The solution and customer benefits
To get closer to the big goal of establishing a sustainable software asset management, Raynet’s Technology Asset Inventory solution RayVentory was implemented first.

“Before we started the project, the big question was how many devices actually existed in METRO’s IT landscape and where they were located. Based on this, we determined which devices were target of the inventory and who was responsible for these devices. This gave us a structure for the project and enabled us to plan the next steps.”

Christian Horstkötter, Senior IT Consultant der Raynet

These steps were the basis for creating a standardized, company-wide guideline together with those responsible for the project at METRO and, based on this, for carrying out a complete inventory.

Thanks to the flexible inventory technologies, the project team achieved significant results after a short time, and based on this, more than 60 customer-specific reports were created. The high level of automation and scalability of RayVentory was an advantage for those responsible. METRO now has complete transparency of all essential data –including, for example, inventory levels for each country, the entire Oracle inventory as well as cross-national insights into the inventory status of the company’s hardware and software.

Through the SaaS management integration in the Technology Asset Inventory solution, additional source systems from major manufacturers, such as Microsoft and Oracle, are connected in order to subsequently draw conclusions with regard to optimization opportunities. This important information is automatically transferred to USU License Management using RayVentory’s intelligent Smart Pull technology. This enables METRO to immediately identify unused licenses and optimize its portfolio.

The goal of achieving maximum data quality for effective data management was thus achieved and is the starting point for successful software asset management as well as holistic IT asset management.

The conclusion
It quickly becomes clear that such an extensive project requires intensive planning and detailed design. However, the results available to METRO at the halfway point of the IT asset management project show that this effort is worthwhile:

With RayVentory as a basis, the previously manually collected information and the data from various systems have been successively optimized and completed, resulting in valuable key figures. These are available to METRO as a basis for action for all METRO companies in over 30 countries as well as for many internal decisions in a central solution.

In the process, METRO was able to achieve compliance for their defined top 3 suppliers in order to be best prepared for future software audits. In the next steps, the existing inventory data will be enriched with end-of-life as well as daily updated vulnerability information. Thus, RayVentory enables METRO to perform a holistic risk assessment of all locations and countries.