What’s the difference between ITAM, SAM and HAM?

10 February 2021
2 minute read
Best practice

What’s the difference between ITAM, SAM and HAM?

10 February 2021
2 minute read

White board Wednesday is me, a white board and learning about all things IT Asset Management (ITAM), every Wednesday!

This week, What’s the difference between ITAM, SAM and HAM?

https://youtu.be/NU8bUoflddY


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What’s the difference between ITAM, SAM and HAM? Transcript

Abbreviated transcript:

This week, three acronyms. ITAM, SAM and HAM. What do they mean? How do they all hang together?

Both HAM and SAM are disciplines of IT Asset Management. SAM and ITAM are used interchangeably. But basically, SAM is management of software throughout its lifecycle and HAM is management of hardware throughout its lifecycle.

Within ITAM, HAM is overlapping with SAM. You typically can’t do SAM properly unless you’re also doing HAM. For example, the software publishers, Oracle, and IBM amongst many other publishers, sometimes charge for their software, not based on the number of users you have, or the number of devices but the power of those devices. So the amount of oomph that server might have. So it stands to reason that in order to manage IBM and Oracle in those instances, you also have to be able to track the hardware properly. So this is how ITAM, SAM and HAM hang together.

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