At a glance
One of the world’s largest toy and entertainment companies was faced with frequent internal and external software audits. These audits required answering many questions with global and regional scope about the IT assets they owned and the characteristics of each. Flexera’s solution was able to quickly generate simplified reports thanks to normalization and market data. With refreshed and cleaned-up asset data readily available to stakeholders, the company was able to free up resources to pursue strategic initiatives.
The challenge
Too much time and money spent on audits
With revenues of more than $5 billion and 6,000 employees, this global toy, board game and entertainment company has some of the most renowned brands in its categories. Their IT staff manage more than 7,000 Microsoft endpoints and 1,500 Apple Mac systems.
The IT staff faced frequent internal and external audits. These required answering numerous questions with global and regional scope about the company’s IT assets and the characteristics of each. Many internal stakeholders approached the IT team for answers and everyone needed their data sliced, diced and delivered in different ways. Stakeholders were looking for gaps in the environments on license counts across regions, obsolescence, compatibility, version sprawl of laptops and software compatibility with their ongoing Windows 10 migration project. This required many days of effort doing manual research for market data, such as end-of-life (EOL), so decisions could be made about systems. Labor-intensive Excel spread sheets had been used to correlate various inventory sources.
In collecting inventory data, it was very difficult to scrub the results from different inventory systems and assemble everything in one place for analysis.
The solution
Aggregate, simplify and enrich system data
Data from 8,500
endpoints was successfully
aggregated and enriched
The company had Flexera perform a proof of concept in which asset inventory data was pulled together from Microsoft System Center and JAMF. Flexera was able to consolidate the two sources of asset information into a single system that aggregates, simplifies and enriches data, leveraging Flexera’s Technopedia, the world’s largest and most trusted source of IT asset data.
The toy maker’s IT team was surprised at how normalization and complex market data could rapidly deliver information previously locked behind multiple sources and people. They were able to feed various stakeholders the customized information they wanted using Microsoft Power BI reports that visualized the discovered data enriched with market data points otherwise very difficult to obtain.
Auditors, security administrators, and the enterprise architecture and client service teams were able to work from the same data set and could communicate better across regions and throughout the world. The company was able to satisfy demand for localized data, which enabled enactment of controls and improvement of infrastructure. The Power BI reports highlighted:
- Positions in hardware model sprawl with lifecycle data
- Endpoint security agent deployment coverage to comply with security guidelines
- Global regional segmented reports
- Applications incompatible with Windows 10
I used to dread internal audits, but with (Flexera), I say ‘bring it on.’ Our ability to make stakeholders self-serve the information they used to come to us for has been transformational to our ability to execute and innovate.
IT manager
The results
Audits under control, more resources made available
Flexera helped the company comply with and prepare for audits more easily. This freed up IT team resources so they could focus on strategic initiatives as well as infrastructure needed to support the team. Audits still occur, but they are self-served from the dashboards created after Flexera’s solution has refreshed and cleaned up data gathered by their inventory systems.
Stakeholders were able to work from the same data set and could communicate better
Gain complete visibility of your IT assets
Additional Cases
