What’s new in Asset Management – for IT and Beyond

[ServiceNow]

The Tokyo release updates for the ServiceNow® asset management products are now available. This includes Software Asset Management, Hardware Asset Management, Cloud Insights, and a brand-new product, Enterprise Asset Management. 

In this blog, we will address questions around three areas of focus for the Tokyo update: 1) How does ServiceNow Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) fit our Asset Management family of products? 2) What are the “better together” solution scenarios that the Tokyo release enables?" And 3) What are the main capabilities in Software Asset Management (SAM), Hardware Asset Management (HAM), and Cloud Insights (CI)?  

Enterprise Asset Management is here 

ServiceNow Enterprise Asset Management is the process of overseeing the complete lifecycle of an organization’s physical business assets to meet operational targets, maximize usable life, and minimize risk. When defining EAM, we mean all the assets beyond IT used to run the business from the frontlines to the back office. 

Automating your enterprise asset lifecycle—The lifecycle starts with planning and acquiring enterprise assets, deploying items where they are needed, supporting them during operations and maintenance, and then ultimately retiring them. 1) Do you know what enterprise assets you own?​ Many organizations we talk to simply want better transparency across their enterprise assets. 2) Can you streamline enterprise asset processes? We can help automate away paper, spreadsheets, and all the manual, in-between steps. And 3) Are you maximizing usable asset life while also mitigating risks? EAM should help you redistribute assets sitting on the shelf and avoid running out of frequently used items. EAM also automates the end-to-end lifecycle for your enterprise assets with a single source of truth on the Now Platform®.  

The ServiceNow Enterprise Asset Management solution functions as a control tower to provide visibility across all your physical business assets. There are many reasons why organizations lack capital expenditure control such as mergers and acquisitions, locations opening or closing down, or general operations. For the entire asset lifecycle, gain financial oversight with up-to-date information such as purchase costs, depreciation, lease terms, and so on.  

Risk exposures can range from undocumented enterprise assets, lack of process, and poorly executed or periodic audits. Every change and action to an asset record is written in the audit trail, generating documentation to support regulatory compliance. The system also enables organizations to rate and prioritize assets by risk level, allowing companies to dedicate limited resources to the greatest potential exposure areas first.   

Streamlines stockrooms—stockrooms often have a wide variety and large volume of serialized and consumable assets. When customers lack dependable inventory information, it results in frustrating stockouts or over-spending. ServiceNow enterprise asset inventory management will help stockrooms function more efficiently with stock rules and bulk orders to optimize stock levels.  

Empower end users to request assets—Make it easy to request from a catalog, while asset managers transfer and receive assets with mobile scanning. Improve balance sheet performance by making better use of what you have already. Many organizations expect enterprise assets will be lost along the way and write it off as the expense of doing business. ServiceNow will help customers contend with loss prevention by managing replacements, refresh cycles, and returns. These capabilities are available with the EAM professional license.  

And if these capabilities sound familiar to what we can do with Hardware Asset Management, it shows how both products leverage workflows and the Now Platform to handle different types of assets.  

Better together with all your assets 

Asset data is crucial to many businesses and ServiceNow offerings. In the Tokyo release, we’ve focused significant effort on enhancing “better together” functionality across software, hardware, and cloud resource management as well as with other ServiceNow products. For the Tokyo release, we’ve also enhanced our better together capabilities with ServiceNow Application Portfolio Management. 

Get the all-inclusive asset management executive dashboard (SAM + HAM + CI)—Customers previously couldn’t see the bigger picture with all their IT assets without having to go into each asset management tool individually to get a good view and understanding of their assets and then stitch together how each type of asset was performing with all the other asset views. Now, that patchwork method of viewing assets can be limited with the asset management executive dashboard. It shows the asset data and metrics from across software, hardware, and cloud resource management. Customers only need two or more of our products for this to work. Here, all the asset data is presented in such a way that executives and other high-level stakeholders can manage KPIs to save cost, reduce risk, and identify assets as they move throughout the asset lifecycle.  

Simulate licensing and cloud costs in the cloud (SAM + CI)—More organizations and departments are looking at moving resources to the cloud. So, how can they build a business case around which cloud to move to? This is where the license and cloud cost simulator can help. This functionality helps estimate the cost differences between different cloud providers and will consider things like bring-your-own-license (BYOL), if customers already have licenses on-prem.  

One of the most exciting aspects of the cloud cost simulator capability is that it will look at all the virtual machines (VMs), customers have running in their local environment. It then matches them with VMs that would be in the cloud to help them do a cost analysis between each cloud provider for running those VMs. However, to get the full functionality, customers will need the Enterprise version of Software Asset Management, which comes with Cloud Insights. 

