all right good morning good afternoon and good evening everybody my name is victor predes colonia i'm part of our asset management team here at servicenow and i'm really excited to bring another one of these live events for you all at this time we're going to be focusing on ham and with particular emphasis on the end to end visibility into your acid estate excited to have everyone a few quick announcements before we get started if you like this event or if you like these types of events and want to learn more or attend others and register for others feel free to scan the qr code here there's going to also be a link in the chat where you can register and see a schedule of events that we have coming up so as it pertains to this event um please bear in mind that some information is privileged and confidential and so we want you to keep that in mind as we proceed as well as some information is forward-looking in nature so they might be subject to change as we answer questions we might be looking at the future and discussing things that are on our roadmap so please bear that in mind all right a big warm welcome to everybody again this is one of our our commitment to you as the customer to help you deploy adopt and achieve value faster with your investments in servicenow and in particular with hardware asset management we're going to focus on asset visibility what does it mean when we talk about end-to-end visibility and to do that i've brought on some folks from the bu but i'll first introduce myself and michael we are part of the outbound product management team we run these types of events and we host these events and we bring forward a lot of the guests that we have on these events so michael happy to have you with me today and for our guests today we have brought lit gupta and michael smith uh both of which are product managers in the hardware asset management space and eric farrington is also part of our product management team he leads up and directs the product management group here for uh servicenow all right so mike uh thanks for joining us lilit thanks for joining us today we're going to talk about three key areas the first is hardware asset management challenges what are what are customers facing today and what what are those challenges that you know we want to bring to light so that we can help address how to resolve those and we'll focus primarily today on end-to-end visibility it is a fundamental part of hardware asset management and i'd like to dig into that and explain a little bit more on what that is and then we'll talk about life cycle and the uh the workflows uh that are prescriptive workflows to address the life cycle as always for those of you that are attending please submit your questions in the chat i will answer those and at the end of the session we'll have a live q a session as well stay laser focused on the topic of the day if you have questions please focus those questions on what we're discussing and if you have any comments to share in the chat i do recommend using the chat feature and get a lot of interaction all right let's get started then uh so lit thanks for joining i i want to learn from you based on your conversations with your customers and the knowledge that you have in this industry you know what are the the issues and challenges that our customers face today why is harder asset management in some cases very difficult thanks victor if we had to summarize this survey this survey from the item review illustrates nicely that there are three main reason cost visibility and x will cost account to nearly 42 percent and visibility account to 23 percent injection on account to 25 percent so when we say cost because lot of money goes into the infrastructure asset so that's become critical visibility i need to know what i own where it is what how the life cycle management how the support is and when it comes to rick's audit compliance we agree with these reasons as they consistently come up with the customers conversations whenever we are talking to the customer we see they talk about cost they talk about the visibility so we agree with what item review is giving if we expand on the reason customer perform hardware asset management these are the five main pillars control visibility support compliance and score represent the business challenges around with hardware asset management when i say control so organization spends a lot of money into the infrastructure but without any roi so they don't know where is my money going which all infrastructure i'm buying so there is no standard process this which is coordinated by id or any other supply chain when it comes to the visibility there are multiple systems multiple places multiple locations but they are not integrated into one single dashboard or the place where i can see where my assets are who is owning them or normalized asset data so that's create a problem and when we say support today the organization is not limited to one office they are distributed they are decentralized and silent and with covet they are even remote also so every house you have a remote worker now it become even more magnified or the problem how i provide support or how i how i manage my hardware asset and when it come compliance compliance is the bigger issues because you are distributed you are decentralized you have a strong cmdb or the relational database it is very difficult to predict or see the acid accuracy and that lead into the problems scope as it is expanding so 10 years back it was just on premise then it moved to the data center today cloud offline all of this and asset themselves are expanding so when we look into it these five challenges plays a very critical role in hardware asset management yeah i mean i i just based on what you were saying there little it it sounds to me like there's just a lot of moving parts and and and hardware as it expands and gets more complex and different assets getting getting in in that scope of i.t there's many things to manage one of the things that you mentioned that i see from the last slide to this slide is that visibility is in both or at least mentioned in both yes this is good observation victor and interestingly visibility is really a fundamental