ServiceNow IT Asset Management: Everything You Need to Know

To sustain, build, and transform your business, you need to know the IT assets that drive it. Organizational silos and legacy IT asset management tools that are inefficient make it difficult to manage and optimize technology assets. This wastes a considerable amount of money, affecting bottom-line revenue and growth.

This blog will introduce you to ServiceNow ITAM, a single-platform solution for managing and optimizing IT assets.

Let’s begin with a simple explanation of what ServiceNow IT Asset Management is.

What is ServiceNow ITAM?

ServiceNow Asset Management is a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution powered by the ServiceNow AI Platform, an intelligent cloud foundation where all ServiceNow products, like ITSM, ITOM, etc., are built.

What is ITAM used for? It is used for managing and automating the IT asset lifecycle. These assets could be software, hardware, cloud-based, or non-IT assets like routers, servers, cables, etc.

ITAM monitors all these assets throughout their entire life cycle, which includes planning, requirement analysis, evaluation, purchase, deployment, maintenance, retirement, and ultimately, safe disposal.

Briefly, ServiceNow ITAM unifies all the assets found under the IT umbrella on a single platform, enabling the following understanding:

• Knowing the assets owned by an organization
• Which assets are in use, and who is using them
• Utilization of assets
• How long the asset has been in use, when it was last serviced, and more
• Cost of each asset
• Software licenses, warranties, and more

Types of IT Asset Management

ITAM falls into the following categories:

• Software Asset Management (SAM)
• Hardware Asset Management (HAM)
• Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)
• Asset Management Executive Dashboard
• Contract and Renewal Management
• Cloud Cost Management

Software Asset Management (SAM)

As the name suggests, ServiceNow Software Asset Management acts as a single source of repository for the software resources, including internal, external, on-premise, or cloud.

SAM has the following capabilities:

Now Assist for SAM: A generative AI feature that summarizes publisher-related data such as contracts, compliance status, and usage patterns while also generating summaries. It identifies under user licenses and highlights compliance gaps, which could be worked on promptly by your teams.

SaaS License management: This solution offers a complete picture of the software licenses. It enables organizations to effectively manage licenses to prevent conditions like over- or under-licensing. While it supports building low-code integrations for additional SaaS tools via APIs, it also detects unmanaged SaaS purchases through financial data and usage statistics.

SAM playbooks and workspace:

SAM playbooks are step-by-step, guided workflows that simplify routine tasks such as setting up server licensing or creating entitlements. This is done through plugins and by analyzing contextual information about licenses.

The SAM workspace is a centralized dashboard where you can map all asset management activities and gain a view into their progress.

Software spend detection: This solution detects all software and SaaS purchases while identifying overlapping or redundant applications. It uses predictive AI to label transactions and match them to known catalogs.

Patches management: SAM can automatically install the patches to the software, ensuring they are up to date and eliminating security vulnerabilities. It also ensures that patches are compliant with the organizational security standards.

Software inventory: It keeps track of all the software installed and where it is located, with other information such as size, version, product ID, and more.

Application control: It also helps in controlling access to the software. You can define who and what can access the software, ensuring that one gets access to the software they are authorized to access.

Hardware Asset Management (HAM)

It tracks and manages the end-to-end lifecycle of all the hardware assets from the time of procurement to retirement. These hardware assets include both physical (like computers, printers, etc.) and consumable assets (like printer ink or paper).

Hardware Asset Management has the following capabilities:

Hardware Asset Workspace: You get a single-pane dashboard to manage all your hardware-related activities like inventory check-ins, transfers, audits, stock orders, and more. Get procurement insights, asset lifecycle visibility, and mobile support.

Asset total cost of ownership: It helps you calculate the total cost of assets throughout their lifecycle, including both direct and indirect expenses. It uses procurement, operating, maintenance/repair, and disposal/donation details. With these expense details, you can identify which of your assets and models are costing more than expected and then decide between repairing, upgrading, or disposing of assets based on total cost.

Hardware normalization: It provides a well-organized catalog of all the hardware-related information, including the manufacturer name, model name, and model number. This makes it easy to find the specific asset.

Asset lifecycle automation: It automates the hardware asset lifecycle from purchasing to disposal.

Inventory management: Provide a detailed overview of the assets across all the storage locations, like how much of each item is in stock and any orders that have been placed.

Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)

This module in ITAM helps you manage and track serialized and consumable physical assets across all locations. Employees can browse and request tools via self-service catalogs, detect low levels of inventory, and initiate purchase or transfer orders, therefore reducing manual efforts.

There are many other capabilities that it offers:

Performance analytics for EAM: You can make the most of your organizational data through visual dashboards and real-time visibility to help you make better decisions and answer questions. Your teams can prioritize tasks and records while receiving alerts for abnormalities.

Asset reservations: Manage and track the allocation and usage of your organizational assets. You can reserve equipment, facilities, and other resources in advance, ensuring that they are available when needed.

Operational technology asset management: It allows you to manage operational assets and equipment in industrial environments. You can seamlessly manage the inventory of spare parts and track their life cycle to see when they become obsolete, to eliminate any operational risk.

Asset Management Executive Dashboard

It is a unified dashboard that brings software, hardware, and cloud asset insights together into a single workspace. With this, you can evaluate spending, risks, and usage.

You can look into role-based or asset-specific performance and usage for better financial decision-making.

Define and monitor success goals, track roadmaps, and assess maturity across asset management domains to avoid any aging and non-compliance.

Contract and Renewal Management

Contract and renewal management is a part of SAM, HAM, and EAM that proactively manages upcoming contracts. It provides actionable insights into the assets under the contract and their respective expiration dates.

It has automated workflows to guide you through each stage of the renewal process, from request, contract details, asset selections, terms & conditions, PO, approval, and contract rate.

