ServiceNow Paris release underlines the industry’s move from SAM to ITAM by introducing the HAM module

Last month the ServiceNow Paris release was launched. With this release, new features for Software Asset Management Professional (SAM Pro) where added as well as a completely new Hardware Asset Management (HAM) module.

With this move, ServiceNow is reacting to the development the industry is going through moving from SAM to ITAM following the ISO/IEC 19770-1 standard.

First, let’s take a look at the key features available in this initial release of HAM:

1. The extensive (hardware) Content Library allows your assets to be normalised to a single standard which makes it more easy to manage and maintain assets and related Configuration Items.
2. Part of the Content Library is Life Cycle data. Life Cycle data will be added to the Content Library on a day-to-day basis. With Life Cycle data the Hardware Models will be populated with information on the Pre-release, General Availability, End of sales, End of support and end of extended support values – all coming directly from the manufacturer.
3. Dashboards have been added to easily manage your hardware assets.
4. Audit Asset inventory. With the ServiceNow mobile apps your stockroom managers can scan barcodes of the available assets to verify if the status of the assets are indeed as registered in the CMDB.

Now, let’s look at some of the new features that were added in the 7th release of the Software Asset Management module since it was introduced in the Jakarta release:

1. Software asset connections to integrate third-party discovery sources: With the new centralised Identification and Reconciliation Engine (IRE) it is more easy to integrate third-party sources and populate the CMDB, including identification (matching the data) and reconcile different sources and discovery tools.
2. Microsoft Azure AD single sign-on app usage allows you to connect to Microsoft Azure AD to retrieve users and groups for SaaS application usage identification. This way, you will have visibility on potential rogue spend.
3. Application rationalisation: Applications will be classified based on their purpose. This feature will show “duplicate” applications where your company can take actions on.

Additionally, Oracle database on Solaris zones hard partitioning is now supported, as well as SAP user-based licensing.

The steady rollout of new SAM capabilities and the addition of the HAM module combined further solidifies ServiceNow as a platform for IT asset management.

If you want to know more about the benefits the ServiceNow Paris release and it’s ITAM portfolio can bring, please contact Softline Solutions!