reason why customers should pursue hardware asset management because if you think about it without complete and accurate visibility tackling and managing cost because each hardware is associated with the cost and all other business challenges what we discussed like compliance support or any any other even unachievable so that's become critical we need to have a visibility and if i come into look into it few example of the visibility operational activities when you see operational activities the asset is associated with different kind of contracts they are lease or how i'm doing renewal how i am swapping or disposing my asset then lessons true of are they maintained properly or not when it comes companies changes so there are a lot of acquisitions and mergers are happening and as a part of this acquisition and merger are we managing asset also because when when you do merger the asset becomes a part of new organization they need to be realigned reassigned workforce keep moving from one place to another place how we manage all of this asset if and when you go to the service sectors the reduction is much more high and the number of people are more and with remote worker it again become very difficult to manage assets business initiatives so business goes to the tough time they go with the good times and assets need to be tracked and having a complete visibility so if i have to cut my cost how i can minimize the spend spending on the asset i need to know what is there in my stock room how i can best utilize what is available where they are available so i can reduce the procurement cost buying cost data center consolidation now everything moving to the cloud data center becomes important where what is the best place i should have a data center what all acid i can put into the data center that become critical until unless i have a visibility about the asset this is not possible and digital transformation with industry moving towards the digital we need uh to know where the asset is how can i click and use those acid so visibility is required critical when it comes to compliance as more and more assets are getting added and missing a visibility result into the problems so vendor audits are required so it can be based stock room or the location order to know do i align with what i show on the papers government and industry regulations required us to make sure that our assets are up to date we are not having any warranties issue life cycle issues so on then comes the x basically the acid can be lost because acid is moving it's not static now with remote distributed and silo visibility into the cloud what goes into the cloud what is on on premise so if i'm not aware it i am i'm going to get into the security problems somebody can hack and take data so all of these results are successful if we know where the asset is if i have the visibility and i have workflows i have things which can give me the bigger picture and i can go deep into it the asset yeah yeah no i mean i'm convinced visibility is is crucial to harder asset management in fact it's it's fairly crucial to anything that's asset management let's talk a little bit then about what we mean by end-to-end visibility mike what what do we mean by that and how should we think about it from a servicenow perspective for a servicenow customer yeah absolutely the thing that we have to remember these days is assets are not always going to be in a static state where they're going to sit in one place and as they progress to the life cycle from the time they're procured to the time they are disposed of they need to be properly tracked and and so there's lots of inputs and a lot of factors that happen throughout the asset life cycle um and that's true also in how data comes into the to the to the repository so we have to realize that in a perfect world the assets are created when they're procured so you've got a set of data that comes from a procurement system or from receiving activities but that's not always the case especially in your your state now understanding up a new environment you're going to have legacy data you may also have a challenge of having siloed environments where you have certain groups managing their assets bringing them into a central repository can be a challenge because you know your network team might keep their own database of assets whereas the data center team may have their own system that record so bringing all this data in whether it's from procurement these siloed sources legacy data vendor apis third-party companies could be managing some of your inventory as well it can be a challenge to consolidate all into one usable readable database so you know one of the things that we covered and we configured and set up in our previous webinar and if you haven't seen it i highly recommend you go look it up is our content service and normalization engine so as the data comes in it doesn't matter how it gets into our data into our database we're going to normalize it we're going to clean it up and we're going to give you some nice data to work with not only are we going to clean up the manufacturer model and product information we're also going to provide lifecycle dates that'll provide you some intelligence so as the asset moves throughout its life you've got these dates to reference to make proper decisions as that happens um and with our content service um you know you'll get an initial massive load of over 2 million models that are in our content service now but we understand that that's we're not done our content team is actively today as we speak are going through and finding more models more manufacturer life cycle dates and they they're getting a consistent feed of all of our un our customers unnormalized data to clean up so every day when they come into work they have a list of assets that come back anonymously that they go through and they find more matches for so every week you'll get an update of a newly created content our content service normally when our customers turn this on day one they're usually around 20 or 30 percent because it takes a while for this content service to work to scrub up the data but normally after a week or so once once everything is settled we