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ITAM Review WISDOM – EMEA: 18th & 19th June, London

So the crew at ITAM Review were kind enough to grant me a slot to talk at Wisdom this year. I had seen a lot of posts on LinkedIn about the “impending apocalypse of AI on ITAM” as if titanium skeletal creatures were ready to kill us for our jobs! So I thought a presentation on machine learning and SAM would be a good topic to present on.

I’ve recently got to grips with recording audio over PowerPoint (I’m so down with the kids!) when I find a window of opportunity I will record a version and convert it to an MP4 file for upload on YouTube (stay tuned).

It was great to see so many familiar faces in real life once more – I was particularly delighted to see the wonderful Kate Hawgood looking so healthy after her considerable skiing mishap. She’s still as mad as ever though; she’s mad-dog keen to get back on the slopes as soon as her leave-schedule allows (clearly she didn’t bang her head hard enough!).

Rich Gibbons was also in attendance – this time as a “civvy”, having made the leap from ITAM Review to Synyega – whose recruitment and growth seems to be going from strength to strength.

Many of the usual organisations were in attendance: SHi, Trustmarque, Anglepoint , Flexera, ServiceNow, SoftwareOne, License Dashboard (the list goes on).

Some newer kids on the block included Azul, Capefoxx and Nitro.

The highlight for me, though, was a random message I received on LinkedIn to ask if I was at the event and available for a catch up. I shall save mentioning names and cap-tallies for now, as you will see why as the story reveals itself.

The person in question told me that she recently moved from a former place of work where a copy of the process kit had been bought. She bent the arm of procurement to buy a new copy for her new place of work. This organisation then went on to implement the hardware asset management processes in the desktop space and managed to uncover £2.5M of theft/ fraud in the Apple sub-set of desktops devices – in the UK alone!

The root of the problem was that a 3rd party had been engaged to handle onboarding net-new equipment, and transitions of devices from warranty and specialist repair back to the live IT estate. Serial “skimming” of devices seemed to be the order of the day.

This got me thinking: This is an international company we are talking about, and Apple only forms about 2 or 3% of the desktop estate. A straight-line multiplication of potential saves to the Windows desktop estate could have this saving figure at circa £20M+ for the UK alone!

Needless to say, I was straight onto LinkedIn with this bit of good news – You can’t outsource accountability!

So all in all, it was a great conference. If you’ve never been to a Wisdom Conference before, I can recommend them. They’re held in EMEA (usually the UK) North America and AsiaPac (usually Australia) each year, so there is bound to be one (relatively) near you!