Analyst group Gartner has released a report showing that many
companies fail to understand their hardware asset bases, leading to
a loss of time, money and system performance.
According to Gartner, less than 25% of companies worldwide have an
IT asset management programme in place that can determine potential
dangers.
Without thorough knowledge of their systems, companies risk
gathering incorrect information on hardware and software upgrades,
overspending on upgrades, or giving false information to
application development groups, Gartner said.
Statistics gathered from Gartner clients indicated that 40% of the
clients' hardware assets were not tracked using any tools and only
10% were reconciled against a database community.
Most clients employ complicated manual tracking procedures or do
not understand their hardware asset base at all, Gartner
claimed.
Poor hardware management can increase companies' total cost of
ownership by 7% to 10% annually, the analyst warned.
Moreover, companies that do not have a grasp of their hardware
resources often have poor software management, which can prove even
more costly.
The findings were released today as part of Gartner's three-day IT
Asset Management and TCO Summit in Orlando.