By Dick Stark

Earlier this month, we submitted a proposal in response to a hardware/software asset management RFP. Of course, with a large opportunity like this, anything is possible, but I feel that we worked hard to deliver an excellent proposal and demo, putting RightStar in a good position to meet the prospect’s needs and win the business. Why? Because the unique combination of Remedy, Discovery, BCM, and ScanStar are tightly integrated to provide a total asset management life cycle solution.

Most large organizations have large, complex, and dynamic environments. To be successful with critical IT initiatives such as IT modernization, secuity, and clould migration, it is essential to have a single comprehensive picture of how the IT infrastructure supports business services. (I suspect that most organizations may not quite be there yet and this gap could negatively impacts other support and operations processes and may ultimately prevent IT from living up to its full potential.)

When done right, configuration management and application mapping improves staff productivity and heightens the quality of services. Cost reduction is achieved by reducing MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery), maintaining license compliance, and reallocating assets and discovering unused licenses.

For this prospect, RightStar proposed Remedy Asset Management integrated with BMC Discovery, BMC Client Management, BMC Atrium CMDB, BMC Atrium Integrator, Remedy Knowledge Management, BMC Remedy Smart Reporting, and RightStar’s ScanStar barcode scanning.

BMC Discovery (formerly ADDM) creates a dynamic, holistic view of all data center assets (hardware, VMs, and applications) and the relationships between them, giving crucial visibility into how the assets support the business. Each scan delves into the information and dependencies for all software, hardware, network, storage, and versions, providing the context needed to create an application map from any piece of information about it. A lightweight footprint allows organizations to map applications with up to 100% accuracy in as little as 15 minutes or less.

BMC Discovery offers seamless integration into BMC Atrium CMDB and Asset Management module, with out-of-the box, continuous data synchronization. The integration can be configured so filters and rules are applied to the data prior to the load. In addition, BMC Discovery offers web services and database integrations that can be used to synchronize the data with other CMDB technologies.

An important componet of asset management is the ability to manually and efficiently take inventory, and reconcile to a “single source of truth.” RightStar’s ScanStar barcoding add-on allows inventory to be scanned and reconciled which helps identify missing and moved assets. And at some customers we take data from BMC Discovery, SCCM, and physical inventory (via barcode scanning) to make one composite record from multiple sources.