Within most companies, Lifecycle Management for end user devices and servers is under control. When hardware assets are due to be replaced, ...
TIP #54 - August 2020: Stop wasting money on licenses when decommissioning IT assets using ServiceNow SAM Pro #HardwareAssetManagement #CMDB
... physical devices are collected from the end users, or powered down and the new assets are installed and taken into production.
However, updating the Hardware Asset Management administration (CMDB) is not always part of the standard process. Normally, this isn't a very big problem, since there are processes in place that take care of "outdated systems" and discard them after a determined period. But until that moment, the licenses related to that asset are still being consumed.
When we take the large amount of assets into consideration that is being replaced at any given moment, the impact on your license position can be huge.Not just because licenses are being consumed by devices that are no longer in use, but also because the complete license pool is unnecessarily large.
To sum it up: Poor asset management leads to an unnecessary demand on a license pool that is too big, locking your companies’ money in a place where it contributes nothing!
What if we would tell you that there is a way of automating and optimising this process?
First, you need to have the ServiceNow SAM Pro module in place. Second, you need to handle system replacements using changes. If both these prerequisites are in place, just include the old and new system in the change and set them to the correct status. (In case of multiple systems, make sure you link the old and new system to one another in ServiceNow.) The SAM Pro module will automatically allocate the software from the old to the new system and include this in the software inventory of SAM Pro. This way, utilisation of licenses will simply move from one system to another, instead of the old system still consuming licenses during the time that it will take to retire it.
How you save money:
By handling the final stage of an asset's lifecycle this way, your license consumption will stay the same, instead of going up when replacing hardware or even increase drastically, in case of a bigger migration.
Another advantage is that you no longer need to make an inventory list of software on systems to be replaced. This overview is automatically available through the SAM Pro module within ServiceNow. So, apart from saving license costs, you also save time on IT migrations and hardware replacements.