2006 VARs of the Year

ASAP Software, a Buffalo Grove, Ill.-based reseller of software, hardware and support services, discovered many of its customers lacked a deep enough insight about their software assets and needs to make intelligent IT purchasing decisions. While there were many IT asset-management packages, none provided the right information.

"It became clear to us that every time we had [to negotiate] a software contract, there were these missing pieces of information that were necessary," ASAP president Paul Jarvie says. "There were asset management and tools, but none talked about the things we were talking about."

Innovating was the answer, and ASAP took on the challenge of building an IT asset-management solution from scratch. eSMART enables CIOs and IT managers to monitor nearly every aspect of their infrastructure, ranging from hardware and software inventory, application-utilization rates, purchased and leased assets, and the tracking of lost and stolen devices. The application is powerful enough to track assets on large, distributed networks. eSMART also enables intelligent decisions on equipment and software purchases, planning and deploying upgrades and patches, faster audit and compliance efforts and an understanding of how employees use their infrastructures. The result is better licensing compliance, higher utilization rates, and faster management and maintenance cycles.

Supporting eSMART is ASAP's professional services, with which the solution provider helps its customers understand asset management, set up policies and processes and build metrics for using asset intelligence to make intelligent purchasing and project decisions. Asset intelligence also provides a powerful tool that helps ASAP and other software resellers and solution providers. Deep asset infrastructure intelligence expedites the needs assessment, IT planning and purchasing cycle.

ASAP, No. 50 on the VARBusiness 500, partners with many major software and hardware vendors including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft and Novell. The development of a homegrown application shouldn't detract from its vendor partners, Jarvie says. eSMART uses and complements its partners' technology.

"We don't create .Net and C++, but we use those tools to create solutions for our clients."

--Lawrence M. Walsh

NEXT: VAR of the Year for Partnership