Fitting Puzzle Pieces Together: Insights from the Flexera 2024 State of ITAM Report

Brian Adler
Flexera

The complex landscape of IT asset management (ITAM) presents evolving challenges — and noteworthy achievements. The Flexera 2024 State of ITAM Report offers a deep dive into how ITAM is evolving. Based on insights from over 500 IT professionals, the report underscores the need for improved collaboration and visibility to optimize IT investments.

At the forefront of this year's findings is the critical gap between software asset management (SAM) and FinOps (cloud financial management) teams. This year, 32% of SAM teams reported having significant interactions with FinOps teams. While this marks an improvement from last year's 25%, it highlights the persistent challenge of integrating these two essential functions that both emphasize cost optimization as part of an important and broad set of initiatives, including lifecycle management, tracking of inventory, software versioning, and more.

Without this integration, organizations risk inefficiencies and missed opportunities for cost savings. As the analogy goes, companies have all the puzzle pieces but have yet to start putting them together. When IT asset management teams are flexible, manage a comprehensive view of the enterprise's data, and share actionable data-driven insights with other teams in the enterprise, great efficiencies are possible.

1. COLLABORATION IS GROWING, BUT IS INSUFFICIENT

Saving the almighty dollar is more important than ever. Finding those dollars to save, wherever possible, is going to be looked on in a positive light. ITAM folks are trying to find where to do that; FinOps teams have historically been trying to do that. We're heading in the right direction, but more collaboration is necessary.

Today there's a lack of significant interaction between SAM and FinOps teams, making it a major concern. Despite the improvement from last year, collaboration is still far from where it needs to be. Organizations have gathered the right people, but have not yet figured out how to bring responsibilities and goals together effectively. This disjointed approach can lead to inefficiencies and missed opportunities for optimization across IT investments.


Improved cross-team collaboration between ITAM (including SAM) and FinOps will deliver efficiencies in the coming years. Working together is an essential part of illuminating — and eliminating — the significant visibility gap regarding licenses for software running in the cloud.

Collaborative efforts for SAM teams are important for various focus areas, including infrastructure and operations, security, cloud (including cloud central teams and cloud centers of excellence). For example, the report's findings also show that only 19% of respondents feel secure in their BYOL (bring your own license ) positioning. This low confidence indicates that BYOL efforts are a significant area where better integration and visibility could drive improvements.

2. CLOUD SERVICES AND LICENSING COMPLEXITIES ADD TO THE NEED FOR GREATER VISIBILITY

Cloud environments add another layer of complexity to ITAM, particularly concerning various licensing models and discount options. The resource costs and the licensing implications must both be considered when optimizing cloud environments.

Consider this example: a company is running Microsoft SQL Server workloads in Azure. If the workloads would be moved to reserved instances without considering the associated licenses, the company could have saved on instance costs, but would have incurred higher overall expenses due to new licensing requirements.

CCOEs provide a centralized approach to managing an organization's cloud journey. Enterprises are wise to include ITAM practitioners in their CCOEs in order to ensure that licensing is incorporated into cloud-cost planning and deployment. Today 72% of organizations have a central cloud team, such as a CCOE; 88% of CCOEs have an ITAM/SAM member on the team, helping guide an organization's cloud journey.

While cloud providers offer tools to help manage and optimize cloud costs, many organizations find these tools insufficient as they mature in their cloud journey. Initially, provider tools like AWS Trusted Advisor and Azure Cost Management can be beneficial, but as organizations grow, they often outgrow these tools and seek more comprehensive third-party solutions.


3. VENDOR AUDITS MAY CAUSE SIGNIFICANT FINANCIAL IMPACT

A positive trend is highlighted in this year's report: a decline in wasted IT spend. Historically, wasted spend has been a significant issue, but this year's report shows a decrease below the 30% threshold. This reduction is encouraging, indicating that organizations are becoming more efficient in managing their IT assets.

However, the financial impact of vendor audits remains significant. The report shows that more than 20% of respondents spent more than $5 million in software vendor audit costs over the past three years. This substantial expenditure underscores the need for robust ITAM practices to avoid such costly audits, particularly as major vendors (including IBM, Oracle, and ServiceNow) increase their audit activities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, responding to these audits is now the top initiative for ITAM teams that report to the CIO or CTO.

Being proactive — getting your internal house in order — allows you to worry less about external audits. Internal audits not only help ensure that you're in a good state; they reduce the time and money spent on external audits.


Broad Responsibilities, Broad Benefits

The report underscores the critical need for improved collaboration and visibility within ITAM practices. Today's ITAM professionals take on a broad range of responsibilities, including tracking ownership of SaaS usage, providing security analysis, getting ready for contract renewals, and maintaining software licensing inventories. As organizations continue to navigate the complexities of modern IT environments, integrating ITAM initiatives into FinOps and other initiatives, leveraging advanced tools, and enhancing data visibility will all be essential for optimizing IT investments and driving operational efficiency.

Brian Adler is Senior Director of Cloud Market Strategy at Flexera

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 26: Network Compliance

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Why VM and Container Monitoring Is Not Enough for Cloud-Hosted Autonomous Agents

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

Beyond Monitoring: Why IT Operations Must Evolve into Decision Operations

Enterprise IT environments have never been more observable ... Yet many organizations still grapple with outages, lengthy incident resolution cycles, and increasing complexity. Most teams do not suffer from a shortage of data. They struggle to determine what deserves attention and what action to take next ... Enterprise IT operations must move beyond monitoring and visibility. The next stage of maturity is decision operations, an approach that helps teams make faster, better-informed decisions ...

