TNT lights fuse on tech asset management

TNT is working on an IT asset management pilot project in the UK which it hopes to roll out around the world.

The logistics giant has started with desktop software asset management and by the end of the year plans to have charted the software on its servers as well, said Steve Fell, supplier and asset management group manager at TNT Express ICS.

He told silicon.com: "What asset management does is risk mitigation - it helps us to understand where our investment has gone."

Speaking at the CA World user conference in Las Vegas, Fell said: "In order to manage what is a huge and complex environment we need to know where everything is.

"We want to get one view of our investments. The idea is we pilot in the UK and then deploy it across the rest of the organisation over two to three years - this is not going to happen overnight."

Through its software and hardware asset management project the company wants to reduce risk - by knowing that it has enough software licences - and also reduce cost by not buying too many licences.

He added: "We are going to see a level of cost avoidance and we are certainly going to see risk mitigation."

The company is using CA's security, asset management, patch management, software delivery and deployment software as part of the project.

Eighty per cent of the project won't be about the technology but about the processes in the organisation - such as making sure everybody involved with the purchasing process knows what they need to do to keep the tech asset management system up to date, he said.