Cloud Cost Management

It is dedicated to providing a complete picture of the total cloud spending across SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS of an organization on a single platform, helping in the decision-making process.

Cloud Cost Management has the following capabilities:

• Spend Management for AI Services: It manages and monitors costs associated with AI services. Wherever and how much they are leveraged, it keeps track of all your spending.
• Bring Your Own License (BYOL): You can utilize the exciting software licenses in hybrid cloud environments and while migrating to other clouds. It estimates the cost of moving VMs from on-premise to the cloud, updates licensing information in real-time, and more.
• Optimizing cloud cost and optimization: Holistic view of the complete cloud spending and usage, identifying the areas of high spending and underutilized cloud assets.
• Centralized procurement: Bring all the separate purchases made by each department under one system. This helps in finding the purchases that were made without official approvals. Also, it helps in finding opportunities for volume discounts from vendors, helping in saving more.
• Budget cloud spend: Help in planning the budget you can spend according to your needs. With regular tracking, it ensures that you comply with your budget.
• Reporting: It generates accurate reports categorized according to their cost centers, services, applications, etc.

Benefits of ServiceNow ITAM

ServiceNow ITAM is a complete solution for optimizing the asset lifecycle by offering the following benefits:

1. Consolidated View of Assets

This is one of the most significant benefits of ServiceNow IT Asset Management. It provides a single-architecture platform for tracking and managing all the assets, such as hardware, software, and cloud services.

This granular level of understanding puts organizations in a position to reduce spending by effectively managing all the assets.

This consolidated view of assets is supported by a native CMDB on one platform, one architecture, and one data model. This enables all the stakeholders and departments within the organization to connect to assets from a single platform. ITAM can be integrated with ServiceNow ITOM to create a holistic view of all IT assets and their operational status.

ServiceNow ITAM also supports real-time visibility into the data to better align the resources with the current business processes.

2. Automate IT Assets Management Lifecycle

ITAM automates every stage of the IT asset lifecycle from request, fulfillment, development, monitoring, service, and retirement.

Here is how ServiceNow ITAM automates the asset lifecycle:

• Request: The stakeholders can discuss the requirements and make a list of assets that are required. ITAM will create a formal request with all the information related to the assets required.
• Fulfillment: The request will be routed to the teams responsible for the approval. They will have detailed insights into the in-stock assets to ensure the fulfillment of the request. If assets are unavailable, then purchases need to be made.
• Deployment: Once the assets are made available, they will be deployed into the service.
• Monitoring: ITAM keeps collecting the data automatically about the application usage to ensure optimal usage and mitigate potential risks.
• Service: The responsible team will be informed regarding the maintenance, upgrades, or emergency updates. Furthermore, it integrates with ServiceNow Field Service Management to help field technicians with information on assets such as their location, configuration, and current status, enabling them to perform maintenance or updates of the assets.
• Retirement: Whenever the assets reach the end of their life, ITAM can proceed with the selling, recycling, or disposing of them according to the organization’s policy.

3. Key Publisher Compliance Management

ServiceNow ITAM has publisher packs that help businesses manage licenses from major brands such as Oracle, IBM, SAP, Adobe, and more. It helps you understand your licenses even in complex environments such as cloud and hybrid.

It ensures that you are following the rules set by the companies that publish the software you’re using. This enhances your defense against software audits. This understanding also makes it easy to reclaim unused or underused licenses.

4. Strategizing Asset Portfolio

ServiceNow IT Asset Management groups the assets according to their type (like hardware, software, etc.) and class (like servers, laptops, etc.). Real-time access to the data about the cost, performance, and utilization of assets helps them to find out which type of asset or class offers the best price or performance.

This results in understanding which asset is most valuable to acquire and maintain. In simple words, ITAM helps you understand individual assets in the context of price, utility, usage level, associated cost, maintenance, and more.

5. Setting License Priorities and Handling

ServiceNow ITAM has the tools and provides the information required to set the license priorities. These priorities may include reclaiming underutilized or unused software and reassigning it to better use. It may also include the disposal of unauthorized, unwanted, or obsolete software licenses.

ITAM can automate the process of rights reclamation and disposal to reduce the human effort that prioritizes the work that matters more.

6. Manage New Hires Efficiently

When you hire new employees, ServiceNow ITAM helps you understand whether you have equipment in inventory or if there is existing hardware that can be reallocated. This ensures all the new employees have access to the assets required to do the job.

ServiceNow ITAM Pricing

ServiceNow ITAM pricing is subject to the requirements of an organization. You can connect with a ServiceNow consulting firm, which will evaluate your requirements and provide you with a custom quote specific to your needs.

How do you Get Started With ServiceNow ITAM?

ServiceNow ITAM is one of the must-have solutions for businesses for asset management across your organization and remaining adaptive to changing business needs.

The first place to start with ServiceNow ITAM is with a strategy. It’s the most important step in building, defining, and clarifying your entire asset picture. That’s where ServiceNow consulting companies can provide you with the expertise you need.

Cyntexa, with more than 400+ in-house technology professionals, has expertise in helping businesses leverage the capabilities of ServiceNow ITAM tailored to their needs. Let’s connect with us to climb the first step of making your assets work for you to their best capacity, and we’ll handle the rest for you.

Schedule a consultation call today.

AUTHOR

Shubham

Service Cloud, Salesforce Managed Packages

With over 5 years of experience, Shubham specialize in curating solutions on Salesforce Service Cloud, Nonprofit Cloud, Consumer Goods Cloud, Managed Packages, and ServiceNow ITSM. He designs and implements end-to-end service solutions that improve operational workflows and ensure seamless integration across enterprise systems. Shubham’s expertise lies in creating secure, efficient, and agile platforms tailored to unique business needs.