True data discovery is a box of silver bullets
Software Asset Management is like a wheel with spokes. You have data coming in from everywhere. If you have the right processes and the right services in place, then discovery is part of the success story.
At Aspera, we take the best of breed approach. We start your SAM journey by finding out what discovery and inventory tools you already have for gathering data about your licenses. Then we figure out what you need to make the data stronger, and design a full solution for your data sourcing and scanning.
There are hundreds of discovery tools on the market but no silver bullet that does everything. That’s why Aspera carries a box of them!
Find the right tools for your data
Successful SAM is powered by the details. In nearly two decades of doing Software Asset Management, we’ve learned that it’s best to let your data drive the processes. Instead of asking your data to fit our tools, we find the right tools for your data. Here is why.
Most likely, your company has discovery in place. In fact, 80% of the inventory and scanning tools that you need are probably already installed. Why duplicate the effort? We focus our time and talents on building the best Software Asset Management solution, and use the software discovery tools that best fill the 20% data gap.
Traditional tools aren't effective or enough. Classic discovery tools can't accurately scan the new forms of usage, such as mobile devices, virtual servers and cloud services. You need more. Our SAM platform, SmartTrack, has data connectors to every modern device management system — such as Mobile Device Management (MDM), Virtual Device Management (VDM), and cloud providers — as well as physical servers and client devices.
The real challenge is normalizing the data. Once you’ve collected the software data, it’s essential to make it clean and relevant for managing your licenses. That’s what the normalization process is for, and why SmartTrack is so powerful. SmartTrack has precise rules that group the important data, filter out the unnecessary data, and run quality checks to fix errors and complete missing data. Check out the top 5 reasons why you should normalize your SAM data.
Learn from the experts
Get recommendations and advice about Inventory and Discovery in this podcast with ITAM Review and Aspera:
Get integration for every IT system
The Aspera SmartTrack platform has rock-solid integrations to every important IT system. This includes over 50 common systems and databases that collect information about installed and used software, such as Altiris, BDNA, BMC, HP, ILMT, SCCM, ServiceNow, and VMWare. SmartTrack works with the data provided by the Master Catalog – a comprehensive database that recognizes the unique Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) for each software product.
SmartTrack connectors are designed to talk to every data source for desktops, servers and virtual environments. They talk to all the inventory and discovery tools that you already have running. They talk to procurement systems, cloud providers, Mobile Device Management, and Virtual Device Management. Aspera is quite friendly. We talk to everyone.
A smarter way for inventory + discovery
Sometimes your company will need a new discovery tool. Maybe you’ve hit a data gap in your SAM program and are ready to fix it. Or you are starting a fresh Software Asset Management program and want a good jumpstart.
Aspera SmartCollect is a powerful tool for gathering the inventory data needed to calculate your software usage It runs a complete discovery of every server and client device, and does both agent-based and agentless data collection.
SmartCollect pulls software data for big vendor networks such as Microsoft, Oracle and IBM, gathering deep details that include product installations, operating systems, running services and hardware assets.
SmartCollect is closely integrated with our SmartTrack platform for Software Asset Management, giving accurate data to calculate license usage, compliance, and reduced costs. Both technologies are designed for enterprises with large data centers, complex or hybrid architectures, and highly virtualized environments
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