find that most of our customers are achieving around 80 to 85 and if you're not at that level then there's usually some configuration settings that need to be addressed or maybe your discovery is not bringing back manufacturer or simple things like that um so there's usually a little bit of cleanup that needs to happen on day one but once this has happened you're going to have a nice set of data that you'll be able to use throughout the rest of the life cycles of the assets that's great so the end to end then is really the initial input of data and then the continual cleaning of that data through the content service which gives kind of rise to you you able to take action with with uh with that data set is that how i hear it absolutely because there's you know as you know the asset life cycle here you can see it starts with the acquire um phase of an asset you you need to know certain informations as you're acquiring assets so is this model still generally available can we still buy it um all the way through the disposal section where they have end of life dates that you need to make sure okay these these laptops are no longer supported so we should dispose of them so this content data will be used throughout your entire asset lifecycle and remind me how how is it that we conduct or do the hardware normalization piece and how important is that that aspect to this and visibility so the normalization happens as soon as the the record is created so with your with your instance um you'll when you when you first turn it on you'll get a large update of content in some cases um there's so there's business rules that run at night that bring over this data so what it'll do is is day one it'll go through and i'll look at your model table and it'll create a normalized model that'll be associated to the asset record so when you look at the asset you'll be able to see a normalized model normalized manufacturer and there'll be a related list for any life cycle dates that are associated with that model and like i said before any any information that you have that does not get normalized it could be from the procurement system isn't putting the right fields in um or discovery isn't discovering or populating the data that you need any unregula unrecognized data will be sent over to our research team and in some cases it may be a new model that just came to the market that we don't have a lot of uh information on and our content service team will go out and they'll create that and so in the next update you'll get an update and from any of your dashboards you'll be able to see um the uh when the next service update will be and when you're gonna get that payload um and if if you find that you're struggling you can always reach out to our um you know your high support and in some cases we find that maybe discovery wasn't bringing in model so you have a very low normalization percentage but you'll have all the dashboards and tips in our model management workspace in our in our in our new hardware asset workspace you'll be able to see the percentage and what models are are being normalized yeah and and mike i think one of the things that's important to note is that the normalization and i think you mentioned this but the normalization once it's once it's there and available it can the data can be used not only for the workflows within ham but it could also feed into other other components of of the servicenow platform so i think that that piece actually also elaborates what visibility can mean for for a customer with the grand scheme of things this example here that i uh dug up when i was putting this together i thought this was a very interesting way of uh kind of visualizing how normalization works do you mind walking us through this one sure absolutely so every model and like i said whether it's created from a procurement system or from servicenow discovery or through integration with sccm we're looking for three data points we're looking for who made it what it is and the specific number so for example we have an apple macbook pro here um and scc you know jam could be discovering it in the first example here is max facebook pro because that's how it's set in the bios uh procurement somebody could have fat fingered it and typed in mac and all caps and then book and lower caps um and then another discovery tool or another integration could have brought it in install apple wrong right there's all kinds of issues and especially if you have a legacy system of of where you relied on a lot of manual processes and human hands you're going to have a lot of human error so it doesn't matter how those come in we're you know so that's the macbook pro 15 apple is telling us to manufacture and the really the model the product name right that's the specific name but we know that for every apple macbook pro 15 there's probably 300 different versions right there's a different model number for a us version as there would be for a french version because they have different keyboards so different power quartz so they have a different skew number so by having all three of those items our normalization engine will bounce it against our content service and they'll bring back apple doesn't matter if it was misspelled the first time or not capitalized properly the normalized manufacturer name will just be apple and and now we're able to report on all of our apple stuff our service desk will know that it's apple they won't what's up help you know they some people are very literal with this stuff um so now you're gonna have a clean standardized um you know normalization database and as long as we're getting these three these three input points whether it's from discovery or an integration you're gonna have a very successful normalization process oh that's great and and i guess one of the things i'd ask is how do you ensure that you get those data points uh into him what are some of the recommended practices in order to ensure that you get complete and in some cases most the time accurate data so you can get that normalization engine working properly absolutely and a lot of cases it's one small error or one small configuration tweak that can save thousands of of issues right it could be something