Web 2.0 companies are facing great challenges in asset management. With an annual IT asset growth rate of 50% or more, it is not hard to imagine the types of problems companies without a proper asset management solution will encounter.
These can include:
- Handling of sheer volume
- Regulatory accountability
- Lease penalties
Without a proper asset management solution, it is hard to establish operational metrics, such as the amount of time between receipt and deployment of an asset, or the number of servers waiting to be deployed. When lack of visibility is combined with exponential growth, a company can easily be caught off guard and find itself unable to keep up with the sheer number of IT asset lifecycle events (receive, deploy, move, dispose, etc.).
Because the biggest worry for rapidly expanding companies is keeping up with growth, assets are accounted for as they come into the organization. But companies preoccupied with growth tend to forget about the assets leaving the company. The absence of proper disposal processes and an effective system to track assets as they reach their end of life could lead to overstatement of total asset value, exposing the organization to paying too much tax or placing it in danger of failing an audit, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, which can result in severe penalties for both the organization and, sometimes, the company executives.
Many companies that are experiencing strong growth need to resort to leasing their IT assets. Lease management is a challenge on several levels, as it not only requires a plan to replace assets as leases end, but also involves penalties if the assets are not returned on time. An asset management solution helps organizations plan for the replacement of the assets that need to be returned. Because they provide better visibility of information and asset location, asset management solutions also save companies money by reducing the number of penalties.