Fitting Puzzle Pieces Together: Insights from the Flexera 2024 State of ITAM Report

Brian Adler
Flexera

The complex landscape of IT asset management (ITAM) presents evolving challenges — and noteworthy achievements. The Flexera 2024 State of ITAM Report offers a deep dive into how ITAM is evolving. Based on insights from over 500 IT professionals, the report underscores the need for improved collaboration and visibility to optimize IT investments.

At the forefront of this year's findings is the critical gap between software asset management (SAM) and FinOps (cloud financial management) teams. This year, 32% of SAM teams reported having significant interactions with FinOps teams. While this marks an improvement from last year's 25%, it highlights the persistent challenge of integrating these two essential functions that both emphasize cost optimization as part of an important and broad set of initiatives, including lifecycle management, tracking of inventory, software versioning, and more.

Without this integration, organizations risk inefficiencies and missed opportunities for cost savings. As the analogy goes, companies have all the puzzle pieces but have yet to start putting them together. When IT asset management teams are flexible, manage a comprehensive view of the enterprise's data, and share actionable data-driven insights with other teams in the enterprise, great efficiencies are possible.

1. COLLABORATION IS GROWING, BUT IS INSUFFICIENT

Saving the almighty dollar is more important than ever. Finding those dollars to save, wherever possible, is going to be looked on in a positive light. ITAM folks are trying to find where to do that; FinOps teams have historically been trying to do that. We're heading in the right direction, but more collaboration is necessary.

Today there's a lack of significant interaction between SAM and FinOps teams, making it a major concern. Despite the improvement from last year, collaboration is still far from where it needs to be. Organizations have gathered the right people, but have not yet figured out how to bring responsibilities and goals together effectively. This disjointed approach can lead to inefficiencies and missed opportunities for optimization across IT investments.


Improved cross-team collaboration between ITAM (including SAM) and FinOps will deliver efficiencies in the coming years. Working together is an essential part of illuminating — and eliminating — the significant visibility gap regarding licenses for software running in the cloud.

Collaborative efforts for SAM teams are important for various focus areas, including infrastructure and operations, security, cloud (including cloud central teams and cloud centers of excellence). For example, the report's findings also show that only 19% of respondents feel secure in their BYOL (bring your own license ) positioning. This low confidence indicates that BYOL efforts are a significant area where better integration and visibility could drive improvements.

2. CLOUD SERVICES AND LICENSING COMPLEXITIES ADD TO THE NEED FOR GREATER VISIBILITY

Cloud environments add another layer of complexity to ITAM, particularly concerning various licensing models and discount options. The resource costs and the licensing implications must both be considered when optimizing cloud environments.

Consider this example: a company is running Microsoft SQL Server workloads in Azure. If the workloads would be moved to reserved instances without considering the associated licenses, the company could have saved on instance costs, but would have incurred higher overall expenses due to new licensing requirements.

CCOEs provide a centralized approach to managing an organization's cloud journey. Enterprises are wise to include ITAM practitioners in their CCOEs in order to ensure that licensing is incorporated into cloud-cost planning and deployment. Today 72% of organizations have a central cloud team, such as a CCOE; 88% of CCOEs have an ITAM/SAM member on the team, helping guide an organization's cloud journey.

While cloud providers offer tools to help manage and optimize cloud costs, many organizations find these tools insufficient as they mature in their cloud journey. Initially, provider tools like AWS Trusted Advisor and Azure Cost Management can be beneficial, but as organizations grow, they often outgrow these tools and seek more comprehensive third-party solutions.


3. VENDOR AUDITS MAY CAUSE SIGNIFICANT FINANCIAL IMPACT

A positive trend is highlighted in this year's report: a decline in wasted IT spend. Historically, wasted spend has been a significant issue, but this year's report shows a decrease below the 30% threshold. This reduction is encouraging, indicating that organizations are becoming more efficient in managing their IT assets.

However, the financial impact of vendor audits remains significant. The report shows that more than 20% of respondents spent more than $5 million in software vendor audit costs over the past three years. This substantial expenditure underscores the need for robust ITAM practices to avoid such costly audits, particularly as major vendors (including IBM, Oracle, and ServiceNow) increase their audit activities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, responding to these audits is now the top initiative for ITAM teams that report to the CIO or CTO.

Being proactive — getting your internal house in order — allows you to worry less about external audits. Internal audits not only help ensure that you're in a good state; they reduce the time and money spent on external audits.


Broad Responsibilities, Broad Benefits

The report underscores the critical need for improved collaboration and visibility within ITAM practices. Today's ITAM professionals take on a broad range of responsibilities, including tracking ownership of SaaS usage, providing security analysis, getting ready for contract renewals, and maintaining software licensing inventories. As organizations continue to navigate the complexities of modern IT environments, integrating ITAM initiatives into FinOps and other initiatives, leveraging advanced tools, and enhancing data visibility will all be essential for optimizing IT investments and driving operational efficiency.

Brian Adler is Senior Director of Cloud Market Strategy at Flexera

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

AI Is Making Incident Management More Complex - Bad Data Makes It Harder

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 26: Network Compliance

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Why VM and Container Monitoring Is Not Enough for Cloud-Hosted Autonomous Agents

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

Beyond Monitoring: Why IT Operations Must Evolve into Decision Operations

Enterprise IT environments have never been more observable ... Yet many organizations still grapple with outages, lengthy incident resolution cycles, and increasing complexity. Most teams do not suffer from a shortage of data. They struggle to determine what deserves attention and what action to take next ... Enterprise IT operations must move beyond monitoring and visibility. The next stage of maturity is decision operations, an approach that helps teams make faster, better-informed decisions ...