Many corporate organisations have limited information about the current value, usage, configuration and status of their hardware and software. This occurs because of a variety of effects caused by fast organisational and operational change. Unfortunately these effects create substantial unnecessary risk and cost at all stages of the asset lifecycle, due to a combination of operational inefficiency and the inability to control and optimise the estate. For example, it is common to see lease and maintenance contracts overrun, to pay 20% more for software licensing than necessary (and be illegal at the same time) and for IT projects to miss objectives, time or cost budgets because of unavailable asset data. In companies with thousands of assets the effect of poor asset management can literally be millions of pounds of unnecessary costs. There are several types of solution in this area; Auditing, Barcoding, Discovery, Repository, Sevice Management and Software Distribution . All combine the use of software, tailored processes and specialist skills.