as simple as letting the procurement team know that um you know the description field that they're seeing on a purchase order isn't the model name right and and you'll find that you'll get a lot of repeat errors um to cause this or maybe with the integration with sccm maybe you're not bringing back the the model number you're just bringing in the model name right you're just bringing that general description where the model number is built into the bios it's there we're just not telling the discovery agents or the integrations to look for and populate it so a lot of that stuff you know one of the things that there's a there's a very symbiotic relationship with the configuration management database the cmdb and the asset database because the configuration data will provide a lot of um great information but it'll also provide a lot of bad information if it's not configured properly and in a lot of cases maybe you haven't been concerned about this information because you haven't really had a need to use it yet but now that you're you know you're maturing your hardware asset space now it's time to to go in and partner with in a lot of cases it's often the same person that wears the same hat for configuration management that does it for asset management or they work together very well so then in in that case visibility may even start as early as having the right cmdb data clean and accurate so that you can start making use of it right so it's um starting out of the game just say hey i'm going to start normalizing maybe sometimes maybe uh premature yeah and and there's a there's a synchronization between assets and cis so if you haven't started your asset management maturity process but you've had config running for years you're going to find assets have already been created because there's a synchronization that happens with certain classes based on how it's configured nice okay now i like to talk about um workflows because now as a as an end-to-end visibility it's one thing to look at the asset know where it's at where it sits and have accurate data but it's another to actually start making use of it and i think when we talk about end to end visibility we're not just talking about the static state right we're talking about it's an ever-changing state and what what you're actually going to do with the data actually gives you visibility into other business outcomes so let's talk about that mike um what's the best way to think about workflows with within ham sure sure so one of the challenges most organizations have um with managing assets is how they can manage them outside of the outside of the time they're plugged in and being used right we have discovery tools we have you know patching agents we have all kinds of things that can connect our infrastructure when everything's plugged in on the network but where we lose visibility is when something gets unplugged or something gets received it's much harder to manage cardboard as it is to manage an active server that's rack stacked and plugged in and running right so that's where our workflows come into place and since our paris release our focus with every release has been to introduce additional workflows that not only give you a process an end-to-end process um whether it's a workflow for a simple i need something a catalog request to to the entire stage of the life cycle to that that item's received or it's a tech refresh or disposal but so we give you the process that that's required to deliver these services and we try to put asset management in the background so the technicians that are working through these workflows are doing the work and the asset updates are happening automatically to the background a very common issue that we find with our with our customers is is just a simple break fix you know a caller calls in with an incident they have an asset that's broken they need it replaced and the technician their focus is keeping this person back to work and getting them a device that's working or fixing the device that they have their focus isn't keeping the asset management database up to date that's the last thing that they're focused on they just want to get this person up to work and jump into the next queue so as these assets are coming in um you know one of the personas that we have here um is is around casey now casey's a hardware manager for a big hospital and and there's constant technology going in and out whether it's through brake fix or tech refresh and as this stuff is happening they're starting to collect assets that are no longer deployable whether they're defective or they're past their useful life now that casey has a normalized database he knows now that his asset life cycle what assets need to be disposed through their age and because of processes that were put in place he has assets now that are sitting in a warehouse that are pending disposal so so now that um you know because for casey managing a hospital they have to maintain hipaa compliance so he needs to make sure that there's a process in place it's going to ensure that all the database equipment gets wiped and gets properly disposed so if they get an audit they can say yes these hundred laptops were disposed here's the request that they were disposed through here's a certificate of disposal that lists all the assets that are associated back every asset now has it has an updated retired state they have um all the dates of all the activities that happens in the disposal process are put in into the asset record and now they have full accountability so if any audit comes through that casey can rest assured that they're doing that they're that they're properly updated so our disposal process will take any assets that are in a pending disposal state and allow you to simply add them into a to a disposal workflow and now you have awareness right because now you know what is you know you can look at your stock rooms and see how many assets are pending disposal so you can schedule your disposals um the end-to-end process goes through validating and saying okay these are the 100 assets you schedule a pickup with your disposal vendor and the disposal vendor comes and picks them up and you verify each asset that you you