Some highlights:
- From an asset management viewpoint, two main ecosystems of IT Asset Management (ITAM) platforms are prevalent: ServiceNow, Snow Software, BMC Remedy, and homegrown systems.
- Clients can purchase hardware asset management modules for ServiceNow but often don’t take advantage of its capabilities due to lack of funding.
- There is value in using a single ITAD provider for disposal asset management software; however, this may lead to a decrease in value recovery or an increase in cost.
- Utegrity is a platform that provides a unified system across multiple vendors and enables customers to view all data from the same place.
- IT resellers have the opportunity to offer their clients an ITAD program via their own portal as it enables them to provide ESG data that they can report on.
Todd’s assessment:
Todd Zegers,
President & CEO
Circular Integrity
[email protected]
(949)346-1683
From the asset management perspective, there are probably two main ecosystems of platforms that are in play. The number one would be what is the client using for an IT asset management system, like ServiceNow, Snow Software, BMC Remedy, if it is still around, but you know there’s multiple kind of IT asset management software that are out there. Both the ServiceNow, the Snow kind of the big guys out there that people can use, or a lot of companies I’ve seen have actually even just built homegrown systems. So I think some of it could reside there and do that, but ServiceNow is an amazing platform. Obviously, they’ve taken off like like a rocket ship over the last 10 years. But you know, a lot of clients that I’ve talked to will go out and they’ll actually buy the hardware asset management module for ServiceNow, but none of them really uses it to the level that it’s capable of, and I would say the big reason is that the IT asset manager and the IT group typically don’t get a lot of funding. It’s hard for these guys to show the ROI of spending hundreds or even millions of dollars on building this mechanism inside of ServiceNow, for example, and showing the ROI of “hey, we built this great thing and now we’re going to use it” as it would have solved the problem you’re talking about, as I can use 98 different vendors as long as they give me all my data in the format I need. I can ingest that in the ServiceNow, and I’ve got that single pane of glass. And by the way, and never have to leave ServiceNow, right, which to me is the Holy Grail and you know, ServiceNow is 65% or more of the Global 5000 use that platform.
Now let’s say you move on from that and you go to an ITAD provider, if you see the value in using a single ITAD provider to be your disposal asset management software, there can be some value in that. Yes, they may have seven different partners around their world that they’re going to use to do all the work for you. And yes, you may see a degradation in your value recovery or maybe a higher cost, but is that cost worth the value you get by all that data being normalized and centralized in something that you can get that single pane of glass from a global perspective?
So taking that a step further, this is again a bit of a not a selfish plug by intention, but you know one of the things I saw when I left to go do what I’m doing now is there’s a real market opportunity to build a platform that can basically do all this that’s more simplistic. So, I’m building a platform now called Utegrity that will basically say “hey Mr. customer you use my software platform, you plug all your ITAD vendors into it, we give them the reporting and data requirements of how you want that data feed to come back in. So whether we create an API with that vendor because they’re big enough and they have enough volume with other customers on my platform, or they send an Excel spreadsheet that you can upload, or there’s an FTP site where they post it and it gets pulled into there, but you get the photos of the shipments, the bill of lading, the audit reports, the certificates of erasure, all that kind of stuff ingested in there.
So now if I’m a global corporation and I want to use 12 different vendors across the world, it’s OK. I’d say “Mr. ITAD vendor in the Philippines and Brazil, you can be a partner of mine, but you have to be able to comply with the requirements of the Utegrity platform to take all that in, because that gives me my pane of glass and that enables me to go out and use different partners in different countries for different product types of different service requirements that I feel the passing class in in those places.
And really where I see this being a bigger plan where I’m going to be focused on isn’t so much on the corporate side, it’s on the IT reseller side. These IT resellers need to have a vehicle to offer ITAD to their clients because again this is of a low value spend in my opinion, a lot of times. And the VAR is the best suited and best positioned to offer their clients an ITAD program. “I’m selling you all the stuff, let me be your partner to bring all the stuff back. I can use different partners you want to, or I can even go find the best in class for me. I can build all this. I can get all of your data in one place for you for you. So now when you log in to buy computers or order services, now you can log into my same portal and order ITAD. Right now you have everything you’re buying from me and getting rid of in one place.”
So I think there’s that mechanism and now you think about an IT reseller, not only are they providing the client that system to operate all those functions, now they can start taking a snapshot across all of their clients and say “listen of the 88 clients using this platform, now I’m now aggregating all of this ESG data on top of that. So now if I am a CDW or an Insight or whoever these big guys are, I can now go back to Wall Street or my sustainability reports and say, “listen, we now provide this service, we’re collecting all the stuff on behalf of our clients. Here’s the impact we’re making for the clients that we serve on the the e-waste side of the house.”
