IT asset management breakthrough

In an impact analysis issued late last year, Enterprise Management Associates noted that IT asset management "is coming back into prominence after existing for many years as something of a dormant, niche discipline."

The reasons? In the report, EMA cited a variety of them, including the need for more effective cost management and accounting given constrained IT budgets; the rise of IT Infrastructure Library v3, in which asset and service life-cycle management come together and take on a more prominent role; and increased pressure on IT to optimize infrastructure and minimize costs in light of green IT, virtualization and other such initiatives.

EMA suggested that these changes give rise to a new model for IT asset management, one that better melds different disciplines such as service, asset and compliance management to boost visibility, automation, risk minimization and operational efficiencies. Numara Software's Numera Asset Management Platform (NAMP ) is one good example of the new model, EMA said.

NAMP provides a unified architecture for eight integrated products that deliver a range of services including inventory and discovery, desktop configuration management, software license management and more, EMA described. Last week, Numara enhanced this IT asset management platform with additional PC and server life-cycle management capabilities.
NAMP version 10 includes three primary enhancements. The first is Service Anywhere, which enables secure, on-demand remote service over the Internet. The intended goal, Numara said, is to deliver better service to a growing mobile workforce. The second is Instant Expert, in-product guided help for IT professionals as they set up, configuration and fire up NAMP features. And the third provides tighter controls over software licenses, usage management and compliance with licensing policies.

In addition, NAMP 10 includes new usability features, including direct device access, advanced reporting capabilities, real-time auditing, index searching, alert management and switch port mapping.

Of NAMP 10, Steve Brasen, EMA senior IT industry analyst, said in a published release, "Numara has achieved a milestone in endpoint lifecycle management …. The new release simplifies many of the management challenges inherent in today's complex support stacks -- such as enabling secure remote management of clients over the Internet without the need for a dedicated gateway server -- a feature I am unaware of any other solution providing today."