Hardware asset management (HAM) tools are software applications and technology used by enterprise companies to manage all types of hardware assets, including IT, line of business and facilities management — regardless of location and industry. Key functionality includes the ability to: - Discover, identify, normalize, aggregate and store data for hardware assets. - Reconcile and manage the complete asset life cycle: procurement, arrival, storage, provisioning, use, transfer, service and disposition. - Govern access, visibility and control to specific assets based on the user’s role. - Optimize and integrate with other IT and financial systems for data, processes and workflow. - Flexibly assign asset ownership to a person, department or location. - Scale in record size and number of records as the organization grows. - Share standardized reports, create custom reporting and export data into other reporting systems. - Offer APIs for asset information to be ingested/entered through integration with procurement systems, software asset management (SAM) solutions or inventoried through CMDB or network discovery tools — as well as bar codes or RFID tags.
Password management (PM) tools are products that provide users with the means to reset their own passwords after an account lockout or when they forget their passwords. PM tools can also synchronize passwords for users across multiple systems, allowing users to access multiple applications with the same password.
Gartner defines SaaS management platforms (SMP) as software tools that aim to help organizations discover, manage, optimize and automate the SaaS application life cycle from one centralized console. Core SMP capabilities include discovery, cost optimization, employee self-service via an application store, insights to increase adoption and automation of onboarding/offboarding activities. As SaaS adoption accelerates, IT leaders struggle to discover and support SaaS-hosted applications in accordance with company, market or geographic policies and regulations. Increased SaaS costs — combined with limited visibility into the entire SaaS portfolio (including unapproved SaaS) and high levels of overdeployed and underconsumed licenses — result in significant financial, operational and cybersecurity risk.
Gartner defines software asset management (SAM) managed services as services expert providers deliver to manage the software, SaaS and cloud assets of end-user organizations. They include skills, processes, technologies and governance to transform and run the SAM discipline on behalf of the client. SAM managed services employ the providers’ proprietary skills and methodologies to transform and run the SAM discipline on behalf of the client, augmenting the client’s resources. Delivered by skilled resources and leveraging the provider’s expertise, intellectual property (IP), rigor and best practices, SAM managed services address the gap in available SAM skills, enable scalability and enhance SAM maturity. At the same time, they deliver day-to-day SAM activities and oversee the full SAM life cycle. SAM managed services are delivered directly to end-user customers, on either a continuous or a scheduled basis, employing required discipline to meet software and cloud cost optimization and governance objectives.
Software asset management (SAM) tools are solutions that provide automation to support tasks required to produce and maintain compliance with independent software vendor (ISV) license use rights, while improving an organization’s ability to proactively identify and optimize software risk and spend. SAM tools provide in-depth software asset analysis through: - Conducting discovery - Analyzing software license entitlements - Automating the collection of software consumption data - Establishing ISV effective license position (ELP) - Governing software assets - Optimizing software value delivery - Sharing information with other tools and stakeholders