure and communicate the value IT provides to the businesses it supports. To do this requires a thorough understanding of the physical, virtual, financial, operational, and contractual relationships of assets to allow the organization to increase return on its IT investment.

HP Asset Manager drives IT operations and decision making in the following ways:

Turn IT into a business that addresses the needs of the other businesses

• Directly tie IT cost to business unit consumption

• Align business services to their supporting assets and contracts

• Measure the TCO in providing business services to the organization, help price the services of the IT

• Support the process for having end users accessing internal and external services

− Request access to the service

− Manage users’ subscriptions

− Bill for the use of the services through showback or chargeback

Enhancing service and reducing asset costs

• Effectively manage contracts, leases, license agreements, and warranties

• Streamline the fulfillment of goods and service requests from the service catalog

• Complete asset and project expense audit tracking

Mitigating security and compliance risks

• Quantify and measure financial compliance risks of IT infrastructure with out-of-the-box software counters that address complex licensing rules (per processor/specific rule for virtual platforms)

• Proactively identify license compliance issues

• Evaluate cost for compliance or savings opportunities on license maintenances

• Re-harvest and reallocate unused software licenses

Figure 3. Dynamic dashboards show the different mix between physical and virtual assets in the IT environment.

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Manage the asset portfolioMost organizations without an asset-tracking solution are challenged by managing assets in disparate systems across IT. As a result, organizations struggle to get a consolidated view of their IT assets and cannot answer basic questions such as “What are my assets?”, “Where are they located?”, and “Who is using them?”. HP Asset Manager Asset Portfolio is at the heart of every HP Asset Manager implementation and helps to address these challenges.

HP Asset Manager Asset Portfolio tracks, defines, and manages the complex relationships between assets, contracts, and costs, providing consistent and accurate inventory information. Asset tracking processes are simplified by consolidating assets and each configuration item into a central repository.

This establishes a baseline inventory of accurate asset data in a repository that allows users of all HP Asset Manager applications to have a consolidated, easy-to-access view of all of their

IT assets, their interdependencies, and their relationship to the business services they support.

HP Asset Manager key benefits:• Improve performance through integrated

ITSM processes

• Complete visibility of virtual assets and their impact on relevant business services

• Manage software compliance on a constant basis

• Establish a foundation for ITIL-aligned IT Financial Management processes

• Comprehensive hardware and software management for desktop environments

Manage vendors, contracts, and IT standards Choose the best vendors, reduce contract costs, and be compliant with terms and conditions are keys to the success of an IT organization.

HP Asset Manager provides a full contract management module that allows to manage the operational aspects of contracts (Contact validation, start, end dates, renewals, contacts, covered assets, and contracts costs allocation to assets) but also tracks vendor performance on key Service Level Objectives metrics (time for delivery, return ratio, and work order resolution).

Beyond operations and performance, Asset Manager helps mitigating the legal risks with a management of normalized terms and conditions. Specifically on license assets, Asset Manager provides out of the bow compliance reports for hundreds of applications of the main publishers (Microsoft®, Oracle, IBM, Adobe®, and VMware, for instance). The best practice software compliance counters, updated every other month, reflect the end user license terms specific to each application: per workstation, per CPU (Oracle core factors, IBM PVU), per named user and so on.

Figure 4. Automate compliance processes to view licenses vs. software installations.

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Consolidate and streamline procurement processesConsolidating requisitions, preventing maverick buying, and enforcing purchasing policies across IT are all challenges that can have a significant financial impact on the business’ bottom line. Organizations need a solution that provides complete visibility of all existing requisitions, enforces standards and purchasing policies, and prevents expensive one-off purchases.

HP Asset Manager Procurement module addresses these challenges by automating and streamlining the entire request lifecycle. It verifies each request against corporate approval standards by checking against a catalog of approved assets. It monitors existing stocks and budgets so that requests are filled through available inventory whenever possible and consolidates similar requisitions across the organization in order to get a greater volume purchase discount and save money.

Financially manage and chargeback for the utilization of critical business servicesHP Asset Manager Financial Management module makes it easy to track costs associated with every asset at every stage in its lifecycle, including expenses related to capital and operations.

HP Financial Management institutes chargeback programs to specific business units. The ability to chargeback for the utilization of virtual or physical assets enables greater cost recovery, and provides visibility into the business services being consumed at the business-unit level. This visibility and cost recovery helps organizations to better budgets and future plans.

