Independent analysis for technology governance
Hello… and thank you for visiting the ITAM Review.
Our purpose is to provide an independent, unbiased view of the technology governance landscape.
IT Asset Management (ITAM) is a governance practice for managing technology assets throughout their lifecycle to control risk and cost. ITAM, once the purview of the IT department, has evolved to address all technology across the enterprise.
The reboot
The ITAM Review began in 2008 so that anyone involved in the SAM or ITAM industry could share their expertise, feedback and opinions of the technology and services in the market for the benefit of others.
In 2024 I folded it into the ITAM Forum while we consolidated the work and the community in one place. Now, as the ITAM Forum transitions into the Linux Foundation, the ITAM Review is becoming a separate entity again.
2026, and I’m taking it back to its roots.
Editorial direction
Less “industry magazine”. More “analyst notebook”.
Independent, vendor-agnostic thinking about what’s actually happening in the field.
Over the years, the ITAM Review has often been the starting point, the sandbox, the forge where ideas first formed before they grew legs and became real organisations, real events, real training, real initiatives. The training platform LISA, ITAM Forum, Practical ITAM, the Wisdom conferences, Excellence Awards, and my evangelism work around ISO/IEC 19770 all stemmed originally from the ITAM Review.
This is me getting back to the thing I’ve missed. The ITAM Review has been the starting point for a lot of spin-offs, and I’m proud of what they’ve become, but they pulled me away from writing. I want to be back in the work: thinking, researching, interviewing, and connecting dots.
ITAM is still the core. But the “ITAM space” isn’t a neat domain any more. The edges keep colliding with FinOps, IT procurement and vendor management, information security, service management, governance and AI.
For clarity: The ITAM Review is my independent work, this is my notebook, the views are mine, not those of ITAM Forum.
How it started: November 2008
After almost a decade selling inventory and SAM tools I felt there was a real shortage of unbiased information about what was going on in the market and updates on the key players.
I originally started the site so that practical implementation experience could be shared amongst peers.
At the time, there appeared to be plenty of information regarding best practice frameworks and ‘what to do‘, but a severe shortage of information on ‘how to‘ do it.
ITAM: From boutique to mainstream
Today the ITAM market has changed radically. In 2008 there were a handful of small boutique tooling providers and specialist IT audit firms. Now ITAM is mainstream, with billion-dollar providers and global integration partners.
Since the ITAM Review started, ITAM has gone from administrative to strategic, aligned to the growth in the significance of IT itself. Once the geeks in the corner who fixed your laptop, IT is now the fabric that runs through the whole business. ITAM has followed that trajectory.
And yet, despite ITAM “growing up”, buyers of IT still battle in a largely unregulated market where malpractice and mis-selling can be rife. Someone once joked with me around 2010 that subscriptions and cloud would mean the end of ITAM. The opposite happened. Cloud, subscriptions and licensing changes have brought more complexity, not less.
Add to that the evolution of what it means to manage an “asset”, and the value delivered, and now the era of AI, and ITAM is entering an exciting chapter. ITAM has grown a lot, and gone mainstream. But in many ways it’s only just getting started, and there’s lots of work to do.
The ITAM Review is 100% privately owned, vendor and service provider independent and impartial.
Martin Thompson, January 2026.