A large, multi-location retail and leasing company has partnered with Sigital for years. The company was running an older release, with asset data sitting in ServiceNow but not doing any work: not driving reorder decisions, not flagging idle software licenses, not showing anyone where audit risk was building. Modernizing that instance, and the hardware and software asset management processes built on top of it, is the current phase of that longstanding engagement.
The company runs a national footprint of retail locations, which means a constant flow of hardware requests, replacements, and retirements, plus a software estate spread across major publishers including Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, and VMware. Discovery and Service Graph integrations were already feeding the CMDB. Intune was already reporting installed software. The data existed, but a structured way to turn that data into lifecycle decisions didn’t: when to reorder hardware, which licenses were sitting unused, where compliance risk was building before an audit forced the issue.
The starting point
Before writing a line of configuration, Sigital’s scope started with an assessment of the existing CMDB data on both sides of the engagement: the hardware asset data populated by Discovery and Service Graph, and the installed-software data populated by Discovery and Intune. For a longstanding customer on an older release, that assessment mattered more than usual. It answered the question underneath the modernization push: how much of the current data foundation could carry the new lifecycle processes, and how much needed to be corrected first.
That assessment set the foundation for two parallel workstreams.
Hardware asset management
On the hardware side, Sigital is implementing ServiceNow HAM Pro to support basic lifecycle management for the company’s hardware assets, tied into the existing break/fix process. The scope covers:
- Hardware models, model normalization, stockrooms, and lifecycle workflow states and transitions
- Out-of-box dashboards and reports covering inventory, lifecycle status, upcoming end-of-life, and asset cost, built on existing ServiceNow widgets and data sources
- Inventory threshold tracking with alerts at reorder points
- Updates to up to three existing hardware request items in the Service Catalog, so the catalog reflects the new asset management functionality (no net-new catalog items)
- A Coupa integration via the Integration Hub Spoke, ingesting purchase order and invoice data so cost and PO information attach directly to asset records
- A SAP Concur integration via the Integration Hub Spoke, doing the same for Concur-sourced purchase and invoice data
Those catalog items are also the clearest place where modernization and adoption meet. A store employee requesting a replacement device sees a cleaner request form and a faster fulfillment path than the older instance supported. That is a small interaction, repeated across a national footprint, and it is the kind of experience improvement that keeps people using the platform instead of working around it.
Software asset management
On the software side, the engagement targets the four vendors the company identified as highest-risk and highest-spend: Microsoft, Adobe Cloud, Oracle, and VMware. Sigital is implementing the SAM Pro foundation, including:
- Software models, license metrics (per user, per device), entitlement management, and the reconciliation engine
- Publisher Pack integrations for each in-scope vendor to ingest entitlement data
- A one-time entitlement import for any vendor where Publisher Pack data isn’t sufficient, limited to one file per vendor
- Reconciliation against CMDB software installation data, using out-of-box license metrics and recognition rules
- Out-of-box dashboards covering license position, compliance status, and optimization opportunities for the in-scope vendors
Reconciliation is scoped to standard license metrics. Vendor-specific constructs like Oracle’s DB/Options licensing or VMware sub-capacity licensing are out of scope for this phase, a boundary Sigital set deliberately to keep the initial foundation achievable within the engagement timeline.
What modernization is actually buying
Neither workstream is about replacing tools. It’s about making the tools the company already owns, ServiceNow, Discovery, Intune, Coupa, Concur, actually talk to each other around a shared asset record, on a platform version current enough to support that. For a legacy customer, the ROI case for this engagement is not only the license savings and reduced hardware waste covered below. It’s that an older instance eventually stops being able to carry new integrations and dashboards well, and the cost of deferring that catch-up only grows. Bringing the platform and the asset processes forward together is what lets the company keep pace with where ServiceNow, and the rest of its industry, are heading.
What this scope is worth in practice
The company’s own results from this engagement aren’t final yet, it’s still in delivery, but the scope maps directly onto the two places where unmanaged IT assets cost money and create risk: software compliance and hardware waste. The research on both is specific enough to put real numbers next to this engagement’s design choices.
Software: the spend sitting inside license sprawl. Gartner research has found that organizations can cut software spending by as much as 30 percent within a year by combining three practices: optimizing license configurations against actual entitlements, recycling licenses that are installed but unused, and running that process through a SAM tool rather than manually. That’s close to a description of what this engagement builds: SAM Pro’s reconciliation engine compares CMDB installation data against entitlements for Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle, and VMware, which is exactly the mechanism that surfaces recyclable licenses instead of leaving them to renew by default. Microsoft’s own internal IT organization has published its experience running ServiceNow SAM at this kind of scale: after consolidating software requisitioning and reconciliation into ServiceNow, the team reported saving around 10 percent across its enterprise license positions, driven by visibility into unused licenses and more accurate volume license negotiation.
There’s a second software number worth naming: publisher audits aren’t rare, and the cost of an unprepared audit response, true-ups plus the internal hours spent reconstructing entitlement data after the fact, is consistently the most expensive way to find out a license position was wrong. A reconciliation engine that runs continuously against Publisher Pack data is the difference between finding that gap in a dashboard and finding it in an auditor’s letter.
Hardware: the cost of not knowing what’s on the shelf. Industry benchmarking on ghost assets, hardware still carried on the books that’s no longer in service or can’t be located, puts that figure at 12 to 25 percent of fixed asset records in organizations without active lifecycle tracking. Every one of those records represents either a device someone is still budgeting to depreciate or maintain, or a purchase that gets made because the stockroom looks emptier than it is. Gartner’s broader ITAM research attributes a similar magnitude of savings, around 30 percent in the first year, to organizations that eliminate redundant hardware purchases and redeploy underutilized equipment instead of buying new. That’s the direct target of this engagement’s stockroom configuration and reorder threshold alerting: fewer purchases made against inventory that already exists, and a system that flags reorder points based on real counts instead of guesswork.
None of this is a projection of what will happen for this company specifically. It’s the range of outcomes that shows up consistently across organizations that put a working HAM and SAM foundation in place instead of managing hardware and software by spreadsheet and memory, and it’s the standard this engagement’s Client Testing phases will be measured against once hardware and software go live.