ITAM is the business practice centered on software and hardware assets and their multifaceted roles within the organization. The risk and value of these assets warrants management beyond normal supply chain procedures, especially because the information about these assets is so valuable to IT service management, financial management, and security. Tracking and creating an inventory is only the first function ITAM brings to the data center. While data center management has the difficult job of choosing and mapping out the next technology improvement, IT asset management partners with IT to identify the financial, contractual, and internal process snags that so often slow that transition.
Expectations for data center services have grown beyond the control of IT costs since the traditional model of user-driven system implementation. In that model, users took a lead role in requesting and acquiring the PCs, servers, and server OS. After integrating and testing, data center operations took over responsibility for the production environment. This scenario led to low asset utilization. For instance, the starting point on servers could be as low as 20 to 30 percent with expectations for growing over time to 80 to 90 percent. In a best-case scenario, capacity and power consumption were wasted until that growth occurred. In some cases, the expected growth never happened (see figure 1).