welcome everybody to another episode of glide chat my name is mike lombardo and with me today is lawrence tyndall harbor asset management expert at glidefast consulting hey lawrence hey mike how's it going thanks for inviting me to this call i'm excited to be on today so lawrence i'm curious how did you get into the hardware asset management space that's a really good question actually mike so before i got into the hardware management space i was actually in video production so i was making music videos in london i was doing that when i was 16. i absolutely loved it right so i had like a little mini dv camera for those of you that remember the tape cameras right i was doing music videos back then i absolutely loved that so you know i was naturally interested in the broadcast world video production so you know there was a job opportunity to go and work out in the middle east uh to go and work for a tv channel wow very very popular tv channel in the middle east um so i got an opportunity to go work there in the it department to go and look after their assets basically it was like an inventory role so i was like you know i've never really done this before but but hey you know maybe it'll turn into something good right and at that point i had those misconceptions of you know people at work in i.t you kind of think like yeah you know they're not nerds but you know you kind of think wow like there's some dude in his basement talking on the keyboard right yeah but then when i actually got into it i was like no this is actually cool this is where the cool kids hang out right yeah yeah so basically went after qatar flew out there um and then managed to get the position working at the tv channel absolutely loved it right had tens of thousands of assets and they actually had service now and at that point i don't know what servicenow was i took one look at it with this guy and i said whoa what's his application like i'm instantly hooked to it everything's so simple you click a button you get an email i'm like never seen anything like this before you know this this experience it reminds me of like a mobile phone app right how easy it is to use and i'm like this is work like you know absolutely love absolutely loved it so i got hooked on that i was doing the asset management there for about three years and after about six months to a year in that role um my manager at the time was like you know let's let's put you into something else at the company right because i kept coming with all these ideas right we can modify this field we can add these forms do these workflows so so then after doing the inventory the hands-on like scanning of assets logging them i then went into a business systems analyst role whereas working on workflows adding new features basically just increasing the roi of the platform and uh just making it fun for everyone to work on the platform so yeah that's basically how i got into it and then yeah that's cool you know what's funny is when you're saying like wow this is just like a mobile app on my phone and then it starts to like you know when i it's similar to me i was i was on a help desk and when i got exposed service now i was kind of just like wait why why isn't everything like this why is work so like old and sluggish in you know even when i got exposed to servicenow i was like aspen released so it was like you know very early on on servicenow's journey we just got uh san diego our hands on san diego publicly today right so you know it was it was early in the journey but still like you could just see the difference you know even way back then it's like wow this is this is what what work should be like you know 100 and like similar to your story i remember just first getting in there and you're just dreaming of all these modules like where's this where's that and then all of a sudden you're like a raven like fan right you're telling other teams like you're telling the marketing team you're telling hey chart finance hey there's this app we use so easy we'll build you a table we'll get you in it you know once people are in it it's like like for me you know you think i work for servicenow but i don't but the way i talk about it you know it's like yeah you gotta use it it was hard to get like get other teams involved like just i'm thinking back to like when i first started and even when i got into the consulting world and you know working with glidecast it was hard to get other teams like listen this is really this is not just an application this is not like this is much bigger and i feel like those tides have turned like where it's just like companies are you know at the ceo level at the highest levels companies are like strategically this is our strategic workflow platform right exactly like like you said back in the day it was more of the it department saying we've seen this tool can we have it please but now it's kind of like the ceos and the cfos and the cto saying this is the tool we're using guys and then everyone just says oh thank you you know yeah it's kind of like lunch in the office right and we you know we're picking what to get and we get the best stuff so yep that's right so i know uh obviously hot raster management's you know a huge passion for you and i know you do a lot of training with your itam institute and so tell me about a little bit about your your ham journey so i know you started off like you said it in qatar at that tv studio um and then where did you go from there so from there i basically got a hard rest at management position working for like a cisco partner basically so i was working for cisco but through a partner what we were doing is working with cisco clients on the asset management platforms and their data and stuff like that so i worked for that company for a few years look for those guys and then i got an internal position with them as a product manager so i was actually helping them build out their asset management application for a new release we're working on that was super exciting right to build a platform from scratch right we got to work with the database with nothing in it got to build the ui got to work with awesome developers absolutely love