The Provance IT Asset Management Pack is a Process Management Pack for Microsoft® System Center 2012 - Service Manager. As a Process Management Pack, the IT Asset Management Pack is built using the Service Manager platform framework and completely integrated with the following Service Manager platform technologies: the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), the Connector and Linking framework, connectors to Active Directory, Configuration Manager, Operations Manager, Workflow, and the Data Warehouse. By leveraging and extending these technologies, the IT Asset Management Pack provides additional capabilities which run within Service Manager:
IT Asset Life Cycle Management for controlling IT costs and effectively managing hardware and software throughout their entire life cycle
Software Asset Management for minimizing software costs and maintaining license compliance by identifying over and under licensed software titles
Financial, contractual and organizational information to support more efficient and cost effective IT Service Management
The IT Asset Management Pack provides you with the necessary tools to manage your assets through their entire life cycle, from receipt to disposal. The configuration data captured by Configuration Manager and Operations Manager and stored as configuration items (CIs) in the Service Manager CMDB is complemented by IT Asset Management Pack hardware asset data. The additional hardware asset data includes location, ownership, financial, contractual and historical information. Specifically, warranty, lease, support and disposal agreements can be stored along with financial and organizational details, such as cost, ownership and location of the hardware asset. All changes made to the asset item are recorded across the entire life cycle. By managing the hardware life cycle with the IT Asset Management Pack, organizations ensure compliance with internal corporate policies and government legislation relating to data privacy, software compliance and safe hardware disposal.
Assets and asset related data can be entered manually into the IT Asset Management Pack or imported from other systems. For information on how to import data, see Importing vs. entering data manually.
For software asset managers that want to minimize software costs, the IT Asset Management Pack identifies overspending on unused software (over licensing) as well as under licensing of software titles.
The key to managing software assets is understanding the difference between what has been licensed and what has been installed. The IT Asset Management Pack lets you quickly and easily access the information you need in order to understand your software licensing position.