You don't have to be a big company to spend lots of dollars on telecom infrastructure in an age when businesses are partnering and growing markets across an increasingly wider geographical net. Rivermine, for instance, estimates that its customers - which range in size from mid-tier to large enterprises - spend from $7 million to $750 million in telecom expenses per year. And industry estimates indicate that Fortune 500 companies spend over $100 million per year on telecom.

And yet up until now, IT Asset Management (ITAM) has been cozily focused on a data centric mind set that often takes the network as an afterthought. The reason for this - to use a word that I use a lot - is "cultural" and historical, since it isn't logical. (If there is logic here, I do invite your e-mails to show me wrong.) Much like the help desk and the operations center, telecommunications resource management - when it's done at all - has been done by different individuals with different tools in different organizations to classical ITAM. But, if anything, telecom resource management is even more isolated - lost like King Kong on an uncharted island in the Pacific, whereas at least the help desk and operations routinely know they step on each other's toes.

One sign that communication is creeping through is CA's partnership with Asentinel, announced last November (introduced, in the true spirit of the season - with the silence of a mouse - see a PDF file of the news release). It is nonetheless a first step - the first instance of a major provider of asset management products formally integrating with a telecom resource management vendor.

This will change - and integration will become more numerous and more profound in nature as asset management evolves towards what the IT Infrastructure Library calls "Financial Management of IT Services" to embrace everything from traditional good ol' desktop TCO to telecom inventory and dispute resolution, to service accounting and demand profiling - once lumped under the unfortunate term "chargeback." Asset management will become an architected extension of the ITIL's configuration management database (CMDB) with roots in effective inventory and clear handshakes with change management, configuration management, capacity management and service management and planning.

Denise Dubie is senior editor with Network World.