Dog Days of Summer Suggest a Busy 2011

With the annual Labor Day holiday fast approaching, it seems like a good time for me to slow down and take stock of what’s been an unusually busy summer. The pace of the last three months—the surge of proposals we’ve been sending out and the high volume of inquiries we’ve fielded—suggest that many companies are beginning to take a hard look at investing in IT asset management systems after more than two tough years of what’s being called the Great Recession.

When I return from the holiday weekend, I don’t expect things to slow down any. In fact, the momentum will probably pick up, as clients and prospective clients begin taking a hard look at their 2011 budgets during this year’s final quarter.

For those who have already gone ahead with outsourcing their ITAM systems, a little basic education is always in order, since part of what they’re getting in the process is significantly enhanced reporting of costs and other key internal metrics.

Absent some coaching on our part, new clients can sometimes draw the wrong conclusions from suddenly having all that real-time information at their fingertips. For instance, they’re sometimes a little flustered when they notice an increase in a single line-item in their budget: end-of-life costs for hardware.

While that single item can sometimes increase, I always point out to them the larger savings they might not notice quite so readily. Their overall asset utilization will inevitably increase, and thus their organization’s total cost of ownership will steadily decrease.

And in the end, isn’t that the most important number of all?

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