A top national defense contractor with a history of using IT investments to stay at the forefront of its industry recently implemented Blazent IT intelligence software. They wanted to better understand how their hardware and software was being used because they suspected that they were wasting a significant portion of their IT budget.

While reducing costs was the company’s primary goal, their IT team was also preparing for a significant desktop hardware migration. What’s more, the IT team was relatively small given the company’s 30% yearly growth from increased federal defense spending. For all these reasons, ease and speed of implementation were crucial.

Even with these significant expectations for the implementation, the company had imposed one further constraint: the solution had to be self-funding. In other words, the vendor had to uncover cost savings that would pay for the implementation because there was no budget for the project. Any solution needed to demonstrate an immediate return on investment.

The company had an existing Computer Associates Unicenter implementation in place for asset management and inventory tracking, but was missing two key elements needed to make intelligent IT buying decisions. First, they lacked desktop software utilization data to help the IT team determine which applications were not only installed, but actually being used. Second, the company needed analytical reports that could quantify the benefits of proposed IT decisions.