Unique width and depthHP Asset Manager is ranked as a leader by all analysts (Gartner,1

Forrester, EMA2) because it has both the width and depth. The scope and years of experience and best practices on covered ITAM processes helps IT organizations to move to the next level of maturity, allowing for instance business services costing and cloud billing.

In addition, Asset Manager also goes very deep, for instance, in the very advanced Software Asset Management compliance capabilities.

1 “Market scope for the IT asset management repository,” Gartner, October 2011

2 “EMA Radar for Software Asset Management (SAM): Q2 2011 Summary,” EMA IT and Data Management Research, Industry Analysis, and Consulting, May 2011

Self-service catalogand request

management

Assetmanagement

Changemanagement

Configurationmanagement system

(CMS)

Knowledgemanagement

Service levelmanagement

Consolidatedservice deskincident and

problemmanagement

Figure 5. HP Asset Manager is a key part of ITSM initiatives.

HP Financial Planning and Analysis

HP Financial Planning and Analysis

HP CMS and best practices

HP Project andPortfolio Management

HP Asset Manager

Governance

Service pricing and chargebacks

Planning and budgeting

Cost accounting

Financial planning and analysis

• Full visibility, control, and accountability

• Automated consolidation of budgets and costs

• Automated cost allocation

Figure 6. HP Asset Manager is a foundation for IT Financial Management.

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Complementary solutions and productsHP Asset Management solutions include the following supporting products:

HP IT Service Management solution

Out-of-the-box integrations to HP Service Manager software provide customers end-to-end adaptive management capabilities to streamline operations and lower costs. The asset base can be easily reconciled with other configuration items to track the total costs of goods and services. This provides a greater understanding of total cost of ownership.

HP Service Request Catalog

HP Service Request Catalog provides organizations with an IT shop window of all the goods and services that are available to the business. This front-end interacts with the HP Service Manager Request management module. The integration to HP Asset Manager streamlines the fulfillment and approval process, so that requested goods can be fulfilled at the lowest cost to the business.

HP IT Financial Management solution

HP Project and Portfolio Management (PPM)

The out-of-the-box integration of HP Asset Manager software to HP PPM software provides customers the ability to track the capital and operational costs of a project for total cost roll-up. The bidirectional integration allows users to easily understand labor versus non-labor costs so that the overall health of a project can be easily tracked and assessed.

HP Financial Planning and Analysis software

HP Financial Planning and Analysis (FPA) supports cost visibility for IT. It supports the informational needs of IT management, accounting, and business leaders to help them make better investments and IT execution decisions. With highly configurable cost allocation rules, HP FPA simplifies and automates data consolidation and aggregation from multiple sources.

Executive scorecard

HP Executive Scorecard gathers key performance indicators and other metrics from IT. It provides dashboards for senior management to show the insights in business-friendly formats. To convey IT as a valuable business partner, CIOs pull together reports that the business can appreciate. This is slow, difficult, and can be without governance. The HP Executive Scorecard automates gathering information from diverse sources, including Asset Manager, consolidating it, linking it to a service hierarchy, and presenting it in near real time.

HP Client Automation software

With the integrations to HP Client Automation, configuration management inventory, and software usage data can be easily populated in HP Asset Manager and reconciled against the asset record (purchase order or contract). The ability to offer license availability before distribution helps prevent software overspend, as well as verifies that license distribution is driven by user entitlement. This integration allows clients to quickly and easily identify over-licensed software and remove it from their environment, hence, saving organizations from penalty fees and additional license cost.

A complete solutionComprehensive training

HP provides a comprehensive curriculum of HP software and IT Service Management courses. These offerings provide the training you need to realize the full potential of your HP solutions, increase your network optimization and responsiveness, and achieve better return on your IT investments.

With more than 30 years experience meeting complex education challenges worldwide, HP knows training. This experience, coupled with unique insights into HP software products, positions HP to deliver the optimum training experience. For more information about these and other educational courses, visit hp.com/learn.

http://www.hp.com/learn

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For more informationGain significant economic benefits for your organization with the HP Asset Manager software—reduce costs and drive business decisions by managing the physical, virtual, financial, and contractual aspects of IT assets. Visit hp.com/go/itamsoftware.

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