originally added to this process gets picked up and then the vendor sends you a certificate in the background and when it's done and you can validate that okay the vendor says i picked all these up since the ones i asked them to pick up great and you can close the disposal task and what happens throughout that process is the the asset manager never has to go back to the computer with a spreadsheet and import or go through and manually update 150 assets that just got disposed these assets went into an in-transit state when they were picked up so they show that they haven't been retired yet but they were picked up and then when the when the the workflow gets closed now all the assets move to a retired state and they have the vendor they were retired to they had the disposal request attached to it and they have a trace a path right back to the certificate of disposal so this is just one example of one of our workflows and this process could never be done through automation right you can never have discovery help you with the disposal workflow because these these haven't been plugged in for a while and they might not ever be plugged in again but what you don't want is you don't want assets that are still in your environment showing up outside in other organizations or other people it can go back online and you might have certain agents that come in if this stuff happens now you've got a workflow that you can tie it back to yeah so you said this is not the only workflow so i'd like to jump into that so what are some other what are some other workflows or use cases that we've seen customers leverage ham when it comes to the automated prescriptive workflows sure absolutely and and and so it starts really um with our request workflow we have a standard hardware request workflow that covers and all of our workflows i should point out we design them intentionally as low code prescriptive workflows we understand that we're not going to make a process that's going to be perfect for every organization but what we did do is we created these workflows so they're easily able to be modified and configured to meet your organization's particular needs so from a request standpoint if you have a approval chain that's required on a certain dollar amount you can add that to the to the request workflow so if it requires if it's over two thousand dollars you need skip level approval you can put that into the workflow it won't break anything it's just an additional step that'll get added to it so we have a request workflow that does the entire process from request to sourcing to you know deployment and and this is something that we you know we have processes that allow our remote end users to receive assets at home so now if you work from home you can pull up your mobile device and scan your asset and that will update the asset record in the background so before this assets even went online we already know it exists because we had a receiving task and we already know it's there so the configuration data will catch up to the live asset um we have uh different deployment workflows whether it's through tech refresh or through standard requests so we have different tasks that get executed um while an asset is in in the inventory space maybe it's defective and you need to work with the vendor to do an rma a return merchandise authorization so we have an end-to-end workflow that covers all the steps in that whether you have to have the vendor come on site or you have to send the asset off site we take into account all those activities and all those decisions that happen maybe the vendor fixes it maybe they say we can't fix it or it's too expensive to fix and we replace it we have a you know we have different different tasks that update the asset records or create new assets as as as a result of the rma process for you once again though your technicians are just working these tasks there's no going back in and making updates because all the asset updates are automated in the background that way the technicians can focus on doing the work and not the busy work the administrative work to go back in behind and fixing this we also have workflows around leases right um when it's time to for a lease to be renewed we have a workflow that walks you through that whole entire process we have another one around uh when somebody goes offline or somebody gets off-boarded from an organization everything that's assigned to them whether it's software sas subscriptions mobile devices mobile carrier plans hardware anything that's assigned to the end user will be tasks created to reclaim it so now we're doing a better job of getting all of our equipment back into the organization um and then we have another another popular workflow for tech refresh and this this is for it can be done for one asset it can be done for a thousand assets as many assets as you want and this allows you to plan and execute all the activities that happen during the tech refresh even reclaiming the asset that you're replacing um in the st the steps that are required to ensure that that asset goes right into the disposal process so those are the bulk of our big workflows and we have we have a new workflow coming in the tokyo release around contract renewals um and that's a better together with our sam tool so it'll walk you through all the steps required for a maintenance contract for example um to get that renewed and and to be proactive with these activities once again they the selfishly helping asset management but not putting asset management in the for in the forelight but having all the updates happen in the background so we can ensure that our data stays accurate because that's with visibility we need to have a clean view of our asset estate and and all these activities that i just described are areas where data can erode yeah and to that point that that visibility has to be an ongoing uh practice right and and these workflows help help also do that by keeping things constantly updated as it moves through the life cycle absolutely and at any stage in an asset's life cycle there's opportunity for data to erode and and for and once data starts to go bad maybe it's from technicians not updating they didn't update the break