Know & Decide for a comprehensive IT asset management approach

Known & Decide, founded in 2015 by Emmanuel Moreau, is a french company dedicated to IT asset management for enterprises. The annual turnover approaches $2 million. The idea came from the deep relationship with CIO the CEO cultivates for a few decades. All these companies have strong difficulties to track, control, manage and monitor their IT resources of all kind.

The Know & Decide solution is a pure software solution composed by 3 modules: the discover, the management and the reporting one.

The data discover module collects information thanks to more than 80 collectors via API and also a file import feature for all offline documents related to IT resources like financial or contractual files. The module also connects to ERPs and other similar reference catalog to feed the CMDB.

On the data management aspect, the solution embeds some correlation functions to identify clearly all associated information and avoid duplicates and reach a strong consistency level. The reporting also provides a global and central view of all IT discovered assets serving as a the reference or base of truth for the IT environment.

The product is deployed on-premises with collectors servers, central database and reporting/UI ones. It is designed to gather all info without any local agent that is very difficult to manage and maintain at the same level. Very configurable, the product also is a no-code solution.

The philosophy is to align the physical reality and the reporting with all contracts and reduced significantly the divergence between these 2 areas with a final goal to converge to the truth.

Five uses cases have been developed to illustrate how the solution can be applied and used. Use case #1 is about a global vision of all IT assets, use case #2 touches the quality of the CMDB, use case #3 is related to the the production plan, use case #4 covers the security plan and use case #5 details budget to streamline the cost model.

As of today, the product is deployed at very large customer sites in France, Belgium and Luxembourg and the firm is looking for new partners that can represent and penetrate some verticals markets. The pricing model used is a subscription plan for 3 years and is based on the annual cost of CIs and varies form 1 to 10€ per year.

This solution also participates to the green and more globally the ESG challenge for enterprises.

Emmanuel Moreau told us that the next key features added to the solution will be AI to provide Natural Language Processing and easy access to all reports. We'll follow this story in the coming months as it is an interesting approach to a real challenge for companies especially for large ones.