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IT is at the centre of everything the business does, making IT financial management (ITFM) a critical function. Today’s business leaders have to know how much IT is spending, how to charge business units for the services they consume and how to optimise portfolios. With detailed command of IT finances, executives make better decisions more quickly, adapt rapidly to change, comply with regulations, control operations, optimise costs and run IT like a business.

ITIL v3 says that service management is asset management. And HP Software’s experience indicates that ITFM starts with IT asset management (ITAM). Eighty percent of the customers who use our ITAM solution have also purchased the optional financial module, and we frequently sell the solution to the CFO, vice president of finance or someone else in IT finance, indicating that many of our customers understand that effective ITAM consists of more than just tracking assets. Other key ITAM functions – such as goods fulfillment, cost tracking and centralisation, and contract and warranty lease management – support not only software asset management, but ITFM and decision optimisation as well.

A modern, full-featured ITAM solution includes core functionality such as budget management, cost measurement, cost management, governance and reporting and analytics. Other essential capabilities, such as project budgeting and estimation, resource management and opportunity analysis, are achieved through integration with a good project and portfolio management solution and data transfer from other systems and databases.

HP AssetCenter software offers all the functionality, integrations and data feeds necessary to make it a powerful tool to support ITFM. Core features include:

• Budget tracking and management, including approval workflows, cost categorisation and expense tracking against budgets
• Expense line management, project TCO, assets, business services and invoice reconciliation
• Vendor management, cost optimisation, a chargeback engine, future expense calculation and service cost calculation
• Compliance and fixed-asset reconciliation
• Reporting and analytics
• Integration with HP DecisionCenter and Project and Portfolio Management Center
• Input from HP service management and configuration management solutions and the HP Universal CMDB

HP AssetCenter not only enables lifecycle asset tracking and management. It also supports ITFM by enabling IT to measure its expenditures and communicate the financial value of its services, reduce costs and charge business units for services delivered – ultimately optimising business decisions regarding IT spending.

For more information about HP AssetCenter, contact your HP Software representative or visit us on the HP Software Web site.