The rudiments of asset management give the enterprise a view of what equipment is in service and what will be retired. Asset management identifies individual assets by serial number and can ideally provide information about resident software licenses, and whether or not a particular widget contains sensitive data. Asset management is the starting point for inventory control or, in other words, knowing what we have. The process of asset retirement and disposition must update the asset management repository with the terminal information required to end the life cycle, including data destruction logs. Organizations that maintain the software records in their asset repository are then able to utilize the asset disposition/hard drive erasure data to repurpose software licenses--a financial windfall for those with the data.
Source: Inside Supply Management, http://www.ism.ws