fix so now you've got an asset out in the world that it says it's in a stock room but someone's using it and then you've got an asset in a stock room that shows that it's still assigned to an end user that may seem like one small little issue but if that happens 50 times a week after a while people start losing confidence in the data yeah no no i believe that you said something else that there's more workflows coming out in the future so it's safe to say that that uh the these workflows build on top of each other and they expand and they they multiply and there's many different use cases so over time there's going to be a lot more different workflows that folks can leverage absolutely absolutely we have like i said we've got the contract workflow the maintenance renewal workflow coming in our in our upcoming release um so today we covered um you know deployment swaps retires refresh we do have a workflow for loaners i forgot to mention that um this will allow you to maintain awareness when you've got loaners out there in the field that haven't been returned once again helping with that visibility because when an asset gets shoved in a drawer because someone forgot to turn the loaner on without this process you're not going to know it's there and and so that's a big thing um yeah and uh but so upcoming workflows we have we have contracts coming in the in the next uh tokyo release in just a few weeks few days in utah the release after that we're working on a donation workflow to allow customers meet their esg mandates and instead of disposing of assets working with local charities to dispose their assets but to do it in a way that's safe that protects the organization but still provides value to the charity that they're working with and we have several other workflows that we're planning that i believe we've got some uh some questions or some survey questions about that you know you guys input may help guide us on what workflows come next yeah yeah and in next week's session we're actually going to get in depth on some of these specific workflows kind of go into product and look at how to leverage the data in ham to carry out one of those workflows but maybe we can just start here and just as a general practice what are some leading practices related to workflows that our customers can think about as we move into next week's session yeah so i think next week we're gonna we're gonna do a deeper dive into the disposal process and we're going to also talk to the tech refresh process because the tech refresh process covers a lot of activities within an asset life cycle it it covers the planning it covers the sourcing if we're doing a tech refresh we need to either buy or ensure we have enough assets to replace the old assets it covers the prepare and deployment stages of that it also covers the reclaim and getting those old assets back so the tech refresh is a great workflow it's probably one of our most complex workflow because of all the the major muscle movements there um but yeah it's definitely going to be a good one so we'll we'll dive into those and how you can help set them up and configure it and how you can make updates so you're looking at flow designer right here and if anyone's worked in flow designer i know your sysadmins have very easy to just drag and drop the little what they call the pills on the on the right side of the the screen you can drag them and drop them in between any steps it's very easy to use it requires very little coding um and and you know our customers have a great success configuring and really making these processes land in their environment because one of the challenges always adopting these processes you guys may have a process in place you may have a site that somebody goes to to do a request maybe it's a team site or something like that or you know something on on on uh you know on a different platform now bringing all this into the servicenow platform will make the end user experience much smoother and much more streamlined well that's great well thank you mike i appreciate that and clarifying end to end visibility and how that actually leads into the workflow process and again we're going to talk a lot about that in the next session we'll actually do some specific examples uh with data sets all right i i did see some questions come in the chat maybe it's the right time to open up for questions we do have some some um dedicated time for that i did see a few questions come in and i see more coming in as well so michael why don't you kick us off with some questions uh and then direct it to lilit and mike you very much victor uh good morning everyone so i have a couple questions here from ed um i'd like to know a little bit more information on obtaining assets for example creation of assets that are discovered instead of those that are procured following the hand process into their best practice to deal with this so so i always say that um the best practice for when we when we create an asset an asset should be created um you know i see your you know focus on discovery but there's a whole segment of the assets life cycle from before it gets discovered that needs to ask it needs to be accounted for it needs to be properly sourced and procured it needs to be received into a stock room it needs to be audited while it's in that stocker to ensure that it's there um and then once it goes online then you've got discovery and integrations to to do that so we offer nothing but best practices around the the procurement receiving and inventorying of the assets and ed i was just typing another question i see you had around stockrooms um and that's a great question and i'm going to answer this live and i was typing the answer but i'll go ahead and answer it live why why we're here and we're talking to you um one of our can we just read the question again michael before you answer it yeah so the question is about the visibility of assets in the stock room and you're correct there are stock rooms with a huge amount of assets they're hard to locate within that stock room are there plans to register and maintain asset positions on where they're located in stock yes absolutely so today we track assets that are in inventory or