Find your software and hardware contracts and renewals in one place (SAM + HAM)—Contract renewals are not always apparent, especially when you look at them across software and hardware assets. Most contract processes are tedious and manual. But it's better to manage renewals and leases than deal with penalties or service downtime. The trick is whether customers can accurately manage contracts and renewals through various stages such as renewal information, terms and conditions, rate cards, confirmations, approvals, purchase orders, completion, or cancellations. This new functionality provides a streamlined workflow leveraging automation and is a part of the asset workspace within Next Experience. And if customers want the bigger picture contract view, they’ll want to have both Software Asset Management and Hardware Asset Management.   

Speed up your technology onboarding (SAM + APM + Service Catalog)—There hasn’t been an easy way to connect the decisions of enterprise architects regarding what technology will be used for the operations and day-to-day use of the Service Catalog. Because of this, enterprises are often slow in putting new technology into production. Companies can now reduce the time it takes to decide on a technology, deliver it to users, and integrate it as part of portfolio management. These three Software Asset Management workflows leverage the Technology Reference Model from Application Portfolio Management (APM), which automates the process of putting authorized assets into service. And, like many processes related to assets, there are lifecycles to consider. The same is true here with the ability to assign different lifecycles to different assets. To leverage the entire solution capability, customers need Software Asset Management, Application Portfolio Management, and our ServiceNow ITSM Service Catalog.  

Adding more customer-requested product capabilities  

Now that we’ve discussed some of the great capabilities that apply to multiple asset management solutions, let’s mention a few improvements for each of our ITAM products.  

Software Asset Management—Asset managers help save the organization lots of money and reduce risks; however, they often find it hard to prove their full worth to the organization. There are common KPIs or metrics that asset managers can impact, but those metrics do not reflect everything asset management teams do. The asset management success tracking capability allows organizations to set up what success looks like and report it to their team and executives. Asset managers can also build the team's morale by finding new ways to measure their defined success and celebrate and highlight team and individual accomplishments.  

Hardware Asset Management—Asset managers or procurement managers are tasked with sourcing requests; they often look at inventory levels and decide where those assets will come from. Then they go through separate tasks to get the correct number of assets either from local stock, other storerooms, or order the assets by creating a purchase order or PO. This capability simplifies the process when a request comes through the Service Catalog, the asset manager makes the decisions, and they can then source it or order it with a few clicks of a button.  

Cloud Insights—The powerful cloud resource management tasks we’ve been able to do with AWS and Azure are now available for the Google Cloud platform. This includes visibility, optimization, and proactive budgeting. It also means Google Cloud billing and usage data is integrated and easy to view, manage, and report. Even more than before, Cloud Insights can be the central source of multi-cloud resource management. That means the same ability customers have with AWS and Azure to do show-backs and charge-backs is available for the Google Cloud platform. Doing show-backs helps teams know what they've spent, while charge-backs hold them responsible for what they've spent. Cloud Insights is only available with Software Asset Management enterprise.  

Final thoughts and honorable mention capabilities  

The ServiceNow asset management line of products and solutions has grown significantly, which is a testament to our customers and how they use the Now Platform. When you look at the areas of focus for the asset management products, it’s amazing to see what we’ve accomplished with the Tokyo release. We’ve introduced a significant product that broadens our importance beyond IT assets to include all physical business assets with EAM.  

Of the nine capabilities we highlighted across four products, nearly half of them are “better together” capabilities. We’re also doing more to give visibility across all assets, help organizations simulate moving resources to the cloud, improve contract creation and renewals, and assist organizations in onboarding their technology faster and with greater success. All of this is significant and shows the power of asset management on the Now Platform!  

To conclude, we’ve added enhancements to each product, such as success tracking, efficiency for procurement and sourcing processes, and making multi-cloud resources more manageable. However, we weren’t able to highlight each capability, but the following table lists other notable capabilities, which you can further explore in the product documentation. 

Product	Capability	Description
SAM	Salesforce integration playbook	Guided experience for integrating your Salesforce platform and organizations.
SAM	Microsoft SQL Server infrastructure report	Gives you the underlying infrastructure that your SQL server runs on.
SAM	Microsoft SQL Server license optimization	Manage license costs by optimally applying Microsoft SQL Server licenses to physical or virtual server infrastructure.
SAM	IBM user licensing	Enhanced support for authorized users and user value unit license metrics.
SAM	Workday license management	Part of our SaaS licensing management that supports Workday SaaS licensing through an API integration.
SAM	Oracle verified vendor for middleware	Verified Third-Party Tool Vendors. This is an enhancement to a current feature that provides additional functionality to verify middleware.
HAM	Hardware Asset Management guided setup	Step-by-step guided setup experience for system admins to opt into features, turn on normalization, and activate automated asset workflows.
HAM	Hardware content lookup portal	The interface that allows model managers and asset managers to search hardware content data provided by the hardware content service team.
HAM	Zebra scanner integration	Leverages the Zebra MotionWorks Enterprise platform to deploy, configure, and manage a population of sensors and readers, which helps gather data about tagged hardware assets, obtain meaningful information from that data, and connect that information to ServiceNow Hardware Asset Management.

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