Inventory on Steroids

Inventory on Steroids

I have written recently about inventory becoming a commoditized item.

One of the limitations of inventory is that there is only so much detail you can collect about hardware and executables. The market appears to be focused on what we do with the data and not how we collect it.

However I believe there is still plenty of scope for growth and innovation within the asset discovery and inventory market. One such example is NEXThink.

Inventory is dead, long live inventory!

A small Swiss company has taken inventory to a whole new level by adding new paradigms and new contexts.

As well as assets the company also monitors users, devices, packages, applications, executables, binaries, ports, destinations and connections.

It is a clever blend of network inventory and network monitoring and is best described as inventory on steroids.

Their offering provides comprehensive and dynamic inventory information to support IT Asset Management efforts but also provides a contextual layer to the assets on the network to support service management priorities such as lags, delays, crashes, waiting times and bottlenecks.

Their connector into SCCM is also very cool. It adds a whole new layer of business intelligence on top of an SCCM install, and like the best SCCM plugins, it also feeds back results to create new jobs in SCCM.

Finally, NEXThink have an interesting proof of concept and ROI model – focusing on real numbers and not hypothetical statements.

All in all; a compelling offering and one to watch.

• HQ: Lausanne, Switzerland
• www.nexthink.com
• Contact: Vincent Bieri, Co-Founder & Director
• 100 Clients, 700K Agents deployed.
• Flagship Client: Ministère de la Défense (French MOD) with ~ 250K seats

SCCM Plugin - Filling the holes

Root-Cause-Analysis: Devices by User by Application by Port by Destination