in stock to a stock room and we know that sometimes a stock room's as small as a network closet or as huge as a football field so it you know starting with our utah release advanced inventory management is going to be a feature that we're going to be um doing a lot of great innovation with but the first thing we have to do is create a data model to support that so in the utah release right now we're in the the development design phase of that um we're going to be adding for any asset that's in a stock room you'll have additional attributes for aisle and space so think of it when you go to ikea i mean you have to buy that bookshelf you get that little print out it shows you what i own what space your equipment's in or if you go to home depot or lowe's you're looking for a part you know it's an aisle 52 row you know or space 16 and once you get there you can track your stuff down um that's going to allow for future advancement stuff like creating pick lists or um you know putting stuff on pallets and so on and so forth but it's going to allow you to really know great it's in a stock room but where is it in the stock room and it's going to help you know not only um your accuracy of your assets because once again we can't rely on discovery you may be using rfid which can help in your stock but most customers aren't so now we're providing a way for you to track maintain visibility more granularly within a stock room so great question yeah looking forward to that coming in the utah release thanks mike for answering that um please keep the questions coming and these are really awesome and i'm gonna actually go to some of our answered ones so we can broadcast them more widely for um an audience um amit had a question here about with the world moving towards virtual elevation and as we pointed out the scope of him and increasing with that um can you please uh shed more light on the concept with regard to virtual of the ham functionalities like procurement lost and stolen stockroom et cetera will not be relevant or virtual um i know you took a stab at this in the chat but maybe you could speak about it to a broader audience yes so we have when we say hardware hardware are mainly the physical asset but today this things are moving towards the cloud and towards the virtualization so anything which is not a physical we have a software asset management if it is a software sas or subscribe base or on-premise and when it comes to the anything like cloud virtualization we have the cloud those two products capture those details all right thank you lalit um another question in the chat that was uh sent to me here was to what extent does all my model data need to be normalized in order to leverage the automated workflows is there a minimum amount and any recommendations we can consider so mike do you want to take a stab at that one sure sure and that really comes down to the you know your organizational itam governance and policies that you configure um to be fair you can use our workflows with you know with bad data right you can have a house party without cleaning your house right it's up to you to decide how clean you want your environment to be with normalization i mean if you have the feature you might as well have the normalized data right and you can opt in and and get all that that cleaned up um to be fair i mean you you know there's you know there's no rule of thumb for how often you should be using it but that's kind of the way i look at that awesome mike i love that analogy about the house party let's see we have some more questions coming in the chat um some of these are quite specific but we'll see what we can do on this call janie have a question here about a process framework consisting of policy process and practice that she's writing and she wants the servicenow process flow to demonstrate the practice do we have any advice uh for janie with regard to writing this we actually have they're available in our in our um success portals um for uh it's a process guide so it's a it's a white paper for lack of a better term that explains in great detail our processes with the different roles that are involved from an asset manager perspective it gives some guidance to setting that up um either work with your partner or your your account team and getting that information to you we have it i just um it's in our success center um it should be easy to find if you search for itam process guides or ham process guides you should be able to find it we keep them up to date with each release fantastic we had a question here that was answered um can you tell us more about the contract renewals piece this is essential for sam um i think we can talk a little bit more about the better together between him and sam on this question yes so what exactly the the contact renewal workflow we have introduced in into the tokyo release which is out two weeks back and as part of this con contact renewal like any expired contract it may have a child it may have a grandchild so on so when when you open i just want to highlight one more thing from an hardware asset management we are supporting maintenance and warranty those two contract type remaining contact will come into the feature under save hardware so we don't know when when we are going to add that and under software sam we are supporting soft software and subscribers so when you when you click on the and need to make sure that you need to have both ham and sam installed to utilize the features of both ham and sam if you only have the stamp then you will be able to do the same data renewal part if you have both both ham and sam then you will be able to do so when you open any expired contract and you click on the renew it will take you through whether you want to continue with the classic workflow you want to continue with the new and once you select the new one it will create a renewal request and in the renewal request some part will be the common and some part of the task will be at the request level the first task it will allow it will show you all the list of child grandchild so on and allow you to select which all contract you want to renew as part of this main contract and once you select that then it will create a