Ivanti Asset Manager Cloud moves the functionality of the old Asset Central on-prem solution to the cloud, and adds new enhancements and customer design capabilities, although existing Asset Central customers will not be forced to migrate.
Phillip Merson, Director, ITAM Specialist at Ivanti
Ivanti has unveiled Ivanti Asset Manager Cloud, the next-generation and cloud-based version of their long-standing hardware asset management solution. It gives customers a comprehensive view of IT assets throughout their lifecycle, tracking lease, warranty and financial data, and adding some new wrinkles, like the ability to assign assets to individuals so the company knows they have them, and the ability to score vendor support so customers can see which ones are not up to the mark.
Ivanti Asset Manager Cloud is the product of the fermentation of different Ivanti products together since the merger which brought together LANDESK, HEAT and a host of acquired companies and technologies, followed by the subsequent addition of more.
“Asset Central was an on-prem LANDESK product, and part of their Service Desk Suite,” said Phillip Merson, Director, ITAM [IT Asset Management] Specialist at Ivanti, who actually came to Ivanti with one of those acquired companies, Concorde, which specialized in managing software licensing complexity and was acquired by Ivanti in April 2017. “With eight acquisitions having being made, a strategic decision was taken to move asset management to what had been the HEAT Service Manager Platform over a period of time. We first built Ivanti Asset Manager Essentials on that platform and released it in August, and now we are introducing Ivanti Asset Manager Cloud.”
Merson said the difference between the two newly introduced products in functionality is not dramatic.
“There is very little difference between them, but Ivanti Asset Manager Essentials was more of a controlled release, where we kept as much control of the cloud environment as possible so we could make changes on the fly,” he stated. “Ivanti Asset Manager Cloud has design capabilities, so that any customer can design their own page. So while there is little difference in terms of what the products can do, there is a significant architectural difference.”
Ivanti Asset Manager Cloud is a hardware asset management solution that provides a comprehensive view of IT assets at any stage within their lifecycle, while also tracking lease, warranty and financial data to ensure assets are optimized and secured. That’s pretty much what the old LANDESK product did, but there are some refinements under the hood, as well as the core change in the solution’s move from an on-prem product to cloud. Merson did note, however, that customers who like their on-prem product are not being forced to shift.
“We are migrating a lot of old LANDESK customers to the cloud, but we haven’t forced any customers to move off the old suite,” he said. “We won’t be end-of-lifing it. Some customers don’t want to move because they have significantly customized their on-prem version. The product still works well, and they take the perspective that why change something that isn’t broken, and there is nothing wrong with that. Some customers also have an issue with the public cloud, and at the moment the Ivanti Service Manager Platform is only in the public cloud, not a private cloud.”
Merson said that old customers who do opt to switch will see some very significant enhancements.
“As well as holding more data, it is much more intuitive to use,” he indicated. “The old Asset Central product had to be designed from the ground up. Now customers can work on it very quickly once they get it, so it is much faster time to value.”
A major enhancement is the ability to assign assets to a single user, to stop people from taking assets with them when they leave an organization because the organization didn’t know they had them.
“We’ve flipped Asset Manager around to assign every single asset to a single user,” Merson said. “You can onboard and offboard and collect all assets people may have gained so they don’t take the assets with them when they leave. This is something that could have been built in by the customer before, but many people didn’t. It now comes out of the box.”
Another new addition provides the ability to track – and score – support provided by different vendors.
“We now provide a lot more information about both the assets and vendors supporting them,” Merson said. “We have built in the ability to cross-check and track the vendor and the quality of the vendor service and support. You can also build out vendor scorecards. That’s very useful when it comes to renewal, to see which vendors support you well, and more importantly, which ones don’t.”
In addition to tracking the asset, the contracts, support and services are tracked as well, as well as to the assets to which they are assigned, all the way through their life.
“All this information is supplied through a dashboard, and there are loads that come out of the box, all of which are further designable,” Merson said. “Things can be further segregated into five subcategories, around computer, general asset, infrastructure, mobile device, or peripheral device.”
A new barcode scanning capability has been added as well.
“You can now do a physical check of assets from a mobile phone and track them as they move,” Merson indicated.
Merson said the changes are things which will make life easier for Ivanti’s channel partners.
“Partners like the ability to sell out of the box without much customization required. They want to sell it, get the support contract in place, and move on. This lets them do that. It’s also a very simple add-on to an existing product set they are already selling and supporting.”
Ivanti Asset Manager Cloud is available now.
