Tracking inventory is more than just gathering a list of all computers, software applications, servers, and operating system settings. To make more effective business decisions, companies need a way to easily identify and understand their entire IT asset portfolio. The alternative - manually tracking assets - often results in wasted time, redundant purchases, increased support costs, and compliance risks.

BMC Client Management Inventory is part of a fully integrated line of IT service and asset management solutions. Each product automates and streamlines a specific IT challenge to help you reduce costs and improve service levels. Built from the ground up as a modular, yet integrated system, this family of technologies provides a single, unified solution to simplify a diverse set of complex client lifecycle and service management needs.

The main features of inventory management are:

• Inventory - Maintain control with a comprehensive inventory of hardware assets across the entire organization; auto-deploy and update BMC agent; Manage changes to hardware or software configurations, enforce change control policies, and maintain detailed inventory history
• Software license management - Show proof of entitlements and know what software licenses are being used
• Financial asset management - Achieve complete cradle-to-grave asset management workflow by receiving assets, tracking financial data, retiring assets, and reporting on depreciation
• Virtual infrastructure management - Discover virtual hosts and guests, and change the stop/pause/start state to perform maintenance or troubleshoot issues
• Security inventory - Collect specific data on key security settings with ease, including installed / update status for anti-virus and anti-spyware, as well as firewall configuration or shared resources
• Self-healing - Maintain the integrity of an application with routine checks that automatically correct an application even after events that compromise the core files
• Agent/agentless discovery - Support both agent and agentless discovery of assets and provide detailed configuration information
• Data import - Perform customized data imports, such as assets and user fields from external sources
• Next-generation and multi-OS support - Support discovery of network devices for Windows, MacOS, Linux®, VMware workstations, servers, laptops, and network devices; core agent support for Redhat 6, MacOS X Lion, and Windows 2008 R2, Windows 7 and 8, and Microsoft SQLServer2012 and 2014
• Windows-embedded client support - Discover, deploy, troubleshoot, assess, and update Windows-embedded devices through a single management console
• Audit now - Update the summary asset data in near real-time (summary asset data provides quick navigation to hardware, software, and security information)
• MyApps - Puts pre-approved software and access requests in the hands of the end user. It's the app store for the desktop - IT can advertise available software applications, advanced actions and quick links for the end-users to access on their schedule, not IT's.