request line item for each of the contract and you can open each of this request line and then start working with filling the renewal details like start date and date and we do all all the checks to make sure that dates are matching correctly and then approval once you are done with this task it it will allow you to select an asset now if you have an hardware asset ham installed then it will allow you to select an asset which you want to be part of this contract and if you have a sam installed it will allow you to select the sam part of the assets and once you are done with this particular task it will go to the next task where you have to select the terms and condition rate card and after you are after you are done with this it will go with the approval approval is at the main request level and once the approval is done it will take you to the po process the po we want tomorrow if somebody want to know the total cost of ownership for an asset so it goes to the bo where the po is created and it is received and the cost are updated another thing we have updated as part of this particular renewal workflow is the contact history so when you go to the history tab you will be able to see what was the parent contact or the previous contract and which is current contract so you will be able to see the complete history of a contract from where it is coming and which was what it was before that that's that's a great yeah that's a great description of that but just just to be clear though the uh the tokyo release isn't isn't fully live yet um and there'll be all kinds of documentations and process guides that will come out along with the release part of our go to market activities um so you'll be able to implement that feature once once tokyo goes live and there'll be there'll be demos and other stuff around the contract closer to the actual goal the actual launch of it yes thanks mike a little bit yes we love these questions keep them coming um here's one i really like about from ed again about eam so yes we talk about hardware i.t assets new in tokyo is enterprise asset management um which relates to non-ip assets and as far as i can tell it seems like ham uh what are the relationships between ham and eam and i know this is something that we've been talking about a lot as we can excitedly um speak to you all about eam so i'll let mike speak to this a little bit yeah absolutely so enterprise asset management will be a new product it's actually that did come out in advance of our tokyo release um so that's available today if you're interested work with your account teams and giving you guys a demo and seeing what's in store there is a lot of similarities between enterprise asset hardware asset management but there's also a lot of uniqueness between the two systems right um and that can all be explored through a demo with eam but the spirit is the same it's having that same visibility to your enterprise assets as you do your hardware assets um and there's different whys and hows uh that that is executed um but the theory is the same we you know there's a life cycle of an enterprise asset whether it's a piece of machinery um medical equipment um a fleet of vehicles however you need to manage those assets we've provided this a lot of the same workflows but they're they're tailored for the enterprise experience and licensed a little bit differently as well but definitely look for there's all kinds of documentation that came out for that um and work with your account reps and account teams and getting a demo in and getting and getting some awareness around that because that's you know ham was our fastest one of our fastest growing uh product areas eam is going to be even faster the demand for it is very high awesome well thank you mike um thank you little lip one more skin here and i think we are ready to move on um to wrap this up so victor i will pass it back to you sure yeah thanks mike thanks really do appreciate you answering those questions thanks to everybody for proposing those i think those are very valuable questions so we talked a lot about different topics within this session there's a couple resources that we want to share with you we'll be posting those in the community once we load this recording up there uh the first is automating hardware asset management with workflow so you'll get an inside look into a lot of things that michael and both lilit talked about today now on now how we are actually using um harder asset management within within servicenow and then there's additional trainings related to hardware asset management not least of which is ham fundamentals but then there's also the ham simulator which gives you a little bit of hands-on practice with the product and then we also have delta trainings um what's the difference between release last time release and this this new release that we just put out uh so you'll see that and victor there was a question in chat about one of the the contract feature that will be covered in the delta training as well um and uh it will be part of the instructor-led ham training past the tokyo release um so i know i think it was janie was asking about that as well awesome no thanks for that mike so and that's a common theme right uh anytime we have new releases we're gonna have new features and that's what those trainings those delta trainings are meant for to capture those the other thing i'd like to just leave you all with is a mention of our itam community this is where we have posted our getting started guide which has a summary of how to set up for success with ham as well as listed trainings and other materials that we find are very helpful for customers as they either on board with their hand journey or they continue to develop in in hardware asset management so be on the lookout for that and without further ado the other thing i'll say is we really appreciate you guys joining us we're going to have way more of these sessions in the near future so be on the lookout next week we're going to talk about the workflows and do some actual live examples with product with that said i'll thank you everybody for joining us we appreciate you spending the time have a great rest of your week we'll talk to you soon