During the past months we have been flooded with sombre information on the chances of a recession due to Covid-19. The new wave of lockdowns forces companies to look closely at cost cutting opportunities within the entire organisation.
TIP #67 - December 2020: With ITAM, an organisation can realise cost savings and might avoid a lot of other harsh (and unpopular) measures to cut costs.
Unfortunately, organisations and decisionmakers tend to overlook some possibilities of actually saving money on the IT environment. By looking at IT Asset Management (ITAM) more closely, and identifying and realising actual cost savings from a different perspective, a lot of other harsh (and unpopular) measures to cut costs might be avoided.
It is a proven fact that ITAM can be a crucial solution to help an organisation during recession. The cost-cutting benefits of ITAM however, should be part of the actual planning of how to deal with the impact of a recession and how to possibly even save jobs and maintain growth.
In the ‘Worldwide IT Spending Forecast’ by Gartner, it is stated that ITAM could save companies at least $67.7 billion globally. And based on experience, Softline Solutions knows that at the very least 5% of IT and software costs can be saved every year. Our Tips of the Week have already shown a number of solid practices that can be implemented to actually realise savings. Also, the business cases on for example IBM licensing have shown that by putting ITAM best practices in place, the license costs and risks can be diminished by hundreds of thousands of Euros.
As Martin Thompson from the ITAM Review recently stated: “While it is impossible to fully correlate the impact of ITAM on job retention, we can illustrate the opportunity with some simple sums. Starting with Gartner’s latest ‘Worldwide IT Spending Forecast’, the total spend next year on Data Center Systems, Enterprise Software and Devices (the three areas of IT spend that ITAM can address) will be $1.35 trillion. If ITAM can reduce this spending by just 5% (which itself is a conservative estimate for the industry), that equates to over $67.7 billion of potential savings from ITAM alone. That is enough to save many hundreds of thousands of jobs.”
ITAM, a real and realistic possibility when cutting costs
Overall, as we encountered during 10 years of implementing ITAM in large organisations, the amount of money that can be saved by ITAM is real and substantial. Organisations should take this opportunity into consideration when looking at ways to cut costs on short, middle and long term. Investigate ways to improve, expand and enable your ITAM programs to drive even more value across the business, which in turn will help the company and its employees.