that it was a great journey and then you know from that i then got an opportunity to go work at cherwell which has now been acquired by a vanity but it's basically it's a it was an it service management application very very similar to servicenow yeah um so i worked with those guys i was working into the itsm modules like change incident but i was also working on the asset management features for them yeah and and you know i'll tell you like i feel like hardware asset management has really and obviously with servicenow's release of hot raster management pro and putting way more focus on to it but i think the pandemic and kovid contributed a ton to hardware asset management processes because a lot of our customers a lot of organizations out there all of a sudden went from fully on site or 90 on on site to almost fully remote right so they had to distribute all these different laptops and equipment and you know i heard some some organizations just go oh my god we just handed out millions of dollars of equipment yeah we don't know who has it how we paid you know different departments are paying for stuff so i really think that shined a light and really you know you hear the stories of like when a security breach happens that's when a security company says oh we need a better we need a better security process right so it was like i feel like the pandemic really kind of shined a light on how crucial hardware asset management processes are oh 100 and i mean it really exposed organizations that had immature hard reset management practices right like i remember seeing companies big fortune 500 companies you know putting up posters fill in your name and the serial number and the asset tag what like i know you're mind blown like where's your service now where's you like having this automated or having all those the checks and balances in in in order you know so and asset management right is talk about a cost saver and and and just you know plug in like if you can just even plug the leaks of asset management as a whole right and i think some people don't understand this and this is my perspective of it and you and you tell me yours tell me if i'm wrong you know i think with both software and hardware but let's talk about hardware for a second right with hardware asset management you have organizations uh with different departments going out and buying whatever they want right if they want a new laptop they just go buy it with a credit card pay cash yeah pay pay right instead of going through it that has a set maybe image of laptops or a model of laptops that's that's pre-approved uh cost-effective maybe they have a um a bulk order agreement right and the same thing with with software right where hey you know i've even seen it a couple times here at cloudfast where we're like hey we gotta get our stuff together we had different teams kind of buying something that we already had licenses for yeah right double buying double spending that's why i think asset management is so crucial to service now because it's not yes you have to spend a little bit of money to to have the application but the goal of that application is to reduce your overall spending exactly overall overhead of you know assets and increase our visibility too right because if you don't know what you have how do we how can we make plans or how can we deploy stuff right and i've worked for companies two ways just like that we don't know what's in this country what's there but once we have that visibility we're able to co-mingle all those assets and share them and save money a lot of people forget that you actually an organization does it properly you make a lot of income in reverse actually like actual profit in a way because from a depreciation standpoint let's say you're a carburetor your hardware asset estate let's say you're a big company with thousands of employees right you've got over let's say 100 million dollars worth of hardware and all that hardware depreciates it like i say a straight line of five years right you divide that you know that's 20 million bucks tax right off every year right there you know you put that as a loss i mean damn you know we could be making profit even if we're making a loss from the products and services so you can't guess right you can't guess at what's depreciating out there and let so if you don't have a hard inventory so there you go we just we just we just named like three reasons how we can save these millions of dollars per year like service now it has all these modules and features it's ready to go you just give us your data we ingest it let's run its magic you align your process with the system you know we're ready to go to town with him so and all right so i don't run out of time here but can you give me a couple best practices or maybe something to avoid uh for customers implementing hardware asset management pro you know because i know the rest of the platform obviously like implementing a best solution model and following best practices and avoiding bad practices are crucial to success of these implementations so could you give us maybe one piece of advice for a customer looking to implement harder asset management problems so my best piece of advice would be to integrate you know when you're looking at integrating service now with other applications just look at like all the the applications where you have data already in your enterprise so for example like sap you know can integrate procurement data you can look at like sccm for discovery data and stuff like that so don't don't reinvent the wheel and and i think in the beauty too with integration hub now there's so many pre-built what they call spokes so it's like pre-built integrations that can just plug right into different applications and a lot you know in the past we've had to really build those from scratch exactly so i love the advancement and the introduction really in the last few releases of integration so all right lawrence i appreciate your time today thank you thanks thanks for having me mike and you know check out the youtube channel we've gone to videos so you know have a look yeah there you go all right thanks mike [Music] you