North Carolina's Jones chose Asset Insight for its capabilities to report on deployments involving heterogeneous platforms. Here we can run an analysis on how many processor types are in a different department and track historically how they're moving toward remediation of areas we find to be noncompliant. It's really important to be enabled to run a number of what-if scenarios, particularly with Y2K, since none of us has done this before. This enables you to test out different theories, look at different cost models. There are dangers to such an approach.
Data can be inconsistent across systems, leading to incorrect conclusions about IT assets.
It may be difficult, if not impossible, to link and reconcile asset, contract, and ownership data. To gain the enterprisewide benefits of infrastructure management, Gartner argues for a single common IT asset data store. One vendor offering an enterprisewide tool is Peregrine Systems Inc., whose AssetCenter 3.0 builds a data warehouse of all assets used by IT, finance, purchasing, and facilities departments, and offers tools to manage procurement, leasing, and costs, as well as assets. Infrastructure Manager NationsBank Corp. is using Peregrine's tool suite to get a better handle on its IT assets as it merges with Bank of America Corp., says Elizabeth Heidebrecht, NationsBank's VP for central operations. Originally, she says, the bank was looking for an asset-management tool, but found that it really needed to focus instead on the broader infrastructure management.