One of the fundamental building blocks of asset, service and software management is the ability to accurately discover the hardware and software assets deployed within the organisation and how they are used. Years of experience tells us that there is a strong day-to-day requirement for automatically discovered and easily reported asset information. More and more data from discovery tools acts as a policing vehicle for a CMDB or asset repository, as well as a direct view of the currently deployed estate used by problem, incident and change management functions and as a baseline for software licence consumption. Discovery has now become a major building block and the foundation to any ITAM, ITSM and SAM initiatives. However, there are many technologies available, each with different strengths and weaknesses. Aspects include network device discovery, software discovery, software usage monitoring and metering, software recognition accuracy, tracking of changes, web access, reporting capabilities plus many more and not to mention a new breed of agent-less dependency mapping tools that are currently emerging onto the market. At ITAMS we can assist you to either obtain better results from existing technologies or to define requirements for, select, deploy and support new discovery technologies. ITAMS has links to all of the major technology vendors in this area, and can help you through the maze of marketing and technical complexity in this area to a solution focused around your organisations needs and current gaps. We can then help you link discovery capability to other systems and processes to ensure that the management information you need on your assets is readily available and being actively used to reduce cost and risk.