“This is an industry on the verge of very soon exploding”

ITAM Review Podcast: Change Makers Series

In this episode of the Change Makers podcast series, we speak with Ben Strickland who won Professional of the Year at the 2021 ITAM Excellence Awards.

Ben, who is Senior Director of Product Management at RAY ALLEN INC., started his ITAM career back in 2012 after spending 12+ years working in the broadband space as an engineer and product line manager. It was when he was at Cisco, working in OS development, that he started to keep track of software licenses, “…which basically consumed me and became my whole life.”

Ben became employee number one of a new team he built focused on how software licensing should change. Ben wanted to focus on something where he could really make a difference and decided that software licenses was it.

In this 19-minute podcast, we speak with Ben about:

• How he got into ITAM

• The work he does with the ISO ITAM Standards Committee

• The big opportunities for ITAM in the next three-to-five years
• What keeps him excited and motivated about ITAM
• What he would tell someone considering an ITAM career

Where the industry is going

“I think this is an industry on the verge of very soon exploding. Coming out of COVID, everyone is starting to now pay attention when it comes to cost savings. The bigger opportunity is information.”

Ben is passionate about the valuable data and information ITAM professionals have and how this information should be used to guide CFOs and CIOS, etc. to the right, yet perhaps different, decisions and choices.   

“There’s a huge opportunity to synthesis this data. It’s literally , how do you make the most out of what you already have. The only way is having someone who has the expertise and can put the information together, and this is their job…it’s their responsibility. Once you do that, the right decisions start happening.”

Hosts: AJ Witt and Jennifer Carr.