What's New in IT Asset Management for the Rome Release

[Adam Smith-Cair]

Automate the end-to-end lifecycle for hardware assets, software licenses, and cloud resources on a single platform.

In the Rome release, our continued focus is helping our customers slash hardware, software, and cloud costs; mitigate risk through the entire asset lifecycle; and improve efficiencies with prescriptive workflow. The IT Asset Management (ITAM) business unit continues to drive innovation to help customers get to value outcomes quickly with end-to-end lifecycle visibility of the entire asset estate—including hardware, virtual assets, software, and cloud resources. Rome’s features and capabilities help solve challenges that arise when asset management is managed separately from other areas of IT and the busines and when asset data is scattered across the organization or between tools. The Now Platform® enables customers to manage their entire IT estate on a single data model with automated workflows that drive action through the asset lifecycle.

The Rome release includes innovations across: 

• Hardware Asset Management—with even more prescriptive workflows that automate how assets flow between people and businesses 
• Software Asset Management—with an array of new features focused on better user experience and management of your spend in on-prem or SaaS software 
• Cloud Insights—for your hybrid cloud environments across IaaS and PaaS 

Hardware Asset Management 

servicenow.com/HAM
 

The Rome release of Hardware Asset Management includes: 

• Asset health dashboard 

• Receive recommended actions, alerts, and insights based on asset health​ metrics
• • Provide interactive asset location tracking​ 
  • Identify asset risks related to compliance, incomplete asset data, or chronic hardware issues​ 
• Return merchandise authorization (RMA) 

• Complete RMA tasks – warranty repairs or warranty replacements ​ 

• Automatically update asset records affected by RMA tasks 

• Asset reservations 

• Reserve an asset or multiple assets up to three months in advance
• • Provide request, new, waitlist, auto allocate, prepare, and deployment workflows 
  • Help to predict future demands to maintain consistent stock levels 

Asset health dashboard 

Assets within the organization can pose a risk based on the critical information they store and the functions they perform. Some assets are also hard to find on the network or haven’t been discovered for a while. There are other assets which have had multiple incidents reported over time. On top of that, it’s often hard to know when an asset is out of warranty and needs to be retired​.​

All of these concerns present challenges for asset managers to keep critical business services performing and individuals productive. The asset health dashboard gives you a good idea of what assets are at risk because of their health or lack of vital information. It presents assets based on individual asset lifecycles, their performance over time, and when they were last discovered. ​ 

Return merchandise authorization (RMA) 

Return and repair processes are well established for many industries. Return merchandise authorizations, or RMAs, are process-driven and are a great opportunity to automate and track workflows. Sometimes this requires a return of the equipment, other times it relates to fixing assets in the field, and many times it includes either a replacement or loaner asset. In all these cases, the RMA process can be streamlined with ServiceNow Hardware Asset Management. ​

Tying together workflows for repair requests and returns and ordering and shipping new equipment makes life much easier for asset managers and field service organizations. ​​ 

 

Asset reservations 

Loaner assets are among the easiest to misplace and the hardest to predict or track. Employees lose confidence in IT when IT must hunt around for something halfway decent for the employee to use while their equipment is being fixed or replaced. But it doesn’t make sense to have a bunch of assets laying around that depreciate, age out, and go unused, either. In the Quebec release, we introduced prescriptive workflows for managing loaner assets. We’ve taken loaner assets a step further in Rome with additional workflows to create something like a loaner lifecycle for temporary assets. 

What employees will appreciate about this new asset reservation feature is that it allows them to schedule assets. The workflow will then determine whether it can be fulfilled or will need to be waitlisted. Asset managers will also be happy they have the visibility into how loaner assets impact their stockroom inventories.  

