Universal Inventory

Context

In Software Asset Management (SAM), data must be gathered about operating systems, software and underlying hardware in order to know what software is installed and how it is used. Data collection is complicated by virtualization, containerization, cloud subscriptions, and mobility.

Microsoft engages certified SAM partners to assist their customers with this complicated process. Because every partner has its own methodology and tooling, the results they produce are different.

With Intelligent Asset Management, Microsoft seeks to standardize SAM processes, data formats, and tooling.

Mission

Build tooling for Microsoft certified SAM Partners to establish a correct baseline software inventory in a standard format that can be used to help customers check licence compliance, optimize usage, or prepare for a cloud migration.

Solution

Universal Inventory (UI) is a next-generation platform for Software Asset Management. UI gathers, processes, and standardizes data about the entire IT infrastructure of an organization to facilitate data-driven technology decisions.

UI does not scan the IT infrastructure, but imports data from existing sources such as Active Directory, discovery tools, asset management solutions, virtualization systems, and cloud subscriptions, and stores the consolidated inventory in a standard database with a well-know structure. This allows value providers to perform the same analysis on inventory data independent of used inventory tools.

Two versions were realized: a Windows service with a Winforms front-end to be installed on-premise at customers at the enterprise- and corporate level, and a cloud-based version to be used by ISP for small- and medium businesses.