Digital transformation continues to expand unabated across organizations of all sizes and industries of all categories. With this transformation comes the need for rapid adoption of new technologies and new ways of acquiring and provisioning the resources that implement workloads in order to take advantage of these technologies. Over the previous few years, we’ve seen a shift in the role and purview of IT asset management practitioners, as they’ve had to adjust to this new world, much of it in the dynamic and agile expanse of the public cloud. This transformation and the disruption left in its wake has continued over the past year, requiring ITAM practitioners to advance their processes and continue to adapt to their evolving IT estates.

This year’s Flexera State of ITAM Report reveals the challenges, initiatives, activities and metrics of success for ITAM teams across the global landscape. The report captures the importance of IT asset management, as it details the responses of 500 IT professionals across a broad spectrum of industries, organization sizes and roles within those organizations. The insights provided by these global respondents provide the big picture of the challenges, strategies and initiatives of ITAM practitioners.

Wasted spend is the broken record of IT

This year’s report reiterates a common theme seen throughout the history of the State of ITAM Report, as well as that of Flexera’s State of the Cloud Reports: Organizations continue to waste a significant amount of IT spend. As organizations pivot away from on-premises configurations and the software required for those environments, and move to the world of public cloud, their wasted IT spend shows no signs of slowing, regardless of the environment. This year, global respondents estimated that 38 percent of their desktop software spend is wasted, while 33 percent of their spend in both cloud (IaaS/PaaS) and SaaS is also wasted. Organizations are moving away from the traditional data center model, causing confusion as to how to best plan future IT usage. And as these organizations move into the cloud, these IaaS/PaaS/SaaS environments are new and unproven, so established processes have not been developed to maximize the efficiency of their IT spend and minimize waste. The role of ITAM is contracting in some areas while expanding in others, and new rules of engagement must be established to combat the wasted spend that continues to be prevalent across organizations.