In the late 1990s, Fidelity Investments operated its quickly growing network like an all-you-can-eat buffet, charging business units according to their head count. "It wasn't a fair way to amortize the cost to the user, and many units were subsidizing others," says Bobby Lie, vice president of enterprise architecture at the financial services firm in Boston.

Fidelity decided to charge departments based on the amount of IT resources they use and brought in the help of Evident Software. Evident helps Fidelity track its top-100 talkers - the most-used applications - by capturing traffic between IP devices. Monthly reports published on Fidelity's intranet details which application servers consume the most resources. This helps businesses understand that the more resources their applications use, the more their IT cost increases.

Organizations are turning to management software to bring visibility to IT and save money. Tools such as asset management (for tracking hardware, software and sometimes projects) and portfolio management (for tracking projects and IT personnel) help companies get a grasp of their IT resources to improve efficiency.

One surprising benefit Fidelity realized is the IT group's newfound relationship with the business units. "Once, we couldn't get the business managers' attention - now they're interested in working with us to optimize applications to minimize consumption and to better manage growth," Lie says.

Fidelity also has identified and removed unnecessary software and reconfigured other software to run more efficiently. These improvements have obviated the need to buy more bandwidth to solve network performance problems, which helped to save more than $90 million since implementing the software in 1999.

Health insurance provider The Regence Group introduced Computer Associates' Argis Portfolio Asset Management software to help rein in IT resources scattered across 38 offices in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Utah. By putting information about its 40,000 asset pieces into the system and mapping that to business goals, Regence can better identify where to assign budgets and to discover which machines hold private health data in order to meet healthcare industry regulations.