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IT management specialist Landesk announced the release of the latest version of IT Asset Management Suite (ITAM), Asset Central, which integrates with the company’s Service Desk offering to provide access to asset data from the Service Desk platform.
Along with this platform alignment, the new release extends the existing hardware and software asset management processes and adds asset discovery mechanisms.
Asset Central provides users with life-cycle processes that range from ordering any type of resource in the asset catalog through to disposal.
The product provides alerting, contract, process and life-cycle management in a single tool. In addition, Asset Central, which is offered on-premises and in the cloud, can help organizations anticipate and schedule hardware and software purchases, updates and maintenance, and optimize usage.
“Today, IT organizations are feeling pressure from their internal customers, the business and from users [who] are accustomed to consumer technologies. As a result, they have a growing base of mobile and IoT devices accessing the corporate network daily, in addition to corporate users purchasing cloud-based applications,” Patricia Adams, IT asset management evangelist at Landesk, told eWEEK.
Adams explained that this is all compounded by an unprecedented rate of technology change that is making Moore’s Law obsolete.
“When we throw in software vendors that are constantly changing their software licensing models to maximize revenue, IT asset management is the only way for an organization to put some control back into IT’s hands,” she said.
Along with the changes to Asset Central, the company is also introducing Asset Intelligence, which includes capabilities formerly found in Landesk Data Analytics, Software License Manager and Inventory Manager.
Asset Intelligence also gives IT departments access to data from Landesk discovery tools or external sources, which provide a view of assets for provisioning and security monitoring purposes.
Furthermore, B2B connectors allow organizations to aggregate contract, warranty and procurement data from vendors.
“When designing the IT Asset Management Suite, user experience was, and continues to be, one of our foundational principles. In order to compete in the market, Landesk understands the need for a user-centered platform that is highly accessible, easy to use, and delivers [the] functionality businesses require,” Adams said. “There is no reason why IT applications should be left out when it comes to great user experience and design.”
She explained that users in the IT asset management industry tend to come from a mixture of backgrounds, whether technical, business or financial savvy, which presents the need for a friendly, intuitive application to address the requirements of users across the business.