Software Asset Management 

servicenow.com/SAM
 

The Rome release of Software Asset Management includes: 

• Software Asset Manager Workspace
• • Consolidates multiple dashboards into a better workspace for day-to-day asset activities
  • Deliver more meaningful and contextual analytics and KPIs
  • Highlight optimization actions and their associated cost savings
  • Detailed visual explanation of how license requirements are calculated in your environment 

• Oracle Update
• • Determine Oracle DB license compliance using licenses brought from on-prem to the cloud
  • Remediate compliance issues for cloud deployments 

• Software Asset Manager Playbooks
• • Increase usability and efficiency through playbook workflows – creating entitlements
  • Deliver more meaningful and contextual analytics and KPIs 

• Better together integrations
• • With Risk Management - Provides data necessary for CIS and ISO governance controls
  • With Discovery Agent Client Collector - Leverages data from the agent client collector, which pushes usage data back from devices the roam about the network 

• Publisher Pack Updates
• • Oracle - Reduce licensing needs across shared storage – specifically VMware
  • Microsoft – Microsoft 365 Advanced Optimizations
  • SAP – S4 HANA Support 

Software Asset Manager Workspace 

Often, software asset managers had to jump between multiple dashboards to access the right information. Because people couldn’t see the most important data and actions in one place, it was easy to get distracted or lost in their processes. This simpler workspace will easily become the new landing page for software asset managers to start their day-to-day activities.

The new software asset workspace was developed based on extensive research with our customers to understand exactly what they need and the actions that are driven by that information. The user interface of the new asset workspace puts more actions in context and shows more meaningful KPIs associated with software asset workflows. 

 

Bring Your Own License (BYOL) 

Most people who spin up cloud services never think about the licensing implications or look to minimize licensing costs. They just figure whatever they are provisioning has already been paid for. Bring Your Own License (BYOL) enables customers to use existing perpetual licenses on public cloud environments such as AWS and Microsoft Azure. This capability increases license mobility so software services can move between devices easily without violating publisher licensing constraints and agreements. We introduced BYOL in the Quebec release for Microsoft server licensing. Now we are doing the same for Oracle licensing that is moved or shared from on-prem licenses to cloud licenses.

For a recent example, a company that provides services to public safety professionals and over 10,000 thousand government agencies, was hit by Oracle with a three million dollar true up for using their database on AWS where they deploy their apps. If they’d known the implications of running the software in the cloud and used the on-prem licenses they probably already had, they would most likely have saved a ton of money and not been written up in an article.

BYOL supports the discovery, analysis, and compliance tracking for BYOL use cases for Oracle DB in AWS and Azure environments. BYOL helps customers determine overall software compliance and potential licensing savings across their hybrid infrastructure, understand the cost and risks associated with transferring on-premises licenses to the cloud, and offers remediation workflows when software is out of compliance—from a single platform.  

 

BYOL adds more versatility to your Oracle licensing 

Software asset management playbooks 

The more steps you have in a manual process, the more apt you are to introduce errors and forget a step. One of those processes is the creation of software license entitlements within your systems—which can be accessed from the new software asset workspace. In this case, we’ve provided a playbook to create your license entitlements. This new customer success playbook provides a consistent step-by-step experience for entitlement creation.  

 
A step-by-step success playbook for accurate license entitlements 

Better together integrations 

The Rome release also highlights additional integration for bringing in more detailed data through ServiceNow Discovery and the agent client collector. This is especially helpful for getting inventory information from end user devices that roam around the network or may leave and come back on the network. This type of discovery doesn’t need to be scheduled, the data is simply pushed from the device back to ServiceNow and is leveraged by ITAM for gathering more complete asset details, such as software usage. 

And on the data sharing side, more ITAM data is being shared with ServiceNow risk management solutions. Risk management uses prescribed governance controls such as ISO 27001 and 27002, or CIS controls. Based on the out of box templates, ITAM now supplies data for 11 of the CIS controls, these are the controls related to software and hardware inventories and lifecycles. This data also helps with governance controls related to software vulnerabilities. 

 

Enable 11 CIS & ISO control points for stronger risk compliance and reporting 

New direct-to-vendor integrations 

Get deep usage and spend analysis for additional SaaS productivity, planning, and research vendors including: 

• Aha! 
• Calendly 
• GoTo 
• Monday.com 
• Miro 
• MS Dynamics 365
• Roadmunk 
• Salesforce CRM and Platform (as a spoke) 
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud 
• SurveyMonkey 
• Trello
• Webex 
• Workfront 
• Zendesk 

With deeper insights and publisher-specific metrics, customers can make strategic decisions to reclaim and reallocate unused or underutilized licenses and better prepare for future SaaS purchases and renewals. 

New and updated SaaS plugins and integrations will be available in the ServiceNow Store to support the faster pace of integration delivery and enhanced support for partner build integrations. 

Publisher Pack updates 

SAM's Content Library contains software metadata for thousands of software publishers. For complex licensing, packs are included for publishers such as SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, VMware, Citrix, and Adobe. These packs include publisher-specific calculations to aid mostly with complex server licensing, such as Oracle database options that can go unused, providing a tremendous optimization opportunity to reduce license costs.

Publisher Pack updates in Rome:

SAP	Support for SAP S/4 HANA – optimize and save by correctly classifying users based on user authorization, user activity, and other parameters
Microsoft	Optimization recommendations for licensing Office 365 based on usage and shows potential savings
Oracle	Oracle licensing is impacted by VMware hypervisor. This tracks Oracle DB licenses, at the Vcenter level, that are stored on VMware

Cloud Insights

The Rome release of Cloud Insights includes: 

• Cloud Insights budgeting
• • Create flexible budgets based on tag values 
  • Enable individual teams to become budget owners and keep a continuous watch on their current and forecasted cloud spend
  • Fine tune alerts for a better heads up on forecasted overages
  • Report on budget shortfalls or surpluses to stay within budget 

• Tag Categories
• • Organize and report on billing from cloud providers
  • Reduce the need to standardize tags by grouping them 

Cloud Insights budgeting 

Many organizations that run cloud operations lack budgets, and what budgets they have aren’t very flexible. For many, much of what they call budgets are really alerts that occur when you cross a budget threshold. But what if you cross your yearly budget threshold in August and have more than a quarter of the year to go? This usually results in another more painful type of budgeting—which would be reducing budgets in other areas of the organization. 

Static thresholds and only being able to see consumption are often the norm, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do better. Cloud Insights Budgeting allows people to create more in-depth budgets to help them better monitor their usage trends, forecast spend, and stay on track throughout the year. This capability also helps organizations set and track budgets for different cloud providers, such as AWS and Azure, as well as set a precedence for each provider.  

Proactively monitor cloud spend by creating budgets – example of a budget and a budget for a service provider 

Tag categories 

Tag categories provide the ability to categorize or organize tags in your environment to simplify and make cloud cost reporting accurate and easier. Flexible, configurable policies classify cloud resources based on tags and other attributes, assigning each resource to specific owners, cost centers, business services, applications, and other entities. Multiple teams inside an organization may create different tag labels for similar things; for example, one team may use an “Environment” tag, whereas another team could use “Env” for the same purpose. When reporting, it’s likely you would only consider “Environment” and inadvertently ignore “Env”, making your reporting incomplete. Tag categories brings structure to the tag sprawl in your environment. 

 

If you use ServiceNow® Discovery, Cloud Insights leverages this data to classify cloud resources. And if you don’t currently use Discovery, Cloud Insights can still leverage billing reports and similar sources for classification. 

Check out the ITAM product page for more information or check out a demo.  Schedule a conversation with your ServiceNow account today or click here to find out more.  

© 2021 ServiceNow Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, Now Platform, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. 

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Join us for the The Now Platform Rome event.

Mark your calendar for the Now at Work, Now Platform Rome release broadcast  

Join us at Now at Work 2021 to learn more about what’s new in the Rome release. You won’t want to miss the Rome release highlights in a keynote session with Dave Wright, chief innovation officer as well as 20 sessions on demand, where we’ll highlight different ServiceNow® products, innovations, the Now Platform, and best practices for upgrading to the Rome release. Register today based on your region:

AMS: https://www.servicenow.com/ams/en/now-at-work.html

EMEA: https://www.servicenow.com/emea/en/now-at-work.html

AP: https://www.servicenow.com/apj/en/now-at-work.html

Japan: https://www.servicenow.com/apj/ja/now-at-work.html

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[Ed Laar1]

Hi Adam,

I can not find any link towards descriptions of the mentioned new capabilities. Am I doing something wrong?

Cheers,

Ed

[Adam Smith-Cair]

Hi Ed,

I'm looking for the same. I'll have to dig into it more.

Thanks,

—Adam

[Adam Smith-Cair]

Hi Ed,

I'm looking for the same. I don't think you're doing anything wrong. I'm digging into it to see why it's not linked up with the full blog post with all the new capability details.

Thanks,

—Adam

[Adam Smith-Cair]

Ed,

Looks like we've got it fixed. Thanks for speaking up and thanks for your patience